Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 2; March 02

CHAPTER 1 from THE CONFIDENCE BOOK

by Paul Davis et al.

STORY ENRICHMENT

1.16 Language focus : Reading
Level : Post-beginner +
Time : Preparation: 20-40 minutes
In class: 45 minutes
Materials : None
Preparation : Interview one of your students

Before class

Ask one of the students to tell you a story about themselves, making clear that it will be used as reading material by the whole class. Interview the student outside class time. Write up the story, respecting the student's way of telling it but in such a way that it is a real reading task for the others. Alternatively get one student to write out a story about themself and rewrite it to the right level of reading difficulty for the group.

IN CLASS

Use the student'sstory text with whatever range of reading comprehension techniques you find useful.
With some classes we have made sure the storyteller understood her story in the rewritten form, asked her to give it out to the class and herself run the lesson. With some groups it is best to slip out of the room and leave them to it.

RATIONALE

For some students it is a great boost to see a story of their own in correct English and shared with the class. The build-up of students stories over a period of weeks documents the time spent together, and revising the stories shows how well remembered these stories are compared to textbook reading passages. (One way we revised them was to pick a sentence from one and a phrase from another and ask students to identify the stories.)
Here is an example of two stories told by post-beginner students. The first one we sang to the tune of 'My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean'!

Oh bring back my money to me!

I telexed the…School to find out
If the fees would be dollars or pounds
They told me the fees were in dollars
In dollars, in dollars not pounds.

Chorus:
Oh bring back, bring back
Bring back my money to me, to me…

But the fees they were really in pounds
So I went to the bank and I lost
Two per cent of commission they took
Two per cent of commission they took.

Chorus

I telexed my brother for money
For money I had not enough
I telexed my brother for money
And he sent me a mountain of pounds

Chorus

My father's stroke

My father was a farmer - he owned 200 hectares of land.
In 1980 he was fifty-two.
He usually smoked forty cigarettes a day.
We lived in a town in European Turkey.
It was Wednesday, December 15th.
We were having dinner with the TV on.
It must have been about 6.00 p.m.
Suddenly my father looked strange. One eye shut and one eye stayed open.
He slumped in his chair.
He had a stroke.
I rushed for a doctor.
It took me fifteen minutes by taxi, there and back.
The doctor said he was dead.
He was dead - it was Wednesday night in December, eight years ago.

Acknowledgment

This is a time-honoured primary school technique. We got the idea of applying it in the EFL classroom from Lou Spaventa (See Bibliography for details of published work).

REAL TEXTS FOR BEGINNERS

1.17

Language focus : Reading
Level : Beginner-elementary
Time : 15-30 minutes
Materials : One copy of the 'Szkutnik readings' for each student
Preparation : Ask the students to prepare the readings for homework, looking up new words, etc.

In class

1. Check on reading problems the students have with the texts on the next page.

2. Split the students into threes and ask each group to choose two of the readings to illustrate with frozen scenes (group sculptures). Give them ten minutes to prepare and to rehearse.

3. Four or five groups then present their scenes to the whole class.

RATIONALE

Most of the texts offered to low-level students are 'realistic' but 'unreal'. A dialogue about buying a railway ticket is realistic in the sense that this is something the student may one day want to do via English. In the classroom it is unreal, because the student is not at that moment going on a journey. A lot of beginners' work is incessant rehearsal for some hazy future reality. The text choice in this unit is literary and will affect some students in a direct, here and now, 'gut' way. There is every reason to use powerful, person-relevant text with beginners. It makes the language come home to them - it makes them feel they can own the words and ways of saying things.

The Szkutnik readings

Seperation
I am here. You are there. Here and there. You and I. A long way apart.

A rich person
I am a rich person. I have plans. I have hopes. I have dreams. It's a pity that I have no money, no time and no energy.

You have no time
So we won't meet today. You can't. You have no time. Something very important. I know, something more important than me.

Goodbye
Goodbye. Be happy. Forget me. Don't write. Don't think. Don't come back. Be happy. Goodnight.

I don't want to change
I am simple. You are different. You want me to change. But I don't want to change.
I want to be as I am. I don't want to be a scientist. I don't want to be a manager. I don't want a career…I only want to have time for thinking.

I've lost my glasses
My watch has stopped. My compass is broken. I've lost my glasses. I'm in a desert. Alone. I think it's called the Sahara.

You know what I mean
She has such eyes. I can't describe them. She blushes in such a way, you know what I mean. And she smiles in such a way. And she walks in such a way. I feel…I can't find the words.

C Longman Group UK Ltd 1990

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The texts are all taken from Thinking in English (Szkutnik 1986).

THE OAK AND THE IVY

1.18
Language focus : Writing
Level : Post-beginner +
Time : 20-40 minutes
Materials : Four A4 sheets of paper for each student
Preparation : None

In class

1. Ask each student to tear the four sheets of paper into eight half pages.

2. Tell the group you and they are going to work silently for a few minutes writing letters to each other about whatever they like. Each letter is to be addressed to someone in the group, and should be signed. When a student finishes a letter they deliver it. A person receiving a letter is free to answer it or not. Join in the writing exercise yourself.

3. The exercise is hard to bring to a close. People get involved.

RATIONALE

In order not to interfere with the trusting, easy, natural modelling process it is vital that the teacher should have the confidence not to venture corrections of the student's letter. If you do correct such letters you are encouraging accuracy at the cost of adventurous, innovative use of language. You are also tampering with the natural flow of the correspondence between you and the student. For this exercise it is better to be a nurturing parent than a censorious one. In your correspondence you are the oak and the student is the ivy. The linguistically weaker writer naturally twines round the stronger one's text, borrowing, testing and trying things out. This is a totally natural and uncontrived communication situation. I wrote to a student, Antonio, about how he was feeling after four weeks in the UK (I was not the regular class teacher) and also how he was feeling about being away from his business in Spain. This was his reply:

Dear Mario,

I'm now here in England and I find it's very quiet and sometimes I remember my country but not my business because I know that I must gone back to Spain and I find another time my business.

Your Antonio

I wrote back to him and used these three abstract nouns in my letter: quietness, relief, bustle. In his answer, writing both naturally and unconsciously, Antonio used the words I had offered him.

Dear Mario,

Quietness can be also the atmospher and not only the person In my case I'm very relief here in England but I mean that when I'm going to Spain I know that I must work with full of Bustle and Doesn't matter.

Your Antonio

He uses quietness correctly, while the other two refuse to fit neatly into the grammar frame he puts round them. It doesn't matter. He uses the words confidently to say what he wants to say and his inter-language has been given a nudge forward. Adequate grammatical digestion of the words will come later.

VARIATIONS

Rather then write letters in class you can write individual letters to students, with them and you doing it as homework. This has a powerful modelling effect and it can be very humanly satisfying. We have found that each letter takes about fifteen minutes to deal with, so it is important to calculate how much time you personally want to give to the exercise, but it is usually quicker and more enjoyable than marking homework.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We learnt the in-class letter writing from two colleagues at ESIEE in Paris, Mike Gradwell and Krys Markowski. They picked it up from therapy practice. The variation is an idea from Writing, Maths and Games in the Open Classroom (Kohl 1977). The idea is also outlined in Writing (Hedge 1988).

FROM BEHIND A MASK

1.19
Language focus : Writing
Level : Lower intermediate +
Time : Preparation: 60 minutes
In class: 60-90 minutes
Materials : None

Preparation

As homework, ask each student to write between forty and fifty things about themselves between the ages of five and fifteen. Tell them this material will be private.

In class

1. Suggest to the group that novelists often draw on experiences from their own lives to create characters. Ask each student to create a new character based on the elements they drew from their own life and to imagine the situation the character is in. The students are to write about their characters in any way they wish.

2. The writings are shared round the group.

RATIONALE

Some students are blocked if asked to write directly about themselves, despite this being the bedrock of their experience. In this technique they are asked to write about a character external to themselves but who is created from within their own personal experience. The character they create acts as a mask. Masks bring some people a great deal of confidence - just think of carnival time!

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We learnt this idea from Travis Venters at the JALT convention in Kobe, Autumn 1988.

ROLE PLAYING HARD SITUATIONS

1.20
Language focus : Conversation
Level : Elementary +
Time : 30-65 minutes
Materials : None
Preparation : None

In class

1. Ask each student to give examples of things they find hard to do in English. Here are some of the things our students came up with:

   • answering the phone
   • making international phone calls
   • giving their opinions in front of other people
   • explaining again when the first explanation was unclear
   • maintaining a long conversation with a native speaker

2. Explain to your students that one way of coping with linguistically hard situations is to rehearse them in role play. Ask for a volunteer to role play one of their own feared situations. There are two ways of running the role play:

   1. Have the protagonist student choose someone in the group to play the other person in the conversation. At the beginning of this process the two of them will have to reverse roles several times so that the helper student finds out how to play the other person in the conversation. At the beginning of this process the two of them will have to reverse roles several times so that the helper student finds out how to play the role assigned.

   2. Have the student sit opposite an empty chair. When they are on their own chair they are themselves. When on the other chair, they are the other person. The student shifts back and forth.

In both these role play formats, encourage students in the group to make their language suggestions, but to make them 'in role' by going behind one of the speakers and speaking as that speaker. In this way the protagonist student feels the help and support of others in the group. Here is an example of how this situation can work.

One of our students wanted to go and visit her boyfriend for the weekend. She knew her parents would be phoning and wanted her landlady to say she was not available without saying where she had gone. She felt embarrassed at asking her landlady to lie to her parents.

VARIATIONS

Role plays can be used to rehearse a difficult situation. They can also be used to help a student gain new understanding of a hard situation they have been through.
We watched such a role play in an ESL context in West London. A Bengali boy had been accused of losing a valuable bag of plumbing tools by his instructor at technical college. The instructor was very angry and the boy felt he had been wrongly accused. In the ESL class the boy role played the instructor and was partly able to see things from his point of view. The role play and the support of his classmates helped the student to come to terms with this negative experience.

NOTE

This exercise is particularly relevant to students on courses in an English-speaking country.