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Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 6; November 02
Chant into Chant
Type of class: monolingual or multilingual
Teacher: doesn't need to know the students MT
Level: elementary to advanced
Purpose: to have students appreciate the English version of MT texts they love.
- For homework ask students to choose a short song/poem they really like and translate it into English. Not more than 20-30 lines.
- In the next lesson collect in the translations and choose one of them to work on yourself. Improve the student's English version, making it as rhythmical as possible.
- Check with the student whose poem/song translation you have modified that she is happy with your changes, especially in a multilingual class, where you are ignorant of this student's MT.
- Get the student to put the text up on the board and then teach the class to recite it in the jazz-chant way.
- Do the same with other students' work over the next x number of lessons.
Acknowledgement: this marvellously simple technique is one we learnt at the the British Council in Istanbul, from a colleague named Graham. If you want more student involving ideas like this see Lessons from the Learner, Deller, Pilgrims-Longman,1990
