Cats
Roy Boardman, Italy
Roy Boardman began teaching English in a UK secondary school in 1959 and moved to Italy in 1965. During his work for the British Council from 1975 to 1995, he set up and was directly involved in a number of teacher training initiatives. He now teaches English at the University of Naples. He is interested in all aspects of language teaching and is at present working on creative language learning and the applications of scenario-planning to EFL syllabus design.
E-mail: royboardman@hotmail.com
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Background
Free Speech
Relaxed beginnings
Literature
Idioms and story-telling
Now you try
Scott Thornbury’s seminal article “A Dogma for Teaching” makes a deeply-felt appeal to all EFL teachers to remember that the primary “materials” of the classroom are the students, the teacher and the language, and that we are overburdened by techniques to such an extent that we tend to forget real person-to-person interaction.
“Teaching – like talk – “ he observes, “should centre on the real and relevant concerns
of the people in the room, not on the remote world of coursebook characters, nor the
contrived world of grammatical structures.”
This defines well the way I prefer to teach. In significant ways, it eliminates many of the believed differences between mother-tongue teaching and EFL teaching.
Theme-based, non-coursebook-bound lessons enable everyone to breathe. The language content can be so well blended with the theme that students are hardly aware that you are teaching and they are learning. The teaching doesn’t kill the learning, and everyone might learn something different. You can allow students to take it in whatever direction they choose, there are so many options. That’s why (or one reason why) the course I use them for is called “Free Speech”.
Down to brass tacks: take a theme, suggest some directions it might take. Cats. When we enter the classroom, we take the whole of the human being with us: that includes ourselves as teachers, of course, but also our past, present and aspirations for the future, our likes and dislikes, our prejudices and values. I don’t particularly like cats, I’m a dog man, but I received a mail from a teacher colleague to publish an appeal for a home for “an absolutely lovely cat” in the Campania ELT newsletter, which I did. It also sparked off my Free Speech lesson Cats.
Relaxed ways of beginning theme-based lessons are more congenial to me than bullet-point procedures (which can also be made relaxed, of course) like getting the class to look at a set of photos, in this case of cats. After the usual greetings, I simply slipped in “Do you remember the name of Audrey Hepburn’s cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s?” and “Do you remember Audrey Hepburn’s character name in the film?” Since this is a class of participants whose average age is 55, everyone had seen the film, some had read the book. We were able to get in a quite natural way to Holly Golightly’s relationship with her cat, and the participants’ cats past and present. There was talk of identifying with one’s pet, and then we set off on the adventure of a naturally-occurring quiz (well, with a bit of steering by me) on the name of Giorgio Armani’s cat (Couture Cat), Freddie Mercury’s (Bohemian Rhapsody) and John Lennon’s (nobody knew).
We then strayed into the area of literature. Cats in literature. We decided that, after talking in pairs, each of us would write down a literary reference to a cat. Six cats came up, some of them being repeated from participant to participant. Each of us, including me, had to tell everyone about the cat without revealing its name or the literary source, so there was a lot of talk and listening. So as not to steal anyone else’s fire, I chose to talk about “Cat” in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The others were:
The Cheshire Cat (Alice in Wonderland)
Puss-in-Boots
Dick Whittington’s cat
Cats in Aesop’s Fables
“The Black Cat” called Pluto in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story
“The Cat that Walked by Himself” (Rudyard Kipling in Just So Stories)
We talked about some cats in Italian literature too, including children’s literature.
And it was time to bring the lesson to a close. I said we’d forgotten a very important source of literary material on cats – T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and we decided that we’d each bring to the next lesson:
- an extract from Old Possum that we liked and that we’d read aloud
- as many “cat idioms” as we could think of”.
So the next lesson began with some speech rhythm practice, using Practical Cats; pieces like:
The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat
If you offer him a pheasant he would rather have grouse.
If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat,
If you put him in a flat then he’d rather have a house.
If you set him on a mouse then he only wants a rat,
If you set him on a rat then he’d rather have a mouse.
Some of the participants had listened to bits from the musical Cats on YouTube, and that helped.
They’d searched for idioms on internet, in books and dictionaries and came up with:
You couldn’t swing a cat in here.
When the cat’s away, the mice do play.
He thinks he’s the cat’s whiskers.
Curiosity killed the cat.
Looked what the cat dragged in.
He’s a fat cat.
She let the cat out of the bag.
What a cool cat she is!
I got them to invent situations around the idioms. They had to tell their story without using the idiom, and the rest of the class had to guess the moral in the form of one of the idioms. They worked in pairs, and each pair came up with a different story.
We rounded the theme off by inventing a chain story. Participant 1 began with “There were once three sisters.” Participant 2 continued: “They had a secret.” … and so on until everyone was able to say: “She let the cat out of the bag.”
Creative writing homework (not compulsory!) was to write a story, description or poem about a cat, but I have to wait till the next lesson in October for the results, which we’ll read to each other and discuss.
If you want to try the lesson, let it develop as ‘naturally’ as you can. Don’t follow a set scheme, just have a set of ideas. And if you want a language focus, well, that’s easy:
If I were a cat, I’d …
If I’d been Alice, I’d have said to the Cheshire Cat …
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Which cat would you rather have in the house, Cat or Bohemian Rhapsody?
I’d rather have ………… because ……………….. ./It’d be better to have …..
Or any other grammatical structure, for that matter.
As for vocabulary, there are a lot of cat-specific words: lap, purr, pad, miao, curl up, … Complete the list!
Take any other topic, and it can be handled in similar ways. There are endless possibilities. I’ve done it with Candles, Walls, Bridges, Horses, Guitars, the Bible … . Sometimes, students have taken it in turns, at the end of the lesson, to choose the topic of the next. This tends to get them mulling it over, and thinking in English, between one lesson and the next.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Literature course at Pilgrims website.
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