An Old Exercise

Paul Davis, UK

Paul Davis is a teacher, trainer and author. He has co-written: Dictation, CUP, The Confidence Book, Longman, and More Grammar Games, CUP, and Ways of Doing, CUP. He has worked in many kinds of ELT teaching and training in many countries. He is a regular Pilgrims trainer. His present ELT interests include Silent Way, Linguistic Psychodrama and Corpus Linguistics.

The following exercise is derived from Silent Way. It gets the students thinking about the meaning given by the position of words in sentences. The example sentence below is suitable for intermediate and above but a simpler sentence would work at lower levels. The original version appeared in More Grammar Games (CUP, 1995).

Before Class

Get as many board markers(or pieces of chalk) as you can muster.

In Class

1. Split the class into groups of three and dictate (or write on the board) the following 13 word sentence:
   With great difficulty we managed to open the rear door of the plane.
2. Tell the students they have to write thirteen correct sentences; each sentence is to end with each of the different words in the sentence above, e.g.:
   Who are you going out with?
   That was great!
   This is quite difficult. .
   Etc….
3. Give them a time limit of ten minutes. Do not help and maintain teacher silence during the exercise (but check they have all understood the exercise and remind them of time after 3, 6 and 9 minutes).
4. Stop them after the ten minutes is up (alternative you can stop them as soon as the first threesome has 13 sentences that they think are correct).
5. Give out a board marker to one student in each threesome and ask each group to have a scorer.
6. Each group writes their first sentence on the board (they should all end with the word with).
7. When each group has written rub off those sentences which are correct. Leave those which are incorrect. Do not comment.
8. Ask the scorer in each three to give a point to their group if the sentence has been rubbed off.
9. Invite the students to try and correct their own sentences or that of another group. Tell the scorer that they get two points for any correction made by their group.
10. Rub off any corrections that are right but leave on any that are still wrong.
11. When students have had time and are drying up correct any sentences that remain.
12. Repeat with the second sentence and so on.
13. Get the scorers to find out which group has “won”.

Rationale

This is a way of “forcing” the students to self-correct and peer-correct. If they develop an “inner criteria” this will stand them in good stead compared to relying on external correction from the teacher. The lesson depends on the teacher being able to set up the activity in an authoritative way but then largely maintain a policy of non-intervention unless absolutely necessary.

Acknowledgement

I developed this exercise in conversation with Rosie Tanner. Thanks Rosie.

Please check the Building Positive Group Dynamics course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.