Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 6; October 1999

Twenty years ago Alan Duff and Alan Maley brought out a couple of books that thrilled auditory teachers and students alike: Sounds Interestingand Sounds Intriguing. These books and their cassettes offered teachers a broad range of noises, as well as sounds organised to “tell” a story. Adrian du Plessis, architect of Cambridge's sally into ELT, was the commissioning editor.

The books are long gone but you can use the ideas they contained better without them.

With an elementary group, ask the students to take up relaxed body postures and ask them to shut their eyes and listen.

You now make the following sounds:

• walk loudly across the room to the door
• knock on the door very gently
• pause
• knock on the door more loudly
• pause
• bang on the door
• open the door noisily
• hit your open hand with your fist
• slam the door shut
• scream (you may need to warn colleagues with classes either side of your room.)

Ask the students to open their eyes and group them in 4's. Each student tells the the story s/he imagined on hearing the above sounds.

Ask each person to write their story in 2 paragraphs. These texts go up round the classroom walls. The students go round reading the texts written by people in other groups.

The most student-centred form of this exercise is when you ask one person, as homework, to produce a sound sequence (10-20 sounds) on cassette which is then used as a story stimulus with the whole group.

You do no “ busy “ work and the students are in complete charge, but within a well- focused frame. Your only task is to help individuals with language and to learn more about your students by observing them.

Alan and Alan, thank you for bringing this exercise into the classical EFL canon; Cambridge, thank you for letting the two books go out of print and thus encouraging greater student centredness!