Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 5; September 03

The Odd Man Out – a new old game

By J. Galpern, E. Lasevich, and A. Sokol
www.thinking-approach.org

Age: any
Level of English: any
Duration: 15-20 min.

There seems to be little hope that we may find any new angle in an activity which has long been practiced by various language teaching professionals. And still we are sure that the way it is practiced the thinking approach classroom will make your lessons more exciting for both you and your students.

The Odd One Out game (to be found in many modern textbooks) is simple to prepare and easy to implement in the classroom. You traditionally offer your students a list of four words (for example: a cat, a dog, a hamster, a wolf), three of which make one logical group (a cat, a dog, a hamster are all pets in our example) and the fourth is “the odd one” (a wolf). Students find the word and explain why it has been chosen (three pets contrasting a wild animal). We will now claim that with a little change this activity can be made much more challenging and be used for the development of thinking skills.

In our case the words chosen are: barber, butcher, teacher, nurse. It's time to see four differences which make the activity a thinking approach one.

Difference 1. The teacher chooses the word for the class to exclude. Let's try and exclude the word a barber. Easy? You may find that what makes it different is that a barber works only with men ( the gender of the clients he/she deals with), when others may work with both men and women.

Difference 2. The teacher asks the students to exclude each word in turn. Thus we find a reason why a teacher may be excluded (educational requirements – higher, when others do not need it), then a nurse (word formation – the word is not built by adding –er as is the case with the other words), butcher (as the only one not exclusively dealing with humans).

Difference 3. The TA (Thinking Approach) teacher uses definite thinking models (the ENV model in this case) underlying the activity and helps his/her students see and apply them, too. We see that any element (an element, E in the acronym, may be anything: a process, a thing, a person, etc.) can be described through the names of features (N in the acronym, such as: education, age, appearance, shape, etc). We can further compare linguistic elements, ie the length of the word. . For example, it may seem hard to find similarities in the idea table and to crawl unless we think formally, linguistically, and notice the number of letters in the word. The values of features (V in the acronym) under the same name may coincide or be very different. A teacher (E) will have higher (V) under the feature required education (N) while the other three will normally not have such a high requirement.

Difference 4. The TA teacher may choose to focus on process rather than on the result of the activity. Thus students are invited to offer their hypotheses and check if they work. For example, if the proposed explanation is “a teacher is different because they work with students”, the teacher may suggest that the idea of customer or client* is common to All four words. The students may come to realise that they have to reconsider their initial idea.

Thus from a very usual and rather unnoticed classroom activity we can get a very challenging exercise which lets us practice a wide range of communicative skills, as well as providing us with rich material for teaching thinking skills.

[ naughty editorial note: I see that the idea of suggesting that a teacher has customers, rather than students, an idea that Mrs Thatcher imposed on UK thinking, seems to have seeped Eastwards as far as Russia. In UK, the railways always talk about their customers. In their case this may be safer than using the old word passenger, since inherent is the word passenger is the concept of reaching a destination, and reaching it when the timetable says you will! ]