PowerPoint Presentation no. 1
The English Alphabet: fruits and vegetables

Juan Ráez Padilla

Juan Ráez Padilla, PhD. Teacher trainer at the English Department of the University of Jaén, Spain.
E-mail: jraez@ujaen.es

This is the first of a series of three original PowerPoint presentations for the English classroom. For more information on PowerPoint and ESL see Ráez Padilla, Juan, "More power to PowerPoint: ideas, examples and resources for the ESL classroom", Humanising Language Teaching, Year 8, Issue 3, May 2006.

The level of this PowerPoint presentation is that of Primary Education. Its main objective is to actively involve students in the learning process, with a view to elicit, explain or review in a funny way the English alphabet, and to foster interactive and collaborative attitudes on the part of the students.

In this presentation I made use of the numerous multimedia material resources online, some of which can be found in the section "Bibliography and resources for the ESL teacher" in the article above. The process is simple: you only need to download the material you need for your presentation from a clip gallery section that fits into your topic. If you cannot find any material which satisfies your needs, you can always draw you own designs, scan them, and transfer them to your presentation.

This is how I usually use the presentation in the ESL classroom: I divide it into two groups, whose names I put in connection with the activity itself (the group oranges and the group bananas, for example, instead of group A or B - they always seem to enjoy their new fruity identity…). I start showing the first image to oranges. We learn the correct pronunciation of the letter and I ask them to tell me which fruit the image/letter (A/Asparragus, for example) stands for. If they are right, they get one point. If not, the turn goes to bananas, who can then get the point from their partners. Then bananas have their own go, and so forth. Those who get more points at the end are the winners. As long as this competitive element is effectively managed by the teacher, students' motivation seem to improve in this lesson/game. In any case, this presentation (as all PowerPoint presentations) can be used in many different ways: for further practice, revision, eliciting answers from just a student / pairs / reduced groups,… The last slide makes use of the different IPA (International Phonetic Association) phonetic symbols to help students with the correct pronunciation of the different vowels and consonants. I use it as a visual aid (either during this activity, or as support for other activities in which spelling is important) for the well-known song of the English alphabet, the "ABC song" (with the same melody as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star"). Having this picture / musical score as "display" has helped many of my students to spell words whose letters had temporarily slipped away…

When I use this presentation with my primary school teachers-to-be students at the university, I urge them to focus their attention on the following areas for the benefit of their teaching practice:

- The alphabet; how to spell; pronunciation.
- Vocabulary acquisition; memorization reinforced by associating letter-picture, essential for young learners.
- British / American English: aubergine / eggplant (letter E), yam (letter Y) / sweet potato, courgette / zucchini (letter Z).
- Interdisciplinary approach: English-music (the "ABC song"); auditory memorization. - Attention is paid to different learning styles: visual learners (pictures) / auditory learners (song).

As I do highlight with the students above, I hope this presentation may well be the trigger for the creation of other presentations which may meet the particular needs of the ESL teacher.

The presentation can be found here:
TheEnglishAlphabet-Fruitsandvegetables.ppt

Please check the Secondary Teaching course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Humanising Large Classes course at Pilgrims website.