Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 1; January 2000

"My Discipline 'Recipe'"

Concha Julián

Page 1 of 1

Who has not enter a classroom and had the impression that "the walls were the only audience there"?. You just stand in front of your students begging for silence and trying to catch their attention. Everything is useless! You are not reaching them at all!. Nobody has a magic wand to solve this sort of problem, but we teachers know we have our "recipes" and sometimes they work!. This is my own recipe based on role-reversal to catch the studentsī attention and find a way into their world. I have been practising this activity for some years and I can now share my experience with you in this short article thanks to Mario Rinvolucri who was very interested in it. I hope it will be useful!.

Right! We start again: we are in front of this group of students feeling so helpless to deal with the situation. We can go out and come in again with no result except our getting cross; we can shout and have our throat sore or we can just go to the leader of the group or to one of the most extroverted teenagers (if you are a woman it is better to choose a boy, and if you are a man, a girl) and ask him/her if s/he can start the class. Extroverted or leader students are usually eager to play our role because they feel they will attract more attention and can become even more popular. We can give him/her our list of studentsī names and our teacherīs book so that s/he can start the class and follow the lesson we have prepared for that day. After that, we simply sit down in his/her seat and play our new role as a classmate: talking, laughing, paying no attention, ... . The new "teacher" comes to the front of the class. Nothing happens until one of his/her classmates notices the change and, shouting, attracts the attention of the rest. Suddenly, the miracle happens: one by one all the faces turn to the front. When the new "teacher" starts asking for silence in the way we normally do, everybody thinks: "This is going to be fun!". The student is going to imitate your voice, pitch, intonation, tone, ... words and expressions, and even s/he can dare to mimic your gestures. We can enjoy the silence, smiles and laughters in the classroom; even more, we can help with some typical studentsī utterances: "Can you repeat, please?", "What does that word mean?", "I havenīt done my homework!", "You speak too quick, I canīt follow you!" and so on.

The whole scene could last from 5 to 15 minutes, more if the student is eager to go on. Donīt be anxious: It is not a waste of time. When we "recover" our own role, there will be a good opportunity to talk about this activity with our students ( I prefer to speak in their mother tongue as students can express their feelings much better in that way). The student can comment on his/her role as a "teacher" and we as "students", we can talk about our feelings, thoughts, new ways to deal with the situation. We as teachers were looking for an opportunity to start our lesson that day, but we got far more: a mutual understanding between teacher and students, which means communication and a chance to humanize our class. This humanism means a lot for our students and we, teachers, need it for our own sake.