Humanising Language Teaching
Year 4; Issue 1; January 2002

A week before Christmas I was asked to set up an ELT software table at an open day for a new school in a deprived area of Hong Kong. As it was a Saturday my seven-year-old daughter Elinor came with me, and together we decorated the table with boxes and leaflets and loaded MindGame onto the laptop. (MindGame is a language game devised by Mario Rinvolucri and Clarity and based on the boardgame Othello.) Traffic was extremely slow - in fact the school was so new that it only had one year group and the parents weren't very interested in ELT software anyway - and I drifted away to talk to some teachers.

Twenty minutes later I came back to my table and found quite a lively crowd of children gathered around the computer. I moved closer and saw Elinor playing MindGame against a Hong Kong boy two or three years older than her. It was the first time any of them had played MindGame, but as computer-literate children they had quickly picked up the rules through trial and error, and were now being given strategic and linguistic advice (good and bad!) from the children standing behind them.

Two things stood out. One was how involved they all were in the language learning. The game involved converting masculine to feminine and vice versa, so when they saw he they had to write she; nephew had to be converted to niece. The Hong Kong boy (whose name I never knew) was learning vocabulary; the English girl was learning spelling (she knew the word nephew but had never seen in written). Neither of them appeared to equate what they were doing with the boring rote learning of vocab and spelling that they have to be bullied into doing for homework.

The greatest pleasure, though, was to watch how a simple ELT game had prompted these two children from quite different backgrounds to play together. Elinor wouldn't dream of spending time with boys, especially if they are 3 years older; it is extremely unlikely that the boy had ever had any interaction with anyone who was not Cantonese. Yet the shared love of play was strong enough to overcome these significant obstacles and bring these two people together for a short time. It must have made some sort of impression on Elinor who, as we left, asked for a copy of MindGame for Christmas!

Andrew Stokes works for Clarity, the ELT software publisher.
andrew@clarity.com.hk
www.clarity.com.hk

Choose Clarity for effective, enjoyable, easy-to-use ELT software.
Andrew Stokes, Director,
Clarity Language Consultants Ltd (Hong Kong and UK)
www.clarity.com.hk
PO Box 163, Sai Kung, Hong Kong
Tel: (+852) 2791 1787, Mobile: (+852) 97310900, Fax: (+852) 2791 6484