| Humanising Language Teaching Year 3; Issue 4; July 2001 ### Stealing phrases from the Idiolects of Others Mario Rinvolucri secondary and adult Level: intermediate to advanced Time: 30 -40 minutes Preparation: Get a native speaker to visit your class for 15-20 minutes ready to speak about a couple of different topics that motivate them. or select a video interview where the interviewee is a native or choose a radio interview, where the interviewee is a native. In class: Introduce your speaker who then presents the class with the two or three areas s/he could speak about. Mini-presentations of each. The students vote to decide on the one they want. or tell the student a little about the interview they are going to view/hear. Tell the students that they are to listen for gist but that they are also to notice any words or phrases that the native uses that they would not use when speaking English. These could be "words" like, erhm, yep,mmmm, they could very frequent oral speech features like the "modal" to tend to. They could be linking phrases that this speaker uses frequently etc… Tell the students to focus on noting down "simple" words, not any complex technical vocabulary the speaker uses. The speaker gives the talk the group have chosen . 10-15 minutes. The students and you take language notes. If you are a native speaker, your notes will be particularly interesting because they will show, age, gender, regional and idiolectal differences between you and the speaker. Ask the students to group in 4's to compare their language notes. If the speaker can stay on , ask him/her to go round and help the students with language doubts, eg: " did I get this down right?" Go through your own notes with the class, teaching useful stuff as it comes up. Assure the students that next time they do this exercise, they will find the double- tasking much easier and they will have fuller notes. Note: To get the juice out of this technique, it is best to use it repeatedly as the students gradually access a great pool of oral language and seriously enhance their awareness of the spoken code. Preparing students from the Cambridge FCE and CAE exams, we organised 2 sessions per week with guest speakers over a 12 week term.