Humanising Language Teaching
Year 3; Issue 3; May 2001
BRING THE TEXT BACK TO MIND
Section 1 Copying from Natives
Level: From Advanced to Native
Time: in first lesson : 30-40 minutes
in the second class: 20-30 minutes
Purpose: to help the students mentally fix phrases and collocations by re-making the
text they first heard them in.
Preparation: Invite a native speaker to come to your class ready to speak on one of three
topics that interest them for l5-30 minutes. Ask them to choose the topics but
not to prepare.
Alternatively, choose a 20 minute video sequence rich in challenging language.
Lesson Outline:
- Introduce the native speaker and allow the class to choose which topic they wish to
listen to.
Alternatively, play the video tape.
In either case, while the speaker/s are speaking, yourself take detailed language notes of phrases, words and collocations that may be new to the students and ones that they understand well enough, but which they would not themselves use in speaking English.
( you should have three to six pages of notes)
- After the talk ask the students to comment on any features of the talk they noticed:
speaker's accent
" speed of speech
" use of pitch variation ( high and low )
" pet words
" use of hands, posture and gesture
" social class features in speech and posture
Lesson Outline 2
(this lesson should be 5 to l0 days after the first )
Give the students copies of your language notes, or typed up copies of them.
Ask them to look through them and, working in pairs, to bring back to mind as
much as they can of what the speaker said.
