I came across this graphic on Facebook recently and, as an English
teacher, it depressed me a great deal, especially when I went to the
original page and read the comments, as person after person spoke of the
video games which helped them to learn. While it is great that they
have been able to learn, and that they have taken responsibility for
their own learning, as a teacher I feel bad that this is the image that
at least some students have of our work. So for the past few days I have
been thinking of ways to redress the balance. Luckily, there are many
ways in which we can incorporate elements of what the students
identified as helping them to learn English into their mainstream
classes.
Using songs
Perhaps the step that we have all taken to bring our classes into
line with the interests of our students is the introduction of popular
songs into the classroom. Indeed, modern textbooks designed for
teenagers often include exercises built around pop songs as a way of
engaging students. However, the very nature of popular music means that
it is practically impossible to include a song in a printed medium
which stands the test of time until the next reprinting. In addition to
this, it can be hard to choose the most appropriate song for a classroom
of teenagers – inevitably, if some of the students love the song,
others will hate it. And the generation gap between teacher and student
can lead to choosing a song which fails to have the desired motivating
effect. Often, the end result is that the teacher chooses a more classic
song which they feel more comfortable with.
One answer to this problem is available online. The site
www.lyricstraining.com
provides simple gap-fill listening exercises based on a large range of
modern songs. If you have access to a computer lab at some stage, this
can be a nice exercise to end the session, as each student can choose
the song they want to work on and complete the lyrics exercise on their
own using headphones. If you are lucky enough to have access to
computers in the classroom, this can be used for fast finishers.
However, there must be more to introducing music into the classroom
than simply providing more practice in gap-fill exercises, or the
novelty will soon wear off. Something I try to do is to have parts of
songs appear in unlikely places in the class. One exercise I use is the
jigsaw dictation, in which a text is dictated with the sentences
jumbled. The students must first take the information down as a
dictation, and then work together to reorganise the sentences to
reconstruct the original text, using their knowledge of grammar and
cohesion. So why not use the lyrics of a song as the jumbled text?
Better still, why not mix the lyrics of two songs, to add an extra layer
of text organisation to the exercise? If you don’t tell the students at
the start of the exercise what the source(s) of the text dictated is,
it adds an element of surprise to the exercise which can perhaps be
motivating than simply announcing that you’re going to listen to a song.
A possible way of checking whether they have the correct order for the
texts is to play the song(s) at the end of the exercise.
Another way in which I use songs in class is in the exercise ‘
Desert Island Discs‘, which I presented as part of my workshop ‘
Getting them speaking‘.
In this activity, students get to talk about why they have chosen a
particular piece of music and how they feel about it, as well as sharing
their choice of music with the rest of the class.
Bringing video into the classroom
In my post ‘
How to exploit video in the classroom‘ I examined different activities which can be used in class in order to introduce an audiovisual element into
everyday learning. Videos are a great way of presenting ideas or
topics to the class, but they should be used as an integrated part of
the lesson. To this end, short clips of video are far more useful than
longer parts of films, and a series of activities can be planned around
different showings of the same video. For excellent ready-made examples
of what can be achieved with this sort of material, I suggest you try
Kieran Donaghy’s great website,
www.film-english.com, which I examined in my post ‘
Five websites to spice up the end of term‘.
I have a colleague who regularly uses film trailers from You Tube in
her classes, with listening comprehension activities very similar to
those which can be done with songs. In a C2 (Proficiency) class, I used
a series of short clips from the series ‘Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
‘
to illustrate different regional British accents, although fully
accepting that even a Proficiency group would have difficulties follwing
Jimmy Nail in full flow!
Matt Halsdorff,
in a comment on the post mentioned above, mentioned that he used video
for close listening exercises, focusing on very specific items of usage,
such as ‘gonna’, ‘wanna’, or the excessive use of ‘like’ in popular
speech.
However, while bringing video into the classroom in this way is
motivating and comes closer to matching the students’ real world
experience, it remains a relatively passive experience. It is a simple
step to allow the students to make their own videos, either in the
classroom itself or for presentation in the classroom. This can range
from recording videos of presentations done by the students so that they
can analyse themselves as part of any debriefing to full-blown video
projects which they script and organise themselves. I have had students
produce videos of weather forecasts, adverts, daytime TV programmes and
cookery programmes, while a colleague in Primary sets a video project
every year in which his Year 4 students represent different aspects of
Roman life as part of his CLIL social science class. Using relatively
simple software, students can create photo stories, or video podcasts
explaining a point of grammar or an item of vocabulary, along the lines
of ‘
iswearenglish.com‘ (see example below).
Conclusions
An important thing to say in any examination of possible new teaching
techniques is that what we have been doing up to now should not be
rejected. While in this post we have focused on bringing elements of our
students’ outside realities into the classroom, what we have been doing
in the classroom up to now plays an important part in the education of
our students and we must continue to do it. However, things outside the
classroom have changed radically in the last few years, and as educators
we must be aware of ways in which we can engage and motivate our
students, including incorporating what they feel comfortable with into
our everyday approach.
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