Fully on to it! Hazelnuts and got the broom

LANGUAGE LEARNING, LAUGHING, ENGAGED, PROGRESSING - a teaching blog: insights and reflections   

15Sls 2019

At Lincoln to learn  about care of flax (harakeke) February 2019.

How happy it makes me when I see students teaching one another :

 

   Fully on to it! 😊👍👍

This class is doing incredibly well. At 10:10 this morning I told them I am very very proud of them. 22.2.2019

They spent the first hour or so today totally fully engaged learning far more than they realised but interacting with one another asking one another checking with one another and doing the same with me

So we went over the same material again and again and again but we were doing the whole thing orally.

Basically I told them a story with lots of bizarre pictures of Brooms and torches and hazelnuts on the boards. Well I actually sellotaped a real hazelnut on the board. And I had a bunch of hazelnuts on the front desk. And I had passed around a bucket of little hazelnuts for them to take. before we started the story.

Then I acted out the story with one brave student actually Michael in this situation because he has good enunciation but really scrambled grammar. And he doesn't mind being at the front of the class because I have told him three days in a row how good his pronunciation is. Which it is. We have decided together that it's because he's from the north of China. Any reason will do.

Actually he was so withdrawn and so lacking confidence and had such bad language learning methods that I was worried about him so I had to find a way of drawing him out. Now he is the happy Class Clown and confident of his pronunciation. His work is improving and he is writing more and writing more correctly. This is wonderful. 

And he like all the other students knows he cannot hide in the back row. They all need to know that they must be active and speaking when we are for instance reading a book together or practicing something on the board. I can see several of them are used to hiding. Perhaps when they were small they were in huge classes in China and it didn't matter.

It matters very much that I get them to change their learning attitudes and learning methods. And I'm thrilled to say this morning that that's exactly what I saw while they were leaning over one another's desks talking and reiterating in writing and correcting.

                                                 

Of course at appropriate scaffolded moments I would provide a bit more written language on the board. But the magic thing was almost all of them were leaving behind their phones and not consulting their phones almost not at all. 

Although they learnt a lot of new vocabulary this morning and they also learnt a lot of grammar without realising it, for instance the past tense, yet essentially it was a storytelling technique with lots of actions and laughter and little drawings on the boards. 

By the time we got halfway through the almost hour and a half most of the students were happy to stand up and speak a sentence or two out of the story. This is amazing progress. The fact that they can speak so many words when two weeks ago one single word would hold them up for a long time if I didn't stop them repeating it. Some repeating is good, obsessive repeating is not good. 

This is a new and more highly scaffolded version of an old exercise which has always been incredibly successful in generating genuine and reasonably accurate language. I used to call the exercise recount with my intermediate or upper intermediate students but here there's a lot more action, a lot more showing and more repeating so actually we kind of learn the words and how to say them all together.

Without specifying that we are doing writing this exercise is incredibly interactive and also a little bit intercultural as I'm trying to get the to Afghani girls mixing with a Chinese visa. Neither side is great at that at the moment but this morning I got one Afghani student, Atefa, to go around the back row and check their writing for me. Which she did successfully full stop

That engenders respect on both sides and it becomes independent of culture in the end I hope. Gradually the whole class is beginning to understand they must help one another and check when in other spellings and other things and they should do that frequently.

I walk around the class and check their books much more often than I have with any other class because I need to check 

a) that they are doing the right thing and 

b) that their spelling is correct. Many of them make mistakes when copying from the board so I work round the whole 24 or so of them everytime we write something actually. 

They're getting the idea that spelling is important and now I'm refining that gradually by pointing out full stops and capitals and also writing the script on the line. That means little by little we are learning things about how to write the letters and how to write in English, for instance not to write in the margin. Without actually having a lesson on that subject. Which we might touch on later on as a short lesson.

They are very happy and pleased with some self this morning. And so they should be.

I am also happy because

• They are courageous about speaking new sounds 
• They are happy to try writing things 
• They are happy to consult their neighbours or me about spelling or pronunciation 
• They frequently ask me what they want 
• Their bad habits of learning are disappearing. Such as writing each single word 50 times to try and remember it. Or translating every single word into Chinese even when the picture clearly showed what the object was.
• They are trusting me with the process of learning which is really really important 
• They are receiving the best of my understandings from my experience and from my research and they seem to be really responding well, working hard when appropriate and relaxing when appropriate.This class is doing incredibly well. At 10:10 this morning I told them I am very very proud of them. 

Got the torch

Got the broom

Put it back

Got the rake

It was dark

Got the broom

(pronunciation) 

Wonderfully useful language they are using and assimilating without analysing tenses or use of 'get'  

They will probably forget the details and words of the story partially but we will do it for a fun interlude now and again next week and the week after so that finally that little story will stay with them in all it's vocabulary or most of it's vocabulary. That's great. 

That vocabulary will serve also as grammar models. Little parts of sentences will serve them to generate new sentences. Such as I went to the garage. Which they must have said 15 times this morning on and off full stop or I got the broom. Got the room is actually really good got the torch got the broom got the rake. It gives them an understanding of that elusive got her in this context.

And they are using the past tense of all these verbs without our having done any specific grammar. They are using the past tense well with are short number of verbs such as go, take, get. This is magnificent

Not only are they using past tense verbs in the correct situation but they are linking a story together, enchaining events  as the French say. 

They are also applying newly learnt theory with confidence  (speechstream theory) and nonchalance and this is theory they are very happy to know, so linking and deleting are big numbers for them now and they apply them well. Of course we have to write them on the board to remind ourselves in a particular text.

WELL DONE STUDENTS!