In
my experience, teaching language skills through mechanical exercises
and traditional fill-in-the-blank, true/ false, and multiple-choice
assessments does not interest students as much as we expect.
When I go
creative, especially when teaching grammar, in a way students do not
expect, I can clearly see the difference. Here is a wonderful method of
teaching English.
Example of a grammar lesson:
I
suggest a motivating way to teach grammar with audiovisual techniques,
with an example of a lesson on teaching modals of speculation that
express degrees of certainty (e.g., may, might, could, couldn’t).
I
produced a video to create a speculative context. I first asked someone
to videotape me doing actions that generated different sounds while I
was getting ready to leave the house for work.
These scenes included:
• brushing my teeth with an electric toothbrush
• blow drying my hair • ironing my clothes with steam • using a whistling kettle to boil water • pouring water into a cup • toasting a piece of bread in the toaster • leaving the tap dripping • spraying air freshener • leaving my cell phone ringing • locking the door • waiting for and entering an elevator • turning on the ignition of the car.
Setting up the video lesson:
Harmer (2007, 310) suggests a variety of viewing techniques when using films and videos in listening activities, including:
• Silent viewing (playing the video without the sound) • Freeze framing (freezing the picture and asking the students what they think will happen next) • Partial viewing (covering most of the screen with a piece of paper) • Picture or speech (half the class watches the video while the other half faces away). • Subtitled films (students see and hear the English language)
•
Picture-less listening (listening to the audio before watching the
video). To awaken students’ curiosity, I made use of picture-less
technique and had my students listen to the sound of the video first.
To
focus on modals of speculation, students listen and guess the origin of
the sounds they hear in the video. This arouses their curiosity and
invites them to speculate. I wanted to create a speculating
environment.
Teaching the video lesson:
I played the first scene and asked them to guess what the sound was.
Then I continued, pausing at the end of each scene for about 15 seconds
to allow them to make notes. I repeated this same process until they
had listened to the whole video. Then I played the video again while
they checked their notes.
Next, students formed pairs and took three
minutes to discuss their notes with their partner. Students enjoyed
discussing their very different ideas about the origin of the sounds
they had heard.By asking questions, I encouraged them to use the
appropriate grammatical structures.
For instance, when I played the
part where I was blow drying my hair, I asked, “What could it be? Could
it be a vacuum cleaner?” One student said, “Yes, it might be a vacuum
cleaner,” whereas another one said, “No, it can’t be a vacuum cleaner.”
When they were not able to use the structure, I prompted them to use
the modal construction by asking tag questions, such as “It can’t be a
vacuum cleaner, can it?” In order to respond to my question, students
had to use the teaching point.
I elicited their answers—for example, “It
might be a vacuum cleaner” or “It can’t be a washing machine”—and wrote
them on the board. Then I underlined the “modal + verb to be” with
another color to help them notice the new structure.
I continued the process about the origin of all the sounds in the video,
and I produced a list of their speculations on the board where the new
structure and the modals were underlined and highlighted.
Then I removed
the newspaper from the TV screen and let them watch the entire video.
This was the most interesting part of the lesson because the students
had a lot of fun, laughing at some of their speculations.
Teaching grammar:
The
same video can be used to teach different
grammar points, such as
present and past simple,
present and past progressive, future simple,
and
“going to + infinitive” without to, all by using the
technique of
freeze framing. In order to teach
grammar, you need to play the video,
freeze
framing the picture after each scene,
and then ask questions.
For
instance, freeze frame the picture and ask your
students questions
like, “What is s/he doing?”
“What did s/he do?” “What was s/he doing?”
“What is s/he going to do next?” or “What will
happen next?” In this way
students will be
prompted to use the teaching point.
Once you elicit
their answers, write them on the
board and highlight the structure
(e.g., “to be + ing”
form of the verb for present progressive, or “will +
infinitive” without to for future simple). Since the
video consists of a
sequence of action, adverbs
like first, second, finally, before, and
later can
also be introduced to and practiced with students.
Teaching vocabulary:
The
same video that I used with my students can be used to teach vocabulary
items on home and kitchen appliances by recording sounds and having
students guess the origin. Being careful to respect people’s privacy,
you can also take the camera around the school, or even outside the
school, and record a variety of interesting sounds.
For instance, you
can record the sound of students playing at recess, the period between
classes, or sounds in the lunchroom and then play the video for your
students and have them guess the source of the sound.
Or you can record
the sounds in a busy coffee shop, a nearby underground station, or a
noisy shopping center and play a guessing game with students.
Teaching writing:
The
same video that I used in my class can be used as a visual prompt for
writing assignments at different levels of English. As George (2002, 12)
points out, “Our students have a much richer imagination for what we
might accomplish with the visual than our journals have yet to
address.”
To use videos in the writing class, you can show the video to
your students using the picture-less listening technique and ask them
to write a story based on the sounds they hear in the video.
Conclusion
Finding
appropriate teaching materials is not that hard, as our everyday life
serves as a perfect resource for creating effective lessons and
activities.
An effective lesson does not necessarily require expensive
and high-tech materials; oftentimes, breaking the routines will excite
students, engage them in the lesson, and teach them the real use of
language in context.