Humanistic Teaching

An approach to learning English

Around about this time in more years than not I wonder about fans. Not the folding kind, nor the electrical ones, but the kind that are given away as promotions. At least that used to be the case. Truth to tell, I haven't seen as many since the century turned. Failure to collect enough free fans is one reason why my idea for using them has never made it from thought to reality. Though not the only one.

The basic idea is simple. Use a fan as a canvas to create a short two phrase  tongue twister. Imagine a craft activity where students use craft paper to cover a fan. Half the tongue twister would be put on one side of the fan and half on the other. Here are a few ideas off the hairs of my brow, though ideally it would be best for students to come up with their own:

• red lorry / yellow lorry (a British Classic?)
• red berry / yellow belly
• silly seals / sleepy sheep
• fat moth / thin moth
• flies fly / fry fries
• flat cap / cat flap
• streaky bacon / stripy string
• four sharks / short thorns
• sinks stink / sing "shin!"

Judging by that lot, it's been a while since I've tried. Though,  I think what's more important than the actual difficulty of the wording is the vividness of the images they create. They need to be something drawable. Something that children will want to draw, though actually I suppose this idea could be usable with adults, depending upon their interest. Real tongue twisters are probably more interesting to adults than children. Actually, I think for children an alternative to tongue twisters would be to get them to think up rhyming nouns with a matching number of syllables, eg iguana / banana, train / brain, umpire / vampire. Another challenge would then be to add an adjective to the nouns to making rhyming phrases: brown bed / big head, fat fish / blue dish, hairy dog / heavy frog etc. This is much more doable than trying to come up with genuine tongue twisters and in reality for most Japanese children creates more than enough challenge to pronounce at speed. And this brings me to the core of the idea. The reason for mounting the tongue twisters onto fans is because they can be span at varying speeds (or so I thought before I tried it). I imagined that after making their fans students could present them to each other, guess the phrases or learn them, and then say them all the while with the fans being rotated faster and faster.

So, why does this idea remain a fantasy? Well one reason is that I usually only remember it when it is impractical to collect enough fans before our summer break. Another is that I'm not a great fan (ouch) of craft activities. When instructions can be written down and children can get reading practise working them out I am more interested, but this idea doesn't lend itself easily to a written explanation. Finally, real fans are not as easy to twist as I imagined when I first had the idea. Their handles are often too fat, especially for small hands. In this respect using a chopstick and sticking circular paper to either side to make a toy fan spins much better and is completely more practical. But making a fan as opposed to using a real one just offers less interest to my mind and my eye, and my heart has never been in it enough to try it out. One summer, one day, some when.

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