ELT News Think Tank
This Month's Think Tank Panel
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Marc Helgesen
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Peter Viney
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Setsuko Toyama
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Roger Barnard
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Panelists: Marc | Peter | Setsuko
Guest Panelist: Roger Barnard
Date: July 2000
Topic: "Is it worth giving my students English homework during their school holidays?"
Peter Viney
Am I replying as a teacher, a writer, a parent or just as a human being?
By this question I guess we mean the long summer break. Languages differ from any other subject in the
syllabus, in that they can't be acquired/learnt in such discrete chunks but are part of a cumulative
process. There's a real problem with forgetting/losing touch with English over the summer. The reason
for a long summer break (at least this is what teachers have successfully persuaded education authorities)
is to give the mind a break; to rest and pursue other interests; to live.
As a parent whose third kid has just (today as I write) completed his last A level exam, I have been living
with their exam pressure for about eight or nine years. My son was saying today that he's afraid of
forgetting his Physics in the gap year he's going to take before studying it at university. As we talked
about ways of maintaining it (e.g. reading Science magazines weekly), he immediately said, "But no
way before September!" I suspect he's not alone in this sentiment.
In today's mood, my answer is
"No, leave them alone." I think that kids often do more creative things in their free time when
left to their own devices. It's the old joke: Parent: Hey! You haven't done your homework! Stop programming
your Web site, and come and do these ten arithmetic sums. If I'd answered it a while ago, I would have made
a difference for adults who were having an enforced summer gap. I think any work you set should be at a
tangent to their normal work and looser.
It's a time for trying to watch movies or videos in English, getting the lyrics of some songs in the top
twenty and trying to understand them and sing them, looking at graded readers that can be read at speed,
mainly for pleasure, with NO exercises on the text, perhaps picking up magazines in English on topics
they're genuinely interested in - from MacUser or Wired to Spin, from Car and Driver to Cosmopolitan.
Panelists: Marc | Peter | Setsuko
Guest Panelist: Roger Barnard
Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author
Co-author of New American Streamline & Grapevine. Peter's Web site
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