ELT News Think Tank

This Month's Think Tank Panel

Marc Helgesen

Peter Viney

Chuck Sandy

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck
Date: September 2002
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Topic: "What are some slightly strange (weird, off-the-wall) activities that have worked for you in class?"

Chuck Sandy

When the poet Ezra Pound said, “Make it new” he was encouraging young poets to step out from behind the conventional rules of poetry to see things in a unique manner and create something fresh. When John Coltrane said, “There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine; new feelings to get at... But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror,” he meant exactly that.

When John Fanselow asked teachers to consider and reflect upon what they do in the classroom and then break the rules they set for themselves, he was in essence encouraging us to follow the advice of Ezra Pound and John Coltrane. In any art, and perhaps some sciences as well, one must know the rules before one is free to break them, and if you wish to take an inner view of things, one must know oneself before being able to clean the mirror and get at what’s new, what’s fresh and what can until the moment of doing be only imagined.

“I have a certain dislike for activities which are weird
for weirdness sake, for those activites that make that
branch shake more than necessary”

But what are the rules of the language classroom? There are hundreds of them, both conventional and personal, both learned explicitly from teacher trainers and mentors, and internalized from having been students in other classrooms. Perhaps all teachers share a basic common set of rules, but certainly each of us carries into the classroom a set of rules unique to his or her own history.

This is not always a positive thing, and before we can ‘clean the mirror’ we need to discover what rules we’ve bound ourselves to. We learn what these rules are by carefully observing what we do or by having others observe us. Then we reflect on what would happen if one of those rules got broken. Then we break them, one by one to see what will happen. Through this process we slowly ‘clean the mirror’ and ‘make it new.’

I mention all this by way of saying that I don’t think one has to or should try very hard to design ‘weird’ activities for the language class when the simple act of walking into a room full of people and constructing a reality meant to build bridges across and between languages is a weird enough thing to do as it is.

Then, and not even by extension, the simple act of being a student in that classroom and allowing oneself to be put into pairs or to take part in a role-play or to put up with whatever series of tasks that day’s constructed reality calls for is a very odd sort of position to be in. We’re already all out there on a shaky limb and while I’m all for making it new in the classroom, I have a certain dislike for activities which are weird for weirdness sake, for those activites that make that branch shake more than necessary.

Too often new teachers come to a class equipped with a bundle of activities that ‘get people moving’ or ‘activate the right brain’ or ‘bring out the inner-child’ or ‘break down the walls’ without really knowing why or what rules are being broken by carrying them out. These classes lack a center and therefore ultimately lack a purpose. They lack what Jack Richards refers to as “take away value.”

To understand what ‘take away value’ is, imagine that a reporter interviews students as they come out of a classroom, asking them, “What did you learn today?” In any class, most students will have different answers based on their own history and level, but one would hope that the answer would always be something more than, “I don’t know, but I had fun.”

This is to say that one can’t break all of the rules all at once and to reiterate that weirdness for its own sake is perhaps as detrimental to learning as is a class built on the tried and true, the unimaginitively dull. Instead of scouring the reference and recipe books for new tasks and ideas, consciously break one rule per class. If you always stand in front of the classroom, sit down. If you always sit down, stand and circulate. If you begin every class with a dictation, start the next class with a story. If you already tell stories, the next time you walk into the class, come in with your story written on slips of paper to pass out one to each student for them to reconstruct and tell you. If you’ve never used music in the classroom, try it. If there’s too much silence in the room, play music in the background. If you always have students practice conversations the way they’re presented in a text, have them whisper or yell or pretend they’re strangers stuck together in an elevator.

Twist activities, have students stand up, turn exercises into games, be spontaneous, and by all means, keep a record of what you do in the form of your own reflective journal. In this way you make it new, clean the mirror, break the rules, and get at what’s fresh and what can until the moment of doing be only imagined. That’s weird enough.

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck

Chuck Sandy, Chubu University

Co-author of two series from CUP, Passages and Connect

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