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?"

Peter Viney

I started EFL teaching as a summer job when I was at university and during the years since, the definition of ‘strange’ has shifted. I recall doing jazz chants circa 1979, when that was considered truly weird.

Or in the same year there was a group of teacher trainees (from a country which shall be nameless) who looked perplexed throughout the course intro lesson. At the end, one brave individual ventured to speak, “These ideas are very new for us.” I had hoped that some ideas would be new, but wondered which one they considered most radical. “Ah, the very new idea is that we must speak in English in the classroom.” I backtracked, “I wasn’t saying that you had to conduct the entire lesson 100% in English.” “No, the strange idea is that we must speak English AT ALL in the lesson.” So one person’s normal is another’s weird!

“I became interested in Primary school teaching aids,
which I’m convinced can be used with adults”

Here are some of the things I remember.

Two-teacher role plays
We used to prepare two classes for an elaborate paired role play with realia. We’d take a whole lesson with two different teachers working separately with the classes, then we’d re-divide the classes, and put one person from each class in a pair. The introduction lesson had thoroughly prepared them with contrasting information full of little surprises. We used to do this with classes of sixteen, and it would all be done in a double lesson so there was no time for comparing notes in between. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

When I started teaching full-time in 1971, I worked with Colin Granger and we always did supplementary drama and improvisation classes with two teachers to the class, which I continued with my wife and co-author, Karen. It’s a luxury way of teaching but highly effective.

We had various ways of bringing two teachers into a lesson, and sometimes we’d use a teacher on a free lesson as a ‘prop’ or subject for a ten minute activity. Then you’d have to reciprocate for one of their lessons. It doesn’t work if everyone is adding up the paid minutes of classroom time with a calculator, but at that time we were in a great teaching situation, and we weren’t.

Models
When I did a lot of teacher training on the use of visual aids, I became interested in Primary school teaching aids, which I’m convinced can be used with adults (but NOT with teenagers). For example, primary catalogues sell cardboard clocks with moveable hands in sets of ten, so they can be used for pair work. Among other things (a doll’s house was one of them) we had a model road layout with several diecast toy vehicles and several figures (from Britain’s Farm series) and a lot of metal road signs.

I always enjoyed watching middle-aged business people staging various traffic scenarios and arguing at length about who was at fault. The solid feel of the props in their hands seemed to fire the imagination, and we had enough toy cars in the end that they could choose one they identified with. Britain’s model ‘milkmaid’ served as one of the pedestrians in any number of scenarios. The basic idea eventually got turned into a cartoon in Streamline, and I think that actual story was one student scenario out of many.

OHP puppet shows
The OHP (Overhead Projector) spends its life covered in dust or stuck at the back of cupboards in so many schools. You can cut out and make transparent coloured ‘puppet’ figures and act out and get students to act out stories with them. You put each figure on a transparent ‘stalk’ so you can manipulate them from outside the illuminated area.

Mime stories
Every teacher should have a lesson up their sleeve for emergencies. This should be something you can do at any level. I was fond of mime stories where a story was conducted entirely in mime and students had to guess what was happening.

I guess that three of these are broadly presentational, and none of them are particularly weird!

Panelists: Marc | Peter | Chuck

Peter Viney, Freelance ELT Author

Co-author of New American Streamline & Grapevine. Peter's Web site

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