Learning Teaching

By playing around with the basic scenario of sitting students in front of The TV and letting them watch the programme through, we can create some excellent lessons (pp. 350-354)

Preview activities:

A language focus on lexis, function or grammar that will come up on the recording; Students predict what will happen from some given information or pictures; Students discuss a topic that leads into or is connected with the subject on the recording; Students study a worksheet that they will use when watching the recording.

Viewing activities:
The task-audio-feedback circle still works well as a basic procedure for video.
Tasks can be listening, looking or interpreting; for example Why are they so keen to get into the museum after it is closed? The tasks can focus specifically on function, grammar, lexis or pronunciation, for example Which of the following verbs does he use? The answers will involve active interpretation of the visual as well as the audio messages. Focusing on gestures, facial expressions, body language is especially useful when studying functional language.

Follow-up activities:
There are many activities that you can do after viewing; here are just a few examples:
Discussion, interpretation, personalisation (e.g. What would you have done?); Study of new language; Role-play the scene; Inspiration for other work: What did the newspaper say the next day? Design the front page; Write a letter from one character to another; Plan what they should do next.

Other ideas: Those are the basics. Now if youre feeling keen, heres a bag of ideas to liven up the lessons:
Dont let the students switch off. Cover off the screen and ask questions: Listen to the words/music. What is in the picture? In pairs, the above idea becomes an instant communicative activity. It could lead to drawing and comparison of pictures. Switch off the sound: What are they saying? Advertisements work beautifully: in pairs imagine and write the script. And then the two students lip-synch it. (Hilarious try it!)

Ideas for using songs in class

Reading or listening comprehension: Use the song text as a normal reading or listening text with the bonus of hearing it sung afterwards (use the lesson ideas in Chapter 8, Section 1&2). Listen and discuss: Get students to listen to the song once or twice, or to a shorter section. Discuss what happened, reactions, interpretations, predictions, etc. Printed lyrics can be given out if you wish. Gapped text: Give students the lyrics with certain words blanked out. They have to listen carefully and fill in the missing words. This is, perhaps, the classic way of using song in class! Its so common that is it a bit of an ELT clich. Vary the task usefully by, for example, using the gaps as a pre-listening exercise, with students predicting what the missing words are. Song jumble: Cut the lyrics up into separate lines, In small groups, students try to work out the original order. When ready, they listen and compare their guess with the actual song. Sing along: The aim is to learn the tune and get the rhythm well enough to sing along with the original recording. This can be quite challenging and requires some careful preparation work on practising stress and rhythm. And if you have access to a video machine with a karaoke recording, the possibilies are limitless.

(pp. 338-339)
Compose: Heres the tune, now you write the lyrics. (Again, an activity that is quite challenging on stress and rhythm.) Matching pictures: Here are twenty pictures connected with the song. Listen and put them in the order in which you hear them in the song. Action movements: Listen to one line at a time. For each line, the students invent a mimed action which they teach each other and then all perform. Dictation: Dictate the chorus or the whole song. Compare with the recording. Picture dictation: Decide on a representative picture of something that happens in the song. Dictate the information about this picture, a line at a time, to students who draw their interpretation. By the time you have finished, a lot of essential lexis and phrases from the song will have been circulating, and the song should be not too difficult to follow.

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