by Ayşenur Nilüfer Kızılkulak
Once upon a time, there was a girl named…, I direct the question to the class, drawing some simple scenes, What can we call her? Muazzez, OK. Muazzez is going to her grandmother. She is taking cookies to her. She is walking through the forest now but there is one thing in the forest and she does not know about it. A wolf is watching her carefully….
This was the beginning of my lesson I made ,while teaching present continuous tense to my A1 class. They knew it was Red Riding Hood but by giving them the option, I let them personalize the story. With the help of this fairy tale and drawings, I was able to attract my students’ attention on a grammar topic. I have a profound interest in fairy tales and drawing simplistic objects. When I combine these two, an enjoyable lesson for both me and the students emerges. Stories have contexts, vocabulary items, reading or listening skills and finally grammar in them. They represent the language quite effectively and one would miss a lot not implementing them in an English learning class. They are like the treasures waiting to be found and waiting to be beneficent to the users. There is a website for Grimm fairy tales, which is one of my biggest passion, by National Geographic, which is my another passion, and one can simply adapt stories according to the levels. When such stories combined with the proper stages through some effort, learning and teaching English can not be daunting. As I always point out, being a good teacher takes a little sacrifice and the ones who does this sacrifice are to be remembered rather than being left in the dusty archives.
I was able to do such lessons thanks to the readings of my courses given by Yasemin Hocam. I call those readings as treasures of a sunken ship since they provide tons of useful ideas and activities. They point out many aspects of ELT and I particularly enjoy the ones on grammar issues. Grammar teaching can be implemented with enjoyable tasks, one just needs to be willing to research and learn more. It takes up longer duration to prepare the worksheets but it is surely better than just writing the rule on the board and making students come up with relevant sentences. As Noonan (2004) suggested, making students notice is one of the most effective ways in teaching. I agree with Ellis (2002) that is does not necessarily need the implicit knowledge but may assist in the acquisition of it. I also became a fan of giving minimal pairs for students to analyze. I think they present a clear and notable path to the relevant grammar point. By discovering the rule, students would feel more competent and prosperous. It is notably demanding for the teacher but when students’ enhancement is taken into consideration, it presents itself as just a challenge into improving ourselves more and more.
As for discovery teaching, again, I start drawing on the board. I stop in the halfway and ask students what it is. They speculate saying moon, ball; some even say bunny and tomato. I continue drawing and everyone agrees that it is the world. I put a stick figure on top of it. We name him Rıfkı and I tell them he wants to travel all the world. I draw a backpack and ask students what he should take. I give them two or three sample sentences and then everyone starts giving advice using should. Then I assign them roles as a group work with four students. One of them is Emre’s mother, another one is father and the other is his girlfriend. The last one is Osman who loves Rıfkı’s girlfriend. They give advice to Emre according to their roles. I remember one advice from a mother role. “You should wear thick clothes, nights in a desert are very cold.” With fun examples, they finish acting out and I hand out the “analyze” charts. There are minimal pairs and students need to find the governing rule. They discuss and find it and present it proudly. Then we do some more practice with flashcards. On flashcards, there are people in trouble and students take turns in giving advice to the relevant picture.
Another point is to make students aware that they will need English in their lives. The intrinsic motivation plays a crucial role and I have experienced it from the first hand. I was buying some groceries in LİDL* and the woman in the counter asked me ” Brauchen Sie Tüte?” I did not understand and wanted her to repeat, she said the same words again and showed me the nylon bags. Then I understood that “tüte” was the German word for nylon bags. I went back home, searched for the dictation and learned a new word via exposure. The next time I went there, she asked the same question and I triumphantly answered. “Nein, Ich brauche keine Tüte, Danke.” I was exposed to the item, had a motivation to learn it and I had a subsequent opportunity to use it. When the students actually benefit from the language, there is no doubt that they would show more zeal to learn more. They also love to learn actual life facts about the people in class during the lesson. In one of my lessons, I was able to integrate grammar with realia, speaking and eventually fun. “Onestopenglish” is one of the most beneficent websites for English teachers. I have signed up recently and I am astonished by the amount of the works to be found there. They have categorized many fields and it is easy to find any need that may occur in the English classes. I also used Jane Willis’s task based learning frame and it was again such a success. I have a picture of mine from the years when I was five. I taped it to the board and asked students the differences. I wrote some sample sentences with used to and wanted them to state more. They used the grammar item successfully. I was really happy to see that my lesson functioned properly. Then I collected some pictured from them, their driving licenses, head-shots and Facebook pictures. We talked about them enormously and it was again a fun and successful lesson.
Usage of songs are also highly effective in teaching. We listen to them everyday, we hear melodies even on a propane truck, why not use them in classes? They propose a fun way to benefit from but finding a perfectly fitting song for the content can be a constraint. This also requires the teacher to be interested in various genres. In my YouTube account, I created a playlist to add songs apt for teaching. To give a couple of instances;
– Dumb ways to die by Tangerine Kitty to revise imperative
– You will never find a love like mine by Lou Rawls to practice relative pronouns
– Revolution by Beatles to study noun clauses
– Happy by Pharrel Williams to go through first conditionals and so on.
Bernard Shaw says that if we can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, we’d best teach it to dance. If teaching skills or grammar is a burden that we can’t get rid of, then we should accept it the way it is and find fun ways to go along with it. I don’t think it is hard to make a lesson fun, it just requires some revision and preparation. When we are willing to do this for the sake of our students, we can earn the badge of being the effective plus funny teacher in the schools.
Here is the link to the Fairy Tales website for the ones interested;
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm/main.html
Onestopenglish website;
http://www.onestopenglish.com/
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