Why are you so petrified of silence?

Why is it as language teachers we sometimes feel grossly uncomfortable when the class is sitting in silence. We sometimes think, these guys are learning a language why on Earth aren't they speaking it, ALL THE TIME?

Last year I had the good fortune of working with some great teachers and here I picked up a number of great activities. One of which was centred almost entirely around the notion of a silent classroom. I used this wonderful warmer and have since adapted it for my teenage PET class and will do so with my pre-advanced class later in the term.

So the big question. How can we make students speak without making a sound?

It's pretty simple really, they write to each other. The first time I did this in class, I did it with every single level I had.

I made sure they entered the class in absolute silence. There was a slide on the board (which you can find here) which told them they weren't to speak to each other but they could communicate through scraps of paper and a pencil.
The slide also contained a couple of starter questions to help them on their way.
For the kiddies it was stuff like: "What did you do at school today?"
For the adults something similar but a little more complex like: What did you get up to at work today?


It worked really well.

For that very reason I decided to do it again, this time with my PET students. I told them to make sure they brought their mobile phones to class.

When they entered the room in silence they could see the activity outline up on the board . I sat them in a circle facing away from each other and gave each of them a piece of paper to write their number on.

I then gave the numbers out to different students.  I then let them chat to each other, freely. In English, in silence. I put a few ideas up on the board to help them out. I gestured questioningly towards my students to see if anyone wanted to make a suggestion at a conversation starter. If so they had the chance to write it up on the board (without using words of course)

The next step was to see if they could deal with multitasking.  I ushered them to change numbers and add the new person to their group. There were then three people in each group and everyone was speaking to in two groups each.

At first this caused a bit of an issue, but soon enough their amazing teenage brains adapted to it and their multiwhatsapping brain came to the fore. After a good ten minutes I stopped everyone and asked them to read aloud what had come up in their conversations.

Some of it was surprisingly deep, two of the students had got themselves into a discussion as to how the Spanish education system was in desperate need for reform. Other students were talking about how good Cristiano's goal was the night before. Best of all though they had been writing in English and correcting each other's work and having fun at the same time. Never in my life have I seen a group of 12 teenagers so happy to sit in silence and speak English to each other. It was utterly glorious.

Give it a go. If your students don't have phones, just give them some scraps of paper and get them to pass them around.

'til the next time

post-it fun for all ages.

Good morning one and all.
I'm sure you've all used and enjoyed one of 3m's finest inventions; the gloriously underrated post-it note. Be it as a reminder to pick up milk or an effort to get your son to remember to take his PE kit out of he washing.
How many of you have used it in a classroom situation? Quite a few I imagine.
This week I've been teaching clothes to my youngest students, body parts to some teens and idioms of the body to my adults. Whilst flicking through ideas online I saw people drawing outlines of their students on the white board and labelling them. I thought this might be a bit of fun. Rather than drawing around my students though I simply plunked them on a chair at the front of the class, gave each team a different colours set of post-its and got them to set about sticking them to the model at the front of class. After I saw that the kids enjoyed it so much I cranked it up a notch and tried it with my teens. A roaring success again. Finally it came to my adult class and as we all know adults are the biggest kids of all. They all got mega involved and were tearing around the classroom trying to stick their idioms to their classmate. Thankfully none of them had found a pain in the ass or being a right tit. That could've caused a complaint or two.

give it a shot. I guarantee every so gel student will have a blast.

Till next time

Where exactly was the cat sitting?

I must admit my most commonly used sentence over the past seven years is probably; "The Cat Sat on the Mat." I use it when helping students develop their imagination and write a story that is less one dimensional and I use it to show what a difference stress can make to a sentence.

Today I'm going to talk about the latter.

I write this simple sentence out on the board. Next I underline one of the words in the sentence and get the students to stress said word. Almost immediately stdents pick up on the difference the stres can make. 

For example. The CAT sat on the mat. The stress on the word cat shows us it was a feline creature and not any other beast. 

The cat SAT on the mat. With the stress lying on the verb it shows us that the cat wasn't dancing, nor was she singing and was in fact just having a nice little sit. 

I continue with the other words in the sentence then I get students to write there own sentences and choose a word to stress. Other students have to decipher the meaning and share with the class what the stressed word indicates. 

And that my friends is about that. 

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