Sensei, I don't have a story to tell...speaker's block & interrogative teaching

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Casually mentioned I was trying to teach "The Narrative Tenses" last Thursday evening, via Swarm,  and then had a bit of a 'mare doing so. Friend, inspiration and twitter vivant +Michael @mickstout promptly asked me about resources to do so. Oh hell, called out!

Back story = used to employ a DELTA-qualified teacher whose every second sentence was about teaching the narra'ive tenses (Geordie), how good he was at it (them?) and that we should all d'off caps & bend a knee to the genius before us. But seeing as we have never had that many students in the rarefied reaches of advanced storytelling...you do need a bit for YLE Movers but you can generally get by without having to display any grasp of the past perfect simple/past perfect continuous/etc...in fact if you even tried, I think the speaking examiner would shake your hand!

This particular class week was missing the storytellers, instead only the 'answers on the next page already filled in' students had turned up. Any story telling they do attempt is in L1. My 'pardon?' usually gets a 'No, no' + dismissive hand wave. Been there? Can never introduce something stealthily or creatively because my thunder eternally stolen "that's on p45"...

Nuts & bolts of had + past participle etc all diligently underlined. But grasping the actual concept? Timelines, arrows, arm waving...Jim sensei needed to hit reset and start again.

So not only scratching my head all week about how to rescue the befuddled students from last week's grammatical cul de sac, needed to actually impress a colleague as well - or at least try to reply.

My students share the same language, and are not natural story tellers nor inquisitors. Imagine the opposite of Irish or Italian, maybe? Any contribution usually delivered as a set piece, accepted universally & scarcely a comment or question there be afterwards.

As usual, simplest is best, and decided after rummaging my collection of supplementary materials that nothing was really going to present itself. I needed to detox the class from the dreaded G terminology & translation mindset, and in some parlance flip the classroom. Keep books in bags, concentrate on imaginative brain, banish pencils, avoid turn-taking & prevent dominant personalities railroading others. Time too for me to be quite a lot more intrusive than I usually am (inviting fluency and letting 'errors' go).

A board game with out story telling limits

Solution. A narrative.

Dived into the back of our games cupboard & found Never Ending Stories (sorry, that awful song will start in your brains too!) - for age 6+ it says on the box. Ideal. Very simple. Totally random. Players plop cards onto a board in turn, and develop a story as suggested by the images on them (characters, objects, locations) in the order they have been played. Past tenses great. But the 'forgotten' past?

Start at the end of the story and add cards to try to get to the beginning, back-filling detail as you go. This is where the teacher needs to be very involved asking for connections, suggesting links, checking/requiring details eg Were they married before? What happened? How did they meet? and letting the whole group contribute - player whose turn it is selects 'best help' and adds the bits up. Importantly, before the next turn, teacher as narrator recaps - helping everyone keep up with developments and providing a model. Embellishment with current events etc as they occur to you are great, as students then get to see the rationale for the tenses you are using, without focusing on the tenses you are using per se - at least if the story is interesting! I challenge anyone to recount the same (and ever expanding) story the same way twice without leaving bits out; students need to see this is the beauty of storytelling not the mental linear blockage some see it as. Grammatical flexibility gets you over the hurdle and you can 'keep going' without having to go all the way back to the beginning of the timeline and get things 'in order' Students love pointing out the teacher's mistakes....ask them if you left something out...and 'rescue' yourself with a post script.

How our story unfolded - narrative to come

So, for me, interrupt like mad at the creative brainstorming phase, establish chronology and link bits together grammatically - then let that part of the story be told however it comes out. Once a turn is 'done'; gently re-tell it to check you got it right (include 'corrections' here?), and help the other students with a second listening before connecting all the other previous parts.

So there has to be a digital way to do this, for classes with wifi & tech savvy learners.Voicethread would be one way to collate a final version, I think, and could be done outside of class/before the next class. Sock Puppet, minus the time limit, another idea. Fotobabble only gives you 90 seconds - but ideal per pic?

In class, with confident students I think a Pecha Kucha type approach might work. You could also trawl ELTpics or any theme in Flickr - or go random and use flickr as a screensaver (hands free, adjust time images shown to suit skills).

Another randomiser = give a student a slip of paper with a ridiculous scenario on it and have them bluster their way out of it - kind of Liar's Game. (eg "You were seen climbing out of a nightclub window at 8am this morning wearing a superman suit")  Of course allow questions from the floor. Big class, have 2 or 3 students sit at the front and have them tell a story. Only one is true, room votes at end of story & Q/A on which one. NB They can all be false, but the winner = most convincing liar?!

What's wrong, Kaede?

Created with Sock Puppets for iPhone and iPad, to add a lot of Oomph to student exchange. Sudden need to rehearse, respond quickly, remember lines and help each other out!

The Secret Room - Green Story Tree #3

A hot summer's day, weary students at the end of a long week..."nothing new" to learn (cleverly arranged Jim-sensei?)

listen to ‘The Secret Room - Green Story Tree #3’ on Audioboo

Love Sock Puppet - the 30 second limit really makes us hurry up :)

Talk to the cat? Learn with a sock?

A lot of people think that childrens' apps in iPhones etc are 'just games'. Well, they can be, if you don't take advantage of them.

A while ago I used a voice recorder in class for a couple of different tasks, and I was pleasantly surprised that the students were very keen to hear themselves. Not only that, they were also critical listeners (much more than me). They got competitive about the time taken, and passing the recorder around in a question/answer drill accellerated the activity nicely too - more fluent and natural.

There is quite a debate about the pros and cons of reading out loud. Yes, it is not a usual feature of English usage, but there's little other way we teachers can monitor what the children are able to read/pronounce. NB Not 'understand'! I have always asked my students to read their homework after we have checked/marked/corrected if necessary. I don't like the whole class speaking at the same time - how can I hear everyone (and for the same time I don't speak when they do)? Instead, I will repeat the sentence after the students, to reinforce their pronunciation. If I model first, they are not reading, are they?

Reading a lot out loud is counter productive. I do not want a performance - so we do not do this with our graded readers. Readers are for fun & internalised consumption (instead, I really like to milk the workbooks/quizzes etc which we use for follow up, vocabulary development, finding grammar patterns, spotting rhyming words etc)

A big bugbear here in Japan is conformity. In my classroom, this manifests as everyone trying to speak at the same speed, pitch, cadence. The dreaded katakana-isation. One of my classes does this so much I pulled all my hair out last week - extending the last syllable in their responses in a falling sound which is horribly unnatural. Still trying to iron that particular issue out, but my one hour a week versus the rest of their exposure to badly done English = feeling a bit like King Offa with his dyke.

Talking Tom, and a number of other "Talking...." apps are very useful indeed. Basically a voice recorder with attitude - an animated cat does a few moves and doen't like being poked or punched (who does?) - so children are allowed to do that after they have done the job. And the job is? Read your sentence through, from start to finish, without pausing. If you pause, the cat will repeat what you just said. Daft? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Judgemental? No. Does it work with longer utterances? Not really. All I want with my young students for now is for them to get to the end of their sentences once they start. The cat repeating their production is funny, but not useful for pronunciation (the voice is distorted). It IS useful for intonation though - usually very difficult to provide feedback on. It picks up all chatter and giggles, which is nice as it breaks the ice...it also means everyone has to take a breath before they start. Good. Students realise they need to preview the entire line that they are going to say, and you can see them nodding their heads as they practice internally with the beat they want to use. So we are getting word level stress and sentence level? How cool is that?

(Our pre-school age learners enjoy Talking Tom et al as well - it encourages them to speak up and try out silly phrases because the cat is just as silly as they are. They love to hear their own made up words repeated perfectly! Very shy children will talk to the cat much more quickly than to me or another adult!)

I wanted to share a Sock Puppet video too - but to do that I have to pay Y85 per scene. What a rip off - lots of fun and very creative, but could get expensive as we have a lot of talented actors at Luna. I like this tool because it has to be collaborative, planned, and quickly executed (30 second limit on the free version). Hope to share somehow, soon.

What's the best use of a voice recorder you have found?