Before any of you think that this is an out-of-character blogpost that is going to tell all about my very exciting love life, I would like to first refer you to the two previous posts I had written about lessons with my wonderful Advanced class:
MLearning, Mini Whiteboards, and Emergent Stuff
and
This is Part Three.
Taking on Phil Wade’s advice about using songs to motivate my class of young students, I told them to print out the lyrics of their favourite English song to share with the rest of the class.
To set an example, I then brought in my own – Tom Waits’s I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love with You. I did not anticipate that this would turn into three days of amazing conversations, language input, and critical thinking workshops.
To spark the conversation, I had brought in the lyrics of the above song cut up into pieces (supplied kindly by my colleague, Richard Chin). In the spirit of a bit of good ol’ bottom-up processing, students had to rearrange the sentences as they heard the song, gradually revealing the surprise ending.
We listened to the song again, this time paying attention to the storyline, using the questions ‘Where is he?’, ‘Who is he singing about?’, ‘What happens in the end?’
In open class feedback, we decided that the singer was in a pub and was trying pluck up the courage to chat a girl up. This led the conversation to things that we do in pubs and the difference in pub etiquette between their countries and the UK. Phrases like ‘Whose round is it anyway?’, ‘to sip, ‘to gulp’ and ‘to have no guts to-infinitive’ and ‘cheesy chatup lines’ went up on the board.
I then got the students to close their eyes and visualize the main character as I played the song again. They were then given time to discuss with their partners and come to an agreement as to how they wanted the lead to look like. They were given poster paper to sketch out this man in the pub, and had to write a description of him and his history (how he ended up alone and lonely in that pub). Meanwhile, I was roaming around the class making myself available for any lexis that might arise or needed feeding in, e.g. stubble, bags under the eyes, creased checked shirt, dishevelled appearance, His career was going downhill, a derogatory term, She is freaked out (by him), etc., all went up on the board.
The posters went up on the walls of the classroom and the students walked around reading the descriptions pinned under the sketches and picking their favourite story.
Then when the student sat back down, they were given the task to predict what would happen if he met the girl in the song again a couple of weeks later in the same pub. They then proceeded to write out the dialogue that they thought would take place between the two main characters of the song, and then performing it in front of the class. (Some of the stories were so funny, I could not stop laughing! One group decided that their main character would collapse on the spot and die of a broken heart…)
If I had had more time, I would have got them to analyse each other’s dialogues and perhaps look at the appropriacy of what was said in the dialogues, and how they can reformulate the discourse so as to maintain face in the interaction. Students could have negotiated ways of saving face when asking a girl out and ways of rejecting someone politely. But my 3 hours were up and I reminded students to bring in lyrics of their favourite songs the next day.
(Part Four : To be continued tomorrow…)
chiasuanchong 