A Rocking Good Time With ELF and Contrastive Stress (oh yeah!)

This is a picture of the ocean. It is here because I use the word beach in this post.

Recently two of my favorite bloggers, Michael Griffin over at Rants, Reviews and Reflections and Russell Mayne at Evidence Based EFL had a brawl dialogue about just who our students will end up communicating with.  The discussion is far ranging, but the take away for me is that linguists like David Crystal (2003), Yamuna Kachru (2008), and Jennifer Jenkins (2009) start off with the fact that the number of L2 English speakers outnumbers L1 English speakers by at least 100,000,000, that these L2 English speakers are using English both intranationally and internationally for a huge range of purposes, and that English is perhaps used less often for communication with a native speaker than it is for communication between L2 English speakers.  Russell wonders if these numbers actually add up, and even if they do, does it necessarily lead to any far reaching implications for how we teach English?  Michael thinks that the shifting demographics nudge learners and teachers towards developing more realistic goals and allows students to focus on how to become competent users of global English as opposed to trying to sound like a native speaker.  

On the whole, I think their discussion is a pretty good snapshot of the English as a lingua franca debate and points towards some of the problems with what it means to focus on comprehensibility and intelligibility when it comes to teaching English.  It also gave me a chance to think about how I teach pronunciation in my own classes.  With that in mind, I wanted to share one of my regular lessons and then explore if an English as lingua franca framework helps me gain any particular insights into how I can gauge the lesson’s value for my students:

Contrastive stress, lesson rationale:

In spoken Japanese, the way to emphasize a particular piece of information is to simply slide it to the front of a sentence.  For example, if I were to take the base sentence, “I heard you went to the Rolling Stones concert in Chicago with Jesse last night,” and wanted to spotlight who you went with, I would say, “With Jesse, you went to the Rolling Stones concert in Chicago last night.”  This means that students are often times unaware of the difference in meaning between the sentence, “I heard you went to the Rolling Stones concert with Jesse last night in Chicago,” and “I heard you went to the Rolling stones concert in Chicago last night with Jesse.”  Not surprisingly, student’s response to this sentence, regardless of where the stress is laid, is often the same.  Usually something along the lines of either, “Yes, I did,” or “No, I didn’t.”  Ignoring stress in this case can (and sometimes does) lead to a breakdown in communication.  So to highlight the importance of laying stress in the appropriate place when speaking, and listening for stress during a conversation, I run the following lesson.

The lesson:

I write up the sentence:

I heard you went to the _______ concert 

with ________ on Thursday in ________. 

I then solicit the name of a band, a friend’s name, and a good location to see a live event from the students.  After I fill in the blanks, I get the students to say the sentence to each other, listen in, and  student and write some of the responses up on the board.  What I end up with is something like the following:

Pattern A:     

I heard you went to the 1 Direction concert 

with Rika in Umeda on Thursday.

                     

+ Yes, I did.

– No, I was at home.

I then say the sentence and add stress to ‘1 Direction.’  I ask the students to copy the sentence in their notebook, writing the stressed word or words in red.  On the board, I circle ‘1 Direction’ in red and label it ‘Pattern B’.  I then have one student say the sentence to another student and see how they respond.  Usually they respond in the same way they did in the above example.  If that is the case I write up the following on the board:

Pattern B:

I heard you went to the 1 Direction concert 

with Rika in Umeda on Thursday.

                     +_____________ 1 Direction.

                      -______________ AKB 48.

I then have students work in pairs to fill in the blanks and usually students come up with something like:

Pattern B       

                     +Yes, I love 1 Direction.

                      -No, we went to AKB 48.

I repeat the same steps as above, only this time I add nuclear stress to ‘Rika’ and after checking which word the students identified as having been stressed, I circle ‘Rika’ in red and label it Pattern C.  I taught this lesson to a group of junior high school students last week and they caught on by this point and needed no additional prompts to come up with possible replies.  Working in pairs, the class as a whole generated a fair number of responses:

Pattern C     
                      + Yes, Rika is my best friend. 
                      + Yes, Rika loves 1 Direction.

                      – No, I went with my brother. 
                      – No, Rika was sick yesterday.

Now students have three patterns and are ready for a short communicative activity.  I have them form groups of three and pick a student to say the sentence in one of the three patterns. The other two students listen and then race to reply.  The first student to say the proper response is the winner and they get to say the sentence with stress in the next round.  Once students get bored of the game, usually just a few minutes, I move on to identifying the remaining nuclear stress patterns possible in the sentence and have students work in pairs and generate responses.  Here are the responses students generated from last weeks lesson:

Pattern D, nuclear stress on ‘Thursday’

                               +Yes, Friday was a holiday.          

                               +Yes, I forgot about Friday’s test.

                                -No, we went on Saturday
                                -No, we went last week.

Pattern E, nuclear stress on ‘Umeda’

                               +Yes, we went to Umeda Hall.

                               +Yes, it was a special event at the station.
                               -No, we went to Namba Concert Hall.

Once students have identified all (or at least most of) the possible stress patterns and generated responses, they play the game one more time.  All in all, this part of the lesson can take anywhere from between 20 minutes to a full 50 minute period.  During last week’s lesson it took about 30 minutes.  The students were laughing and having a pretty good time thinking up responses as well as playing the game.  I even noticed them throwing in gestures such as holding up their pinky finger when stressing ‘Rika,’ which implied that Rika was the girlfriend of the person they were talking to.

Recycling and fluency:

Once students have been introduced to contrastive stress, it makes for a great warm up activity.  Students come into class and there is a sentence on the board, something like, “I heard that your favorite thing to do in Osaka is eat Okonomiyaki with your friends.”  With very little prompting students can quickly identify words or phrases which can be stressed as well as come up with appropriate positive and negative responses to each.  This can lead into a number of activities such as providing students with a role play card as a prompt.  Using the information on the card, students have to say they sentence laying stress on the appropriate word (for examples, the role play card might say, “You hate Okonomiyaki.”). 

So what does this have to do with ELF?????

Jennifer Jenkins (2000) identifies nuclear stress as one of the features to include in a lingua franca pronunciation core for ELT.  So if deferring to the advice of experts is a good enough reason to teach some aspect of English, I guess I have my justification for helping students develop their ability to use and identify contrastive stress.  But to tell the truth, I’m not entirely sure that Jennifer has such a solid case.  In addition to Japanese speakers of English, Nigerians, Zambians, and Indians all spotlight information in sentences in English without relying on contrastive stress (Kachru, 2008).  Spending class time on contrastive stress for speakers of English from these countries who are not going to be speaking with L1 English speakers might not actually be all that worthwhile.  And perhaps even more importantly, I’m pretty sure that if most L1 English speakers were talking to someone from India and that person said, “Kevin only ate the cake,” it would be pretty easy to understand that emphasis is being added to ‘Kevin.’  In fact, research around Communication Accomodation Theory (Giles, et al., as cited in Kachru) seems to show that people naturally accommodate to their partner over the course of an interaction and that as opposed to teaching any particular feature of a particular English, exposure to a wide variety of Englishes is the best way to improve an interlocutors ability to process what they hear (Krachu, 2000, p.80).

All that being said, the students in my school are expected to go study abroad in Australia and to participate in an extended home stay during their high school careers.  Without some practice around contrastive stress, I can easily imagine an interaction like the following:

           Home Stay Father: So you’re going to the beach on Friday?

           Students: No, I’m not.

Then, when the student starts packing up to go to the beach on Saturday morning, the father gets all flustered and wonders what’s going on and says something like, “Why didn’t you tell me you were going to today???!!”  In addition, once students practice using contrastive stress, I notice a decrease in those contorted sentences where emphasized information is twisted to the front and banged into the shape of a subject.  So for my particular students, I can see some real value in teaching this particular aspect of pronunciation. 

Still, I don’t want to replace the idea of a lingua franca core with a practical-for-my-students litmus test either.  If I limited what I teach to features of pronunciation which are “practical,” that just puts me in another trap, one in which I have to somehow know more about how my learners will be using language in their future than they probably know themselves. 

So where does that leave me as a teacher?  Does ELF provide me with any useful ideas of what and how to teach in my classroom, especially when it comes to issues of pronunciation?  I wish I had an answer.  In fact, I feel a bit more confused now than when I started writing this post. 

Maybe it would be best to end with a bit of feedback I got when I asked the students what they had learned during a series of contrastive stress lessons I ran last year.  One second year student wrote, “I always forget to say ‘my’ or ‘your’ when I speak in English.  But I noticed how important it is and practiced it a lot in this lesson.  So now I think I will remember it.”  When we teach, we almost always have an idea of what the students should learn.  But that idea, the teacher’s hope, more often than not, finds no purchase on the subtle shifts in our students’ attention.  What our students notice and learn is not up to us. 

Pronunciation provides our students with a physical framework through which to explore and play with language.  And it often does so in a way that keeps learners engaged for longer and with a few more giggles than say a grammar based lesson.  Perhaps when it comes to pronunciation, the point shouldn’t be about the number of people who speak any particular type of English, or the practicality of what they are practicing, or striving to identify a lingua franca core.  When we teach pronunciation, maybe we should be measuring the amount of freedom students can find in the physicality of speaking, and how that freedom translates into the very personal, and very real gains that are at the heart of learning.

References:

Crystal, D. (2003) English as a Global Language. Cambridge: 
     Cambridge University Press.

Jenkins, J. (2000). The Phonology of English as an International      
     Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jenkins, J. (2009). World Englishes, A resource book for 
     students. New York: Routledge

Kachru, Y. & Smith, L.E. (2008). Cultures, Contexts and 
     World Englishes. New York: Routledge.

If you’re look for a much more thoughtful and in depth discussion of what EFL is all about and how EFL ideas can be used to help shape a pronunciation class, please check out this series of posts by Alex Grevett over at The Breathy Vowel blog.

Update before posting (is that even possible?): Alex Walsh over at Alien Teachers has a new post up on EFL as it relates to native expressions.  I highly recommend it.

(And a big apology to Dr. Yamuna Kachru for misspelling your name.  Culture, Contexts and World Englishes is one of the mst thoughtful explorations of English I’ve ever read.  And it certainly deserves far better than sloppy name mangling.) 

But Is It Art, a (reflected upon) lesson plan

what would you title this?

The school year is now officially over.  As if on cue, it suddenly warmed up here in Osaka.  The Japanese plum blossoms are blooming, whispers of pale yellow, baby blue and pink.  There are a few students still in the building as I write this.  They’re taking make-up tests.  I wonder how they can concentrate when, even as a teacher, I think there are so many more important things to do than sweat over a test.  I’m probably more sympathetic than usual.  I’m going to be spending my spring sweating over the assessment module of the dip TESOL.  That means plowing through three books on how to make and score tests.  I’m not sure that learning how to make a proper test is any more appealing during the start of summer than taking a test.  Still, things are quiet now, I’ve got a free minute and a notebook full of lesson notes to reflect on, so…

A MegaSuper Kind of Cool Writing Lesson 

Adam over at Teach Them English, has a blog post titled “The Greatest Creative Writing Activity Ever.” The lesson plan is clean, imaginative, and great for almost any level student.  I read it and was reminded of “Is It Art?” one of my own favorite writing focused lessons.  Before I started teaching in a high school and kind of got chained to a syllabus and administrative expectations (oh, that recurring anxiety dream about low TOEIC scores), I used to run this lesson at least twice a year.  That was about five years ago and the mega-super-coolness of the lesson as I remembered only grew with time.  So I blew the dust off “Is It Art” and headed up to room 403 to use it as my end of the year lesson.

Prep Time: about 15 minutes if you have a color printer or LED projector

Total Lesson Time: 90 minutes

Student Level: from beginner to advance

Activity 1: Give That Picture a Title

Materials Needed: Copies of 4 abstract art paintings (you can get some good ones off the internet, the abstract art entry over at Wikipedia is especially useful).  Just print up the paintings (or download JPEGs for your projector) and slap them up on the classroom board at the beginning of the lesson.  Label each of the paintings with a number.

Process:

1. Break the students into pairs.  You can also do the activity in small groups if there’s a large number of students.  Have the groups think of a title for each of the four pictures.  I don’t usually require the students to use any specific language at this point in the lesson, but if you are looking for a grammar hook to hang the lesson on, this is a great opportunity to have lower level students work with noun phrases.  That’s pretty much how it played out in my class this time.  Some of the titles my students came up with included “Sunshine,” “The Purple Fireworks,” and “Flowers Floating on Water.”  At higher levels, you could direct students to come up with titles that used relative clauses or a tricky verb tense.
2. Once all of the students have finished coming up with titles, direct them to write three sentences about what is happening in the picture.  The teacher will need to be roaming around the room at this point and provide feedback so students can have polished sentences for step 3.
3. Each group writes up their title and sentences on the board.
4. Once all of the titles and sentences are on the board, make sure to give the students time to read what’s up there.
5. Have students write the number of the painting they think is being described next to each group’s title and sentences.

If you’re wondering what might get produced, here’s a sample of what my students came up with:

Unexpected Disaster Issues: Some of my students were wonderfully non-abstract.  One group wrote, “There are blue dots at the top of the picture,” about a painting that had a lot of blue dots floating at the top of the canvas.  I ended up having to take some time out of the lesson to have a short discussion about abstract art in general.  After the lesson was over I remembered that when I used to teach this lesson, I often introduced the phrases, “It reminds me of…” “It makes me feel…” and “It looks like…”.  I would definitely recommend introducing these types of sentence heads to help students frame how they will write and talk about the paintings during this activity.  It might also be worthwhile to see if your students actually know something about modern art before starting the lesson.  It turned out that out of 12 students, only 3 had ever been to a modern art exhibit.  Finally, one of the abstract pictures I picked looked a lot like flowers.  Needless to say everyone titled that one something having to do with flowers.  So definitely go with as abstract an image as possible.

Activity 2: 5 Minute Masterpiece

Materials Needed: Crayons, markers, and paper

Process:

1. Tell students they have 5 minutes to create their own abstract masterpiece.  Start the stopwatch.  Watch them draw.
2. When five minutes are up, tell the students to think of a title and three to five sentences about what is happening in the picture.  They don’t have to write it down and they definitely shouldn’t share the information with anyone in class.
3. Finally, collect the drawings, throw them up on the board, and number each picture.

Unexpected Catastrophe Issues: Maybe this one shouldn’t have been so unexpected considering what happened in activty 1.  Two of my students just kind of refused to draw abstract pictures.  One of them drew a beautiful picture of a duck.  Another drew one of flowers.  The duck artist got a little embarrassed about the non-abstract nature of his picture after seeing what the other students had done and demanded an extra five minutes to draw a new picture.  I tried to assure him that his picture was just fine (it was a very excellent picture of a duck).  But he was pretty insistent (artists!).  Anyway, I gave in.  Another student started complaining about the fact that his picture didn’t mean anything, so he couldn’t think of a title for it, let alone think of three sentences to describe what was happening in a picture of nothing.  He probably had a valid point.  Next time I run this lesson I’m going to be a bit more explicit with my instructions and give students more warning about what’s coming next.

Activity 3: Art Critic

Materials Needed: student notebooks and pencils

Process:

1. Each student picks their favorite picture, gives it a title and writes 5 sentences about it in their notebooks.  For higher level students you can have them shoot for a cohesive paragraph.  It’s basically, the same kind of thing as activity 1, just with a little more meat.  I find this activity provides lots of opportunities to work with students’ emergent language.  I was lucky enough to be running this class as a team teaching situation, so there were two of us helping students find the language they needed to say what they wanted to say.  I think it could also work well as a paired activity, partnering lower and higher level students.
2. Students introduce the picture they wrote about to three other students.  After a student introduces a picture, their partner has to write down the number of the picture that they thought was being introduced as well as the reasons why they thought so.
3. The big reveal: each student announces which picture they had written about.
4. The big reveal 2: each student introduces their own picture, letting the class know the title they had given it and what they had imagined was happening in the picture when they drew it.

Fully Expected Issues: Students would listen to their partner and then, instead of writing in their own words why they thought picture x was being described, they would just snag their partner’s notebook and copy a sentence down into their notebooks.  If I had to do it again, I would probably institute a “no looking at your partner’s notebook” rule during this part of the lesson.  Or even better, I would give the students a bit of time to remember what they wrote in their notebooks, collect them, and make them work from memory.

Partially Expected Issue: Mr. Picture-of-Nothing had nothing to say about his picture.  But no one seemed too concerned about it.

Final Thoughts:

While I still like this lesson I realize that, at least with the students I work with now, it’s not quite the prep-free lesson that it once was.  On the other hand, running and reflecting on this lesson has shown me that maybe it was never quite as prep-free as I had imagined.  There are all kinds of avenues for expanding this material that I had never really thought about before.  It would be pretty easy to turn it into a genre focused lesson, where you passed out reviews of art exhibits, had students identify salient aspects of the genre and then used that as the base for students to produce a more academic text.  It could also be one of a series of lessons focused on art in general and personal esthetic values.  For examples, you could include the last auction price for each of the paintings in the first activity and have a pretty cool discussion about how society determines the price of a work of art and how that sometimes is at odds with our own personal values.  Anyway, “Is It Art?” might not be my absolute favorite writing lesson anymore, but if I were a critic, I would still give it 3 out of five stars.  Not quite a Chagall but maybe a little better than a Rockwell.  But to each his or her own tastes.

(no random squiggles were injured in the planning or execution of this lesson)

Bonus Suggestion: Mr. Chris Wilson tweeted about a lesson he ran in class which required students to draw pictures and ended with a role play at an art gallery/museum.  This seems like a nice way to frame the last activity in this lesson.  I’ve always wanted to include a gallery walk in one of my classes and this lesson seems like a perfect opportunity.  Thanks for the idea Chris.

DNT as in Do No Talking (Can ya dig it?)

This post brought to you by Kevin Giddens and the DNT Movement

This year I was lucky enough to snag all of the first year communicative English classes at my high school (or maybe the other teachers just avoided them).  But I always run into the same problem with my beginning classes.  How can I present basically the same grammar patterns and very similar vocabulary in new and novel ways week after week?  I’ve done a series of Dogme lessons over the past two months and left the topic of discussion up to the students.  This has gone a long way to providing a sense of “newness” which I think is important for any language class.  

But I also think there’s something wrong with continually relying on new language to make a class work.  How do we move to fluency practice if we don’t find interesting ways to recycle the content which was used in previous classes?  One of my friends likes to use some kind of strange pointer when teaching a class which is full on review.  He will carry an apple throughout the class, point to students with the apple, tap the white-board with the apple, and sometimes even toss the apple back and forth with students while engaging them in conversation.  Just the apple in the classroom distracts learners enough so they don’t have that “same old same old” feeling. (If you have the time, I hope you might leave some of your making-review-class-fresh-again tips in the comment section or tweet them out at #freshreview.)

After the Dogme lessons, I wanted to do some serious consolidation work, so the other day I walked into my class, passed out pieces of blank paper to the students, and wrote the word, “Hello,” on the board.  I waited.  A boy in the second row up-talked with a, “Hello?”  I nodded and underlined the word hello.  Everyone, in unison, said, “Hello,” and we were off.

I wrote:

① How are you?

Then I held up one finger and pointed to Mari-Chan.  She actually cocked her head and said, “Two?”  Maybe she thought we were going to do some counting exercises.  But the boy next to her helped out by whispering, “I’m fine.”  So Mary said, “I’m fine.” Which was fine, but not as fine as if she had said how she really felt.  Which is what I got from the long string of “sleepy” and “tired” responses that followed.  Once everyone seemed in the groove, I pivoted and wrote:

② What’s your favorite movie?

I held up two fingers and pointed to Kusu-Kun, who immediately shot back, “Howl’s Moving Castle.”  Which I guess kind of set the tone for the question because after that almost every student answered with a Ghibli flick.

③ Why do you like it?

This time I pointed to Kusu-Kun again and held up two fingers.  He said, “Howl’s Moving Castle” again and seemed annoyed that I was asking him the same question twice in a row. Then I held up three fingers.  He paused.  Started to say something.  And then shook his head.  So I pointed to Rika-Chan first with two fingers (“Spirited Away”) and then three fingers (“It’s very interesting.”)

We finished running through:

④ What’s your best subject?

⑤ Where do you spend your free time?

⑥ Tell me about your best friend.

before one of the more self-assertive students finally shouted out, “Sensei!  Why aren’t you talking?”

I picked up my white-board marker and turned to face the board.  I started to write, “I haven’t talked yet during class…” when I noticed something I rarely hear in this class.  Nothing.  Silence.  My back was turned to the class.  I was obviously going to be writing for a while, but the students hadn’t started chatting with each other in Japanese.  There was only the deep hum of the industrial heaters warming up the room. And in total silence, I finished writing up the instructions, “Why do you think I am not talking today?  Please write two reasons.”  There’s a list of student’s answers to this question at the bottom of this post.  See if you can guess what the students wrote before taking a peek at their answers.  And I want to give a big shout out to Y-chan here for asking the question in the first place.  I often forget to solicit student feedback to see what the students think is going on in class.  And if I didn’t have students who took the time to check-in themselves, I would spend most of class time nodding off on the highway of intuition.

I walked around and peeked at students answers.  While peeking, I scrawled “Talk” or “Don’t talk” on the bottom of each student’s paper in thick red marker.  Some of them stopped to give me a quizzical look, but that was about all the reaction I got.  Then back on the board I wrote “Don’t Talk” next to the six sentences and on the other side of the board I wrote, “Talk.”  I drew a nice firm blue arrow from the “don’t talk” to the “talk side” of the board.

Then I dragged Kusu-Kun up to the front of the classroom and positioned him in front of the word “Talk.”  I took up my position in front of “Don’t talk.”  I held up some fingers.  Kusu-Kun answered.  Everyone seemed to understand the gist of what was going on.  I picked up my kitchen timer and flashed it to the students.  I wrote, “3 Minutes,” on the board.  I looked at the students and there were some nods.  I wrote, “OK, start.”  And they did.  Half the students walked around flashing finger-questions.  Half the students walked around giving verbal answers.  While they were practicing I sat and listened.  I was just enjoying the fact that the students were so actively engaged before I realized that almost every student speaking was talking in complete sentences.  Complete sentences.  Complete sentences are the white truffles of my class.  I can root around for hours without finding a one.  And here they were littered all over the classroom.

Finally, I wrote “EVERYONE TALK for 5 minutes” on the board, held up the kitchen timer and hit the start button.  Students, even though they were free to talk, continued to hold up fingers for the questions as they said them.  I think these gestures added an element of redundancy which is often missing from classroom speak.  And those complete sentences just kept on tumbling out.  5 minutes wasn’t enough time for students to say what they wanted to say.  The timer beeped, but the students were talking so loudly, they couldn’t hear it.  So I used the extra time to write, “How did it feel when all the students could finally talk during the last 5 minute practice?” on the board.  Slowly the students returned to their seats and started composing their answers, some of which are listed at the bottom of this post.

For students to shift from using short term memory to accessing chunks of language from long term memory, they need to practice the language over and over (Ellis, 2001).  But in an EFL environment, they’re not going to get that practice outside of the classroom, or at least not very often.  Having a wide array of methodologies to draw on is one way we can give our students multiple exposures to the same language without them (or us for that matter) getting bored.  When seen in this light, all of the arguments about methodology can seem a little beside the point, especially when dealing with true beginners.  The real question is, are the students engaged with the language?  Are they using it?  Are they invested?

50 minutes of no talking.  It was a long 50 minutes for me.  Judging by the students’ response, less so for them.  When I finally wrote, “See you later,” up on the board as the bell chimed, I felt pretty sure that it had been a useful 50 minutes as well.  Because the students reply, “See you later.  I gave it my best,” was still ringing off the walls as I walked out the door.

Reasons given by students for why the teacher did not talk in class:

1. Talking makes you tired
2. You feel sick
3. You want us to practice our reading
4. You want us to pay more attention
5. It’s fun
6. You want us to see how much English we understand when reading
7. Even without words, you can find a way to say what you want to say
8. You are in a bad mood.
9. To learn how to read people’s feelings.

What students wrote about how they felt when everyone in the class could finally speak:

1. I was happy I could have a normal conversation.
2. I felt like speaking is really convenient.  I could understand the power of talking.
3. I felt so refreshed.  It gave me a lot of energy.
4. Excited.
5. I could answer the questions easily and quickly
6. I felt like speaking is really good.
7. I felt safe

Reference:

Ellis, N. C. 2003. ‘Constructions, chunking, and connectionism: The emergence of second language structure’ in C. Doughty and M. H. Long (eds): Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Image:

“Keep Silence” from: http://www.designofsignage.com/application/symbol/railway/largesymbols/keepsilence.html

But will this class fly?

My school has been hit hard by influenza.  We would normally cancel classes, but most of the first year students are off on a school trip in Hokkaido and the seniors are finished with classes for the school year.  That leaves only the second year students.  My morning class was reduced to six students.  Six students who were probably using most oftheir energy wondering how long they had until their joints started to ache and the doctor told them they had to stay home.  Not a high energy group.

There’s been a lot of posts on the net about functional grammar/pragmatics/cognitive grammar lately.  Scott Thornbury’s post on construction was one of the things that got me thinking more about functional grammar this week.  And then there was Brad Patterson’s post on “What it means to be polite.”   In my teaching environment here in Japan, at a school for students with extended periods of absenteeism, I bump up against the following issues when it comes to functional grammar and pragmatics:

1.      My higher level students see English as a means to pass university entrance exams, so functional grammar in the way of oral communicative English turns them off.  They don’t see the point.

2.      My students, if they use English in the future, will primarily be using it as a communication tool with other non-native speakers.  So how to implement f.g. when teaching ELF?

3.      My lower level students missed much of their junior high school English schooling, so, for those students, I want to keep class as simple as possible and provide them with language they can pick up and run with.  This means teaching a lot of chunks of language and a conscious decision to keep it simple.

But my mentor on the Dip TESOL told me the other week, that because Japanese has such distinctive registers, perhaps I was selling my students short.  Maybe they would be able to transfer some of that L1 knowledge and pick up on differences in register more quickly than I thought.  So I decided to teach some functional grammar to the still-standing-six who shuffled into class this morning.  How?  Paper airplanes.

I had the students space out their desks in a big circle.  Then I passed out sheets of blank paper.  I started folding a paper airplane.  The students looked a little anxious.  But soon enough, without any spoken directions, all of them were happily folding airplanes. 

I turned to S-san and said, “Can I see your airplane?”  As expected, she held the airplane up for me to see.  So I asked K-san, and he did the same.  Finally I just said, “Throw it to me!”  Then we talked about what “see” meant in the context of my request.  All the students wrote the question, “Can I see your airplane?” somewhere on their paper airplanes.  The students then had some time to look at each others airplanes.  But they couldn’t leave their desks.  This led to much paper airplane throwing.  I asked the students to get their paper airplanes back.  Silence.  One student said, “Can I see my airplane?” to another student.  But I could see that she was dissatisfied with the language she had used.  So I said to N-San, “Hey, can I have my airplane back?”  Which was an ‘aha’ moment for most of the students and a few moments later, everyone had managed to get their own airplanes back in hand.  And without prompting, they all wrote, “Can I have my airplane back?” on a wing or the body of their plane.

“OK,” I said.  “Now let’s see what everyone thinks of our airplanes.  How can we get another person to really think about our airplanes?”  Which, happily led to N-san asking another student, “Can you see my airplane?”  Ah, the joys of look vs. see.  A short explanation and students were ready to make the request, “Can you look at my airplane.”  But here I stopped the airplane throwing for a moment and we talked about the nature of our three requests:

–          Can I see your airplane? (I want to do something.)

–          Can I have my airplane back? (I want to have something.)

–          Can you look at my airplane? (I want you to do something.)

Most of the students agreed that there was something different about the nature of the third request.  It required more of the person than simple tossing a paper airplane.  There was some sort of extra effort required.  So I suggested, instead of “can”, perhaps “would” might be more appropriate. 

Now I noticed that while most of the students were enjoying breaking class rules, some just couldn’t bring themselves to throw an airplane in the classroom with joy.  What’s wrong with kids today that they don’t want to toss airplanes around a classroom??!!!  So I asked them if it was uncomfortable to throw an airplane in class with a teacher watching them.  And it turns out, it was.  So I left the class and listened in at the window.  There was definitely less hesitation than when I had been in the room.

By the end of the class, students had also written, “Would you get me Maria’s airplane?” And “Could I please keep this airplane?” somewhere on their airplane.  I’m not 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure that students had developed some ideas of how levels of politeness can, in part, depend on where the locus of action is within the request as well as the duration of the request (“Could I please keep this paper airplane” resulting in a permanent state as opposed to say “Can I see your airplane” which is merely temporary).  And if not, they at least practiced some pretty basic requests which we can build on in our class tomorrow.

At the end of class, every student but one happily kept another student’s paper airplane even after the bell rang.  That one student, for whatever reason, just couldn’t bring himself to join in the last 5 minutes of practice/throwing.  So I hit him up after class and asked him what kind of things prevented him from participating.  And he said, “I just felt embarrassed.”  So I asked him if, when we did these kind of wacky lessons, he wanted me to just prompt him once in a while.  Would that make it easier for him to join in?  He looked relieved and said, “please do.”  So I took my airplane and wrote, “Would you please do that” on the inside wing, gave it to him, and headed downstairs to write up my class notes.