To begin at the beginning, as one rather famous Welsh wordsmith once put it.
Well, here is this much humbler (and considerably less decadent) welshman’s first foray into the world of blogging. But a well-overdue one.
After nigh on 16 years of teaching in Germany, I thought it was high time to share some of the fascinating insights and thought-provoking nuggets that arise daily in the language classroom, which keep my passion for teaching alive and kicking and make those creative juices keep on (over)flowing.
Of magpies and honey bees
As a self-confessed linguistic magpie, I’m always on the look out for juicy tidbits of language whilst out and about, picking up all sorts of bits and bobs of German from television, overheard conversations on public transport and incredibly kitschy 80s pop songs (amongst other things).
Come to think of it, I’ll always associate the German expression “Ich düse mal los” – roughly translated as “got to dash”, with this pop gem from 1983, where I first came across it. Not to mention the french word for traffic jam (embouteillage) from this piece of magic by Vanessa Paradis (never did manage to squeeze that one into a conversation, though).
These associations are, as I’m pretty sure most of you would agree, extremely strong and worm their way into your head and become fixed. I’m sure you’re even humming along to some of your own melodic memories right now as you read.
So, it got me thinking about finding a way of helping learners to grasp all of these little odds and ends of English that are fluttering around every day and pin them down to share, in a similar way to Scott Thornbury & Luke Meddings’ lovely honey bees activity from Teaching Unplugged.1
As chance would have it…..
A very creative learner of mine created this beautiful infographic as a homework task as a way of introducing potential English-speaking colleagues to Hamburg and giving them an overview of its cultural and linguistic ins and outs.
This magpie seized on the opportunity to ask the learner to teach me how to use the word “luschern”, which I hadn’t really met before.
After lots of discussion and negotiation of meaning and nuance, it turned out to be akin to “take a peek”, which threw up lots of fascinating collocations and emergent language like a “sneak peek” “a sneak preview” and yes, you guessed it, “peek-a-boo”.
Everybody needs good neighbours
Call it serendipity, but barely three days later, “luschern” snuck up on me again out of the blue while clearing out my cellar.
Seeing the mountain of clutter, my amiable neighbour squeezed past the debris and on reaching my open cellar door uttered the immortal words “mind if I take a peek?” (well, in German, but you catch my drift). My linguistic synapses went wild!
Discovery log
Drawing inspiration from this repeated encounter with the word in the wild, as it were, I wanted to develop a tool to capture all these instances of useful language.
Jim Fuller has blogged on the excellent Sponge ELT about the listening log, which certainly inspired what eventually became the discovery log.
The tool is designed to help foster an organic, sustainble classroom ecosystem, where learners become more autonomous and responsible for their own learning.
I was aiming to help them capture discovered language outside the classroom, and motivate them to share their discoveries with each other in the live sessions.
This would (hopefully) lead to lots of discussion and explanation, as well as the negotiation of meaning and usage relevant to their own context. This is an example of what happened with some higher-level groups over the course of a few weeks:
So, reader, I married…
…the idea with reality, and this was what came of it. While not everyone got on board with it straight away, over the weeks it became established as a fixed part of the lessons.
It often even lead into whole lessons, where one language item sparked discussion on further ones and formed the basis of the whole lesson.
A case in point was when one learner picked up the expression “I was wondering if you could…” from an email and brought it in to the lesson.
This led to lots of discussion on indirect and direct formulations which we then fleshed out into a group task to write a polite response to a dictated email containing all the phrases discussed.
It’s fair to say that the response to the lesson was okayish….
Stay tuned for next week’s blog on what happens to all these useful tidbits of language once they’ve been through the class mill….
- Meddings,L. & Thornbury,S. (2009), Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching. Delta Publishing. ↩︎
