:: Creativity in Materials Design - Anthing New?
by Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims UK
:: Anything Old?
At the moment, my quest for 'old gold' seems to be drifting across the 20s and 30s of the last century, a period of effervescent intellectual activity. Today I want to offer you practical activities and practical thinking frames drawn from those times. A marvellous feeder field from that period, brought into EFL by Alan Maley, is the work of the Surrealists (Oulipo). A classic language exercise from their work is the lipogram, which is perhaps the best editing exercise I know. It is very simple: ask students to work in pairs, re-writing a paragraph from their coursebook, in such a way that there are no occurrences of a letter, let's say, a. Tell them that they need to try to stay as close in meaning and feeling to the original as possible.
Let me show you what I mean by re-writing the first sentence of the last paragraph without any a’s:
Right now my quest for ‘old gold’ seems to be drifting through the period from 1920 to 1940, the longest period I found of effervescent thinking work.
The exercise is linguistically exciting, as people come up with ingenious solutions to the re-writing problems, but it is also a powerful person-centred activity, as students express admiration for neater solutions than those they have been able to find. Thank you Surrealists, thank you Alan.
From the work of Rudolf Steiner (the Waldorf Schools), I want to take a thinking frame and a student exercise. Andrew Wolpert, from Emerson College, the main Steiner training centre in the UK, offers this very simple, yet effective, five-step frame for thinking about a lesson you have given:
:: How did the preparation go? This includes any physical, emotional, technical, intellectual preparation.
:: How can I describe the rhythm of the lesson?
:: What empathies and antipathies did I experience with different students and with myself?
:: What obstacles did I face?
:: The unexpected?I have used this frame in my own work, both intrapersonally and as a kicking-off point for a session with my supervisor. Very simple and very useful. Thank you Steiner.
And now for a classroom exercise from the deep pool of Waldorfian methodology::: Take a composition topic, let’s say Canberra.
:: Ask a fifth of the class, working each on their own, to write 7 declarative sentences about Canberra.
:: Ask the next fifth to write 7 negative sentences each about the topic.
:: The next fifth write 7 questions, again about Canberra.
:: The next fifth write exclamations
:: The last fifth write 7 imperative sentences each.
:: Tell the groups to put their heads together and share what they have written.
:: Now ask the students to form new groups of five with a declarative, negative, interrogative, exclamatory and imperative person in each group. They share their sentences.
:: The sentences all go up on the walls and the students go round and read.
:: After this 20-minute brainstorm, ask the students to write a composition in pairs.Until I did this exercise with a group, I had no idea of the different mindsets brought forth by each syntactic shape. Your ‘imperative thought’ is quite different from your ‘ interrogative thought’. And these Steiner realisations have been around all through my 35-year-long EFL career.
:: In 1935 A.R.Orage brought out Love and psychological Exercises. This was re-published
by Sam Weisner, New York in 1998.:: In the late 20s Orage left behind him a successful career as a London literary critic and editor
and devoted himself full time to spreading the ideas of Gurdjieff, especially in the US.:: This is not the place to go into the overall work of Gurdjieff – suffice it to say that a central part
of the mental management he advocated was self-awareness.:: Orage’s book is packed with simple and less simple self-awareness activities that are a gift to
any modern language teacher, like this one: let me show you a couple of people doing it:Person A: Zero
Person B: Ninety-nine
Person A: Three
Person B: Ninety-six
Person A: Six
Person B: Ninety-three
Person A: Nine:: The exercise finishes when Person A reaches ninety-nine and Person B reaches zero.
:: A second Oragian exercise, that we did not do in the Canberra workshop, involved a person reciting a poem and saying how many letters each word contains immediately after saying the word e.g.: Jack (four) and (three) Jill (four) went (four) up (two) the (three) hill (four)
:: This exercise is particularly useful for low level learners coming to English from an different script, as it helps them to visualise each word separately. It fits well with the way Chinese learners are well used to ‘quantifying’ characters in terms of number of strokes.
If you agree with me that the past, both recent and distant, has much hidden gold to offer to even casual panners, then you will find a very useful place on the web, Old Exercise in Humanising Language Teaching, to be found at www.hltmag.co.uk. There are 25 or so back issues to look through, so you won’t be short of rich food for thought.
:: Anything New?
Where to start? There are so many feeder-fields that could enrich our area of work and that EFL methodologists have not yet explored. Here I will deal with the contribution of Howard Gardner, who proposes that a human being has a number of separate intelligences. In Frames of Mind (1986), Gardner proposed seven intelligences:
:: interpersonal
:: intrapersonal
:: musical
:: spatial
:: kinaesthetic
:: logical-mathematical
:: linguisticHe has since proposed the addition of two more, the spiritual and the naturalistic. This last one is the condition of being in touch with nature as a shepherd may well be, or a fisherman or a meteorologist.
I will not here go into the criteria that allow us to call a bundle of skills and behaviours an intelligence. The point for us language teachers is that Gardner’s theory invites us to teach language through all the intelligences, not just through the linguistic one. If I translate this last sentence into French – ce qui est important pour nous, enseignants de langues……, I am using mainly my language intelligence. The Multiple Intelligences (MI) state of mind invites me to teach language spatially, intrapersonally, musically, etc.
What does this mean in practical terms? Let’s have a look at a sure-fire musical exercise that I learnt from the brilliant Austrian trainer, Herbert Puchta.
:: Everybody stands up and makes sure there is some space around them. Everybody shuts their eyes and imagines they are the lead person in the creation of a piece of group music: they could be a lead singer, a conductor, a jazz improviser etc… They make the music with their bodies and hear it in their heads.
:: After three minutes the students group in fives and describe the experience, which will include
some cases of blocking, as not everybody lives strongly in the world of music.Done early in a course, this exercise gives the teacher some idea of the students’ musical tastes.
:: The session finished with each person taking 10 minutes to write a letter addressed to themselves, not to be read until after the course. I guess some people thought this was a bizarre exercise, but that is perhaps because there are very few well-used activities in the EFL canon that involve talking to self, writing to self or any form of inner monologue or dialogue. Even student diary-writing is often contaminated by the teacher reading what has been written, which makes it hugely less ‘inner’.
If you are interested in seeing more activities with an MI orientation, then go to www.hltmag.co.uk and, using the author search, look up Herbert Puchta, who has a whole-book manuscript of such activities, a few of which have been carried by Humanising Language Teaching.
Mario Rinvolucri works for Pilgrims, UK, and edits Humanising Language Teaching, Pilgrims’ webzine for EFL teachers. He is a frequent writer for The Teacher Trainer, Pilgrims’ journal for trainers. His 2002 books are Humanising your Coursebook, and Using the Mother Tongue, with Sheelagh Deller. Both books are published by ETp-Delta, UK. His first CD ROM, Mindgame, with Isobel Fletcher de Tellez, came out with Clarity, Hongkong, and is currently used by all British Council schools round the world.
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