Learning by Laughing
We called our workshop Learning by laughing, there are a million reasons why (most of them serious).
The basic idea is to share methods that make language learning fun – but also effective.
We believe that language is communication and that communication needs content, something to talk about. A language is nothing in itself; it has to be filled with what is important to us.
We also believe that we remember things better when we use our whole body and when we laugh. One of the ideas behind TPR (Total Physical Response, one of the methods we share) is that the crazier the sentences and assignments are, the better you remember them. Weird is good – it creates more synapses in the brain!
A third thing we believe in is scaffolding, sometimes with words, sometimes with text frameworks, and always with modelling.
Based on these beliefs we chose a number of methods and ideas to share in our workshop. We started off with methods for beginners, had a few lessons with ideas for intermediate learners and ended the workshop with thoughts for advanced students.
Beginners
When you first start to learn a language you need words, mainly nouns and verbs and you need to practice pronunciation preferably by being exposed to the language. None of us learnt our first language by spelling. We introduce TPR, a method where the learners listen and use the body to extend their vocabulary. It is extraordinarily effective in the beginning but has the limitations of only teaching concrete words and mainly teaching verbs in the present tense. With our twenty teachers sitting in a circle, Jenny had Janna walking around, pointing at things and people, knocking on them and eventually sitting on them using only the nouns, verbs and prepositions we wanted to teach. It creates laughter and it gets everyone on their toes, eager to show what they learnt. To make it equal and to show the efficiency of the method we chose to teach Swedish – a language none of the teachers knew before. After 20 minutes we collected the words we used on the blackboard and everyone knew 10 nouns (singular and plural), 10 verbs and 2 prepositions. Quite effective, even with 70 students in the classroom.
Beginners also need games and we introduced Fruit Salad, Word Snake, Hangman, I Spy…, 20 Questions, Memory Game, 2 Truths and a Lie, Taboo, Boggle, Categories and the game when you just put a really long word on the blackboard and try to find as many words as possible in that word (we used language teacher). We won’t take time explaining all the games now – but on request we definitely will!
Are these games useful in a classroom of 70 students? According to the teachers in our workshop, they are. On the last day we drew a line on the blackboard and handed out white cards the size of post-its with all our methods and games written on them. The teachers were asked to place the cards on the blackboard and grade them according to usefulness. The games got the highest ratings.
Intermediate
For intermediate learners we discussed writing and how to use the students’ own lives and experiences as inspiration. Pictures for example, 50 black and white photos we printed from the internet and spread on a table. All the teachers gathered in a circle around them telling us which pictures symbolized happiness to them, and fear, and which ones they could relate to their childhood and which ones that showed something in their future. With a hundred stories in our hands we wrote about ourselves and each other. We continued with talking about our senses, how to use them in teaching and more specifically in writing. The teachers found the short writing exercises very useful, although they said the longer ones were harder to fit in with their curriculum.
In the Swedish classroom we have found storylines to be an effective, creative and fun method. In a Cambodian classroom it is difficult to find the time. The Cambodian Syllabus for English is a book of 14 units which the teacher has to cover. Most students have two hours of English per week and that is hardly enough time. This made us introduced storyline as a part of homework instead of being a classroom activity. The problem with this however was that effective homework does require some preparation in the classroom to give the students adequate scaffolding. Effective homework also requires a place to sit, a pen and a bit of time – a luxury for some students.
We chose to share Shipwrecked, a storyline in which the writer has to imagine going on an around the world voyage. As the title reveals there is a storm, a shipwreck but also a rescue on an island. The writer creates a new society with rules and maps and is finally rescued again – this time back to what we call civilisation. The writer has by then written a number of different texts, for example a letter, a postcard, a message in a bottle, a list of necessary items, a list of laws, a map and a poem. The story ends with an article in which the writer describes how he is rescued and what he learnt from the experience. Creative, fun and with the need of lots of new words!
We also introduced a more relaxed storyline called The house, based on the same idea but in a much safer(?) environment.
Advanced
When we got in to advanced learning we introduced the Australian Genre method. This is a whole pedagogy including a total grammar, a philosophy and a way of looking at texts and scaffolding. Two full weeks are not enough to do this method justice and the three days we spent on it were just a brief introduction.
But we introduced the different text types that the Genre method acknowledges by having the teachers write different texts about tea. With all the texts taped on the walls it became clear to all of us that the different texts followed different rules. And those rules are global.
When going deeper into the Genre method it was harder for some of the Cambodian teachers to follow, the Circle Model was well understood but the texts we wrote together required a lot of English and the method itself seemed difficult to grasp. Maybe that is why games within the Genre method, for example Dictogloss, were rated amongst the lowest in the evaluation.
Trying to tie all the loose ends
We started the workshop by making a list of what the Cambodian teachers expected and wanted to learn from these weeks. We ended it by summarising everything in lesson planning. The teachers were divided in to groups of four and together they made a lesson plan which had to work in a Cambodian classroom with the required curriculum, 70 students and also with at least one of the games or methods we shared. A difficult task which they all completed with distinction!
But the best moment happened right after that, when they all started making lists of each others’ phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Twenty teachers who didn’t know each other before this workshop now found it necessary to continue sharing ideas and methods with each other. That was sheer happiness!
/Jenny
