Puns
Week 31 of 36: this week I wanted the Ss to suggest some homonyms or homographs and to do a running dictation, so here’s how I set about it:
I wrote the word ‘watersport’ on the whiteboard and asked them to come up and write anything it reminded them of. I did the same with the word ‘salmon’ to check they knew what it meant (they did).
Next, I told them Brits love to play word games, and gave them a handout showing some headlines made out of puns, such as ‘fisherman knows his plaice’ (they didn’t know the word ‘plaice’), ‘fish and chips take a battering’, ‘sealed road’, ‘Witch costume will you wear for Halloween?’, ‘the horse’s mane problem’ etc. I think this was a new concept for them, and I made sure I explained each pun, eliciting root words, idioms etc. where I could.
Next, the running dictation. They were in 2 teams, although one team had 3 in it, and I dealt with this by switching the 3rd person to the second team halfway through. Between themselves they organised who would do the writing and who would do the reading. It was (in retrospect) probably quite a difficult passage written in quite formal language, although not long. It was about salmon in the Wye so ticked a) the Welsh culture box b) the sustainability box and c) something a bloke might be interested in (also in retrospect!). Quite hard work, especially for the writer, trying to understand the differing accents! At the end we summarised what it was about and talked about some of the words they didn’t know, such as stream and survival (no problem with ‘reproduce’ though!)
The final part of this was for them, as a group, to come up with a punny headline to go with what they’d written - ‘Wye salmon aren’t returning’ is what they came up with! Pretty good.
I had another listening practice to do after this, almost 5 minutes about beaches (we’ve been focussing on talking about holidays for a few weeks), an RP audio from the British Council. I played it once so they could get the gist of it and ask me any words they didn’t know - prior to this I’d given them a handout on bright yellow paper for ease of finding it in future with a glossary of the words in the passage, and gave them time to read it and decided if any of the words needed further explanation. The second time it was played, they had to fill in the gaps in an exercise I’d given them. The gaps were in order they were played in but not all the text was on the exercise. I think I’d do this differently in future, so they can follow along and have a better chance of success, since no one got above 7 out of 10, although no one got below 5 either.
When the listening task was done, they were given a choice of topic to talk about - a beach they’ve been to, an animal in their country that lives in or near water, or a beach sport they’ve played. Within each topic, there were 3 pieces of information they had to give (you can tell I’ve been looking at the IELTS tasks!). They were given about a minute to prepare, had to talk for 2 minutes, and then each person from the class had to ask them a question.
I’m never sure whether to correct errors as they go along and ruin the flow, or write them on the whiteboard for later reference, and here I did a mixture of both (reformulations in green in the picture above). They did a good job - one even showed pictures on her phone of the beach she’d been to! Another spoke about carp fishing (perhaps prompted by the earlier fishy talk), another about beach volley ball, another about a beach she went to as a child, and the final one about seagulls. Great!
I should say there was an observer for the first hour of the class, grinning away as the running dictation was carried out. Afterwards she said this was an excellent activity on many levels, including communication and going at their own pace. She did ask where their folders were, rather than notebooks - rather remiss of me, since it’s usually the first thing I tell my IT students to do! Also incomplete ILPS and no marked work (although I did have some, which I forgot about, and gave back to the Ss after the observer had gone) - when I had a big class the easiest way to mark work was to do it as a class exercise, so that’s why most of their work is self-marked. I haven’t had the official report yet, but it sounded quite optimistic, so let’s hope I end my first year as an ESOL teacher on a positive note.