Grammar Games Mario Rinvolucri
Providing English has virtually become a utility, like providing electricity or water. In many countries knowing some English is one of the things necessary if a person wants to rise into the lower middle class. It is a social gateway skill.
In Athens, Greece, where I taught my first TEFL classes in 1964, the elite had learnt French but their children were dropping it in favour of English. In those distant days you could still talk of a rivalry between French and English to serve as the main lingua franca of the world.
Mario Rinvolucri - biography. Internet, etc) activities to work with them. I always use games to fix grammar points, vocabulary, etc. Dear Mario, I have. Grammar games: cognitive, affective, and drama activities for EFL students by Mario Rinvolucri ( Book ) 107.
Today, French is not in contention anymore. As is normal in world history, the spread of a language is linked to military and political matters. The last 40 years has seen the parallel spread of US political, military, commercial, scientific, intellectual and linguistic domination of the globe. In a very real sense EFL teachers are as much propagators of the Imperium Americanum as F22 pilots or managers of Kentucky Fried Chicken stores. When I started teaching English in Greece in the mid-1960s there was nothing around called 'methodology'. There were one or two things you did like dictation and gap-filling but the techniques we used at the time could have been summarised on four sides of A4. The creation of a huge bank of techniques had to wait until the 70s, 80s and 90s.
In 1986 Paul Davis published a book called Dictation with Cambridge University Press (CUP) that offers 30 or forty ways of giving a dictation. I would not have taken a second look at a book with that title in the 60s; my reaction would have been 'What do you need a book for? Everybody knows what dictation is.' Alan Maley and Alan Duff started creating the wave of teacher's resource books in the mid-70's and here is where you will find most of the innovative ideas that feed the profession today. The creation of a serious body of techniques for teaching language has impacted world EFL very unevenly however. The Chinese learnt English in the 60s with the grammar translation and rote learning methods.
This is still mostly the case today. When I visited the Malay University English department in 1989, I found the gap-fill grammar exercises that Stannard Allen stuffed into his Living English Structures to be still alive and flourishing. Filling gaps was the main way that Malay University students passed their time in EFL classes. CUP's most popular grammar book in the world market today is Murphy's English Grammar in Use, which is full of mechanical transposition exercises. In the late 90s Hong Kong-based Clarity brought out a CDROM called Tensebuster, crammed with yet more gap-fill stuff.
Yes, the picture of methodological change is very uneven. In Europe, take Austria. In the 90s the books of Herbert Puchta and Guenther Gerngross came to virtually monopolise the state secondary school market. These coursebooks are strongly multi-sensory, they draw on all the latest techniques and both the authors are strong NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) practitioners. Teachers in the secondary State sector across Austria have been directly trained in the use of the books by Herbert and Guenther rushing round the country and doing teacher training workshops on the lower slopes of almost every Alp.
Neighbouring Germany plods along 2 language teaching decades behind Austria, with its coursebooks created to the satisfy the prejudices of seventy-year-old committees on the various State Education Ministries. I am a person who is happiest thinking about very detailed practical things. In the area of methodology I am interested in the scenarios that stimulate students, scenarios that keep them awake, that have them access reasonable levels of energy. I am interested in the choreography of lessons, in the rhythm of lessons, in the beginnings, the middles and the endings. Like a medical surgeon I am proud if a good teaching technique is associated with the Pilgrims group I work with or with me personally. I have no time for the sort of waffly discussions that filled the UK airwaves in the 80s and 90s, for example the writings of Widdowson and Brumfitt. What had their musings to do with the nuts and bolts of language teaching?
In 2000 we are bringing out six issues as against the eight we produced in 1999 and Pilgrims gives me 2 working weeks to edit the magazine. I guess this year's editorial work will take more like three weeks, if you think of the working day as eight hours.
I am a very commissioning editor always asking people to write things for HLT. But I not a very editing editor. I don't spend hours helping people to hone their stuff to perfection.
You will find some marvellous stuff in the magazine but if you are a perfectionist you could be disappointed. We got the idea of starting an online magazine by looking at OUP's Spectrum and thinking that it made their book-selling site more interesting. By late 1998 we had established a solid, navigable site for selling our courses but it was a bit boring.
We only changed it significantly each January. HLT is there to make the Pilgrims site more interesting. The Web is already playing a major role in the lives of language learners. They are learning a huge amount of English simply by their general interest in searching for things on the web in English.
And this is happening outside the control of any school or teacher. The problem is how to persuade 40 year-old teachers into cyber times. Only one or two of my local Pilgrims colleagues here in Canterbury, UK, actually go to the web to read their own magazine! Over the past year I have printed out the table of contents and one or two articles so that they have the pages in their hands.
I hope that gradually they will acquire a periodical web habit. How long will it take? At the moment my web interests are dry and narrow, and largely confined to EFL. I keep an eye on other web magazines and try to learn from them.
I keep in personal contact with a large number of print and web EFL editors. What I plan to do is to use the web to start keeping up to date with advances in brain neurology since this is a central field for anyone interested in how language is learned and spoken. My problem here is that I find six Web sites on something like the anterior cingulate cortex (a bit of the brain linked to error correction) and find I dont have the lexis to understand any of them! I need to take a year off to study basic brain anatomy and neurology. On Teaching Teachers. Knowledge of your own person. When you teach a language you inevitably teach yourself, you teach your own ways of feeling and thinking.
As a teacher you need to know a bit more about who you are and how you affect others, you need to know something about your hidden demands from students and how you create your 'bad student'. You need to know about the sort of projections you indulge in and the particular ways you map reality. For more on this see Bernard Dufeu's brilliant book with Oxford Teaching Myself (1994 ). One-to-one teaching.
I feel that teaching practice should start with several hours teaching of one student, so you really have to cope with his or her needs as a learner and so you cannot hide behind your lesson plan or the fantasy of the group. Your teaching career would thus start in the interpersonal area, not fiddling with grammar explanations and lesson plans.
Unblocked Games Mario
Cultural awareness. Certainly for those who are going to teach English in lands they do not belong to this is a central area that the short training courses deal with very skimpily. Cultural awareness is a big chapter and it cannot be learned simply intellectually.
It has to be visceral learning, and so hard to achieve, maybe, on a course. In the case of that project yes, I spent the best part of six months coming up with different activities and testing them out in classes in the Cambridge Eurocentre. I had an intense conviction that there really was a book there. Grammar Games came out in 1984 with CUP and has now sold well over 100,000 copies, which is not bad for a teacher's resource book. Yet it is not my best book, whatever the market's judgement is. The one on story telling with John Morgan, Once Upon a Time, (CUP 1985) is way better, as is Ways of Doing, with Davis and Garside. Ways of Doing opens up the whole exploration by the students of their own processes, it is like an initial action research guide, but for students - not teachers.
I think these two books will help her begin to get her head round a way of doing things and a belief system that she has never dreamt of. They are: - 'The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon' which gives an entry into Japanese formalism, delicacy of perception, sensuality, clarity, concreteness and withering contempt for things disliked. 'The Enigma of Japanese Power', by Karel van Wolferen, which describes the complex working of a society that manages to combine being super-modern with continuing to live in a 'mura' (village) state of mind. Insights from both books might help the teacher cope with the bewildering stuff which will hit her in her first Japanese school. I have been invited to three JALT conventions and have done two round-the-archipelago JALT tours.
But actually I have learnt most of what I know about Japan by working with Japanese women students from Gifu in the context of The Cambridge Academy, in UK and with young Japanese managers in the Executive English Division of Pilgrims, again in UK. My impressions of the EFL scene in Japan? First, there are several EFL 'scenes' in Japan. There is the typical JACET-style applied linguistics classroom in a university, there are the language and literature classes in the universities, there are the junior high classes, which are quite different from the junior high clubs which are again different from the juku (cram schools) to which half of this age group goes twice a week. My impressions are too varied to be summed up in a few words. The question seems to imply a homogeneity among European students and among Japanese ones. In Finland when you have four people at dinner then main speaker will be the silence, in Italy, at a dinner table with four people, five of them will be speaking at once, while in Greece, six out of the four will be trying to make themselves heard!
Choi Games Mario
I know Japan less well then Europe but I guess the reactions of Aomori province students may well be different from those people from Okinawa some 2000kms to the South of them and with plenty blue water in between. One thing I did find with the college students from Gifu, studying in UK was that their emotionality almost overwhelmed me. They took the first month of intensive work to warm up, but my God, once they were warmed up the things they wanted to talk about and their affective openness amazed me.
Those girls made Italian woman seem reserved and cold. Yeah, of course they were abroad and at least partly out of the Japanese rule system. But all the same wow, what emotional power! ELT News is the website for teaching English in Japan and worldwide and for those looking for English teaching jobs. If you're involved in the English Language Teaching (ELT) Industry, then this site is your home. If you're looking for an English teaching job or another English-related job, check out our teaching jobs section.
Games
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