Thursday found me in a particularly reflective mood and my morning session with a small group of Polish beginners got me wondering about many aspects of my practice. I wondered how I would have done things differently if I’d been being observed and whether I’d have been right to do so. I’ve been wondering about the role, the format and the necessity of a plan and about the use of L1 in a language learning situation. And, today, after reading Phil Longwell’s post on mindfulness I’ve been thinking about how I pay attention to and respond to what’s happening at the present moment.
I was going to expand on some of those wonderings here after sharing an account of my Thursday morning, and I had actually started to but it was getting too long (and I was getting too tired) so, for now, here’s just what happened for anyone who might be interested. I hope it makes sense! I may come back to the ‘clever’ bits at a later date!
I had a plan – of sorts. The week before, we had heard good news about one learner’s son and how one family member was very happy and another was very very happy. We looked at another way to say very very happy and built on this looking at other emotions – one of these being worried. In response to the question, Are you worried? a learner told me that she was worried because she needed another job. In light of this, I thought that the most useful thing for her at the moment would be to be able to tell people what she can do, and that the other learners would benefit from this too. So, we were going to look vocabulary for activities and then at simple sentence structures with I can/can’t and questions Can you? and answers. I had photocopies of a workbook and a printout of a board game to support this.
The learners came in, took a wee while getting settled, and I waited.
When people seemed ready, I asked how they were. They were all ok. Then, there was some discussion in Polish between two learners and out of that came the word ‘mushroom’. One learner, we heard, had been picking mushrooms the day before in the grounds of a big local hotel. I asked if she made soup with them. Yes, I was told. Mushroom soup is very good, another learner contributed. But these mushrooms weren’t only destined for soup. They were also used to make pierogi. There was some more chat in Polish and the English words holiday and Happy Christmas came out of it. Christmas holidays I suggested. Yes. More Polish. I caught tradycja. Tradition, I said. Yes. Pierogi is something they traditionally eat at Christmas – on Christmas eve. What else did they eat at Christmas? What do we traditionally eat in Scotland, they asked. How do they make Polish Stuffed Cabbage? They all chipped in to describe the process, using words they know, dictionaries, pictures, mime and sound. We wrote it down. We checked it was right. We read through it together. We focused on the main verbs – mix, put, fold, pour, boil, eat – and some prepositions – on and in. We separated these from the recipe and then used them to reconstruct the recipe orally – first referring to notes, then from memory.
As we were finishing this, one learner (the one who needs a new job) was looking at a Polish/English picture dictionary and making notes of words related to cleaning. She was still paying some attention to what we were doing as she did this – chipping in now and again – and when we finished she asked me how to pronounce what she had written in her notes. As the need for this was clear, we spent the rest of the session working on this. Writing the verbs on pieces of paper – clean, hoover, dust, mop, polish etc – then adding objects – windows, floor, furniture and so on, all the while clarifying and checking understanding. And then, we added I can, I can’t and Can you?. As the title, says, what I had planned 🙂 but not as I’d planned it! We now had a substitution table made up of pieces of paper and we drilled questions and answers (substitution and chain drills) using the table. Most things the learners could do, so there was little opportunity to practice “No, I can’t” on this particular morning, until, that is, one learner asked another if they could hoover the windows!?!
I plan to do more on this next week…
🙂
Carol Goodey 