I’m really excited today for two reasons. Firstly tonight is the big night where I start my MusicEnglish classes in York. I’ve no idea if anyone will turn up yet but I’m hoping word gets around soon enough. I’ve been doing a big promotional push this week. Not through social media as you might expect but good old knocking on doors and talking to people. I’ve spent a lot of time in cafes, bars and libraries this week handing over my leaflets and business cards to people in places where I’d expect to find learners of English. I’m really starting to enjoy this I’m thrilled about the idea of taking the music back into the classroom where it came from in the first place. I’ve also got a few ideas lurking around on what is going to happen in class. I’ve been speaking to local musicians Plaster Knuckle and Glass Caves and have invited them to come into class and play some songs and talk about them with the students. I hope they agree that will be really great.
I remember a few years ago when I did my first teacher conference and I was feeling a bit anxious. I was with a representative from a publisher and she said to me
Don’t worry, if you are talking to teachers about teaching, they’ll love it
That is the best piece of advice I’ve ever been given about doing talks with teachers. Teachers want ideas, practical activities, materials and they want to imagine how they could work with their learners. And they also appreciate a glass of wine too, but this is a day session, so not likely for this one. I’ll let you know how I get on.
Breaking the Ice, warming up and filling in – I’ve found that songs are a great way to help develop routines in teaching. For instance you could kick off with this song at the beginning of a week, or equally finish off with this one. Learners become familiar with the routines and look forward with anticipation to the next song you are going to do. And they can be great homework activities too.
Notice and Practise Grammar – Grammar doesn’t have to be dull. Try these songs out for going to, had better, infinitives, will, 2nd conditional and many many more. The songs could be used at any stage in the students’ learning, i.e. for presentation of language, practice or recycling from previous work.
Collocation Rich – All songs are rich in collocations (words that commonly occur together). There are some obvious ones for instance for verb + noun collocation, and perhaps this song for say, tell and a few phrasal verbs thrown in for good measure. Try this song for collocations with ‘out of”- my favourite.
Develop stress and rhythm – Raising awareness of stress and rhythm is very important and perhaps under-emphasised in ELT generally? Weak forms become really easy to illustrate through songs where for instance ‘I have got a’ becomes ‘I gotta’ and so on. There are some really good examples of the use of ‘gonna‘ and ‘wanna‘. All songs can help develop awareness of word stress and rhythm. I get my students to listen to songs with printed songsheets and get them to underline or highlight the really stressed words, and then sing back together as a class with emphasis on the stressed sounds.
Pay attention to Sound and Spelling - Subtitles are splendid because they really do help learners to relate the words they hear to the written forms, for example I use this song to illustrate the written form of words with ING or this one for working on the ‘P’ sound as some learners find difficult to distinguish and articulate from the ‘b’ sound.
Improve reading skills – Taking a Pop-Lexical Approach to music, we might consider that we articulate language in chunks, and I think that the same goes for reading. We don’t consciously read every single word, we are aware of the chunks and skip along. But second langauge learners and equally students of literacy will benefit from the subtitles in becoming more familiar with reading along to the audio tracks. I used to have a student in my class who had never been to school as a child and struggled to read and write in both first language. She did, however, know many Beatles songs off by heart (and use to sing them in class), so I’ d give her Beatles songsheets to read while listening to a song at the same time.
Connect with learners - This is the most important point, I think. Students are only going to learn the words to the songs they like listening to. You could get your students to construct a class survey to find out about everyone’s music interests and habits. Then you could use the songs they like – don’t forget you can request songs to be subtitled here on MusicEnglish.
Action songs – These are especially good with young learners e.g. The Skeleton Dance. If you teach very young learners I really recommend keeping your eye on MusicEnglishKids.
Integrate with other creative expression e.g. drama, storytelling, poetry – I’ve recently been attending some storytelling sessions through creative play for very young learners. For instance in the telling of the story ‘The boy that cried wolf’ – The children start by making a sheep from a paper cup, cotton wool, and so on, then they sing a song about sheep – guess which one? The sheep live on a mountain with the boy shepherd, ‘She”ll be coming round the mountain when she comes’ … And then a few party games like ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’ It’s tea-time and now I’m going to eat you. At the same time the story is building up – fantastic. What about teenagers though – how about design a film poster for this song, or write a film review?
Language can be understood as consisting of a series of patterns or building blocks. To learn a language means to learn these patterns, these ‘chunks’ of language by:
Firstly ‘noticing’ the pattern(s)
Then making use of or ‘personalising’ such patterns
Becoming more confident in their use through practice over time
In our first language(s) this is perhaps more subconscious and occurs over a long period of time but more challenging when it comes to learning a second or other language, and particularly after childhood.
Pop songs can help in this learning process because:
They are so rich in everyday language
Provide plenty of repetition of key patterns / chunks of language
The combination of the words with melody, stress and rhythm can make learning more memorable
Learning the words to songs is engaging and fun (if we learn the words to the songs we like)
If we combine listening to the songs and reading subtitles as on the videos at MusicEnglish then the words to the songs become so much more accessible: creating opportunities for students of English to learn the words to the songs they listen to and in the process helping them along the way in their becoming speakers of English.
In the video we listen to a Japanese person who speaks English but one who struggles with her identity as a speaker of English. As with many people who speak English as another language besides her first language(s) she attributes her identity crisis to her English language use and in particular her pronunciation and accent. Learners and teachers of English will be extremely familiar with this situation – and as a teacher of English I want to reflect on how we can better understand this issue and more importantly seek to find solutions.
The title of this blog post is of course deliberate and the focus of this brief piece of writing. What’s important is the front-loading of ‘Speaker’ in the title. Here the perspective is on the person and I ask this question of the person in the video - Who are you? This is in contrast to ’She speaks English’ where our interest is in the language, the way she speaks it and to what degree of accuracy and fluency. In the video the speaker’s focus is very much on the latter and she is ashamed of her perceived ‘mis-use’ of English and her confusion about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the different usage contexts.
‘Identity’ is complex because people are! Learners of English are not bacteria in test tubes, nor Skinner’s performing rats. How people understand themselves as speakers of English is important. I see identity as a narrative, a story, one that has both a past and a future. Identity is a story that is preceded by other stories and anticipates the next. Moreover, the plots, the storylines are in part socially constructed and we seek to meet the expectations, to align with the plot. These stories are shared culturally and through language and other means but the problem for the speaker in the videos is that her audience is not familiar with her stories, nor she theirs.
In communication with others we draw on all our shared language, experiences, knowledge and so on – we are somebody in those stories, we are the actors. But when people are not familiar with the plot or the story doesn’t go as we might expect, it all breaks down and our identity is at stake – I would argue that migrants often experience these tensions and seek to resolve through aligning with the norms of language and cultural expectations.
Three examples to illustrate my take on identity:
A Story : Young beautiful princess meets handsome prince, they fall in love, have lots of children, live happily ever after in their big castle – a fairytale – Yes, but a plot a story that many people live and understand themselves by. Identity is a story.
History - I was moved by a recent television documentary about a woman who was the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp commander. She was only a baby when her father was executed for his crimes - and now she spends her whole life coming to terms with this terrible legacy. She tries to resolve this by meeting a survivor of the camp. But again she becomes the target of the survivor’s anger and herself a victim. Identity has a history.
A Future - I’ve had the pleasure over the years of teaching young adult ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) learners aged 16 – 19, we talk in class about their aspirations, their plans for their careers in the UK, what they want to do and BE – Identity has a future.
The speaker in the video is following a story, she has a history (one that precedes her narrative) and she has a future. Her story is not necessarily going to plan and she blames herself for it. So what can teachers do about this?
Of course there is no magic solution nor methodology but more a case of being human and developing the classroom as a community and as place where we all want to be and feel good about ourselves. Now as I said I don’t have an answer but I want to draw on a personal classroom experience that will help.
I used to teach in a church that also operated as a hostel for homeless people and as a classroom space for a local college of adult education. This particular classroom space was used for learners who were really hanging in there on the edge of local ESOL provision. These learners in this class had not been to school as youngsters and struggled with the literacy demands of ESOL provision that is on the whole funded by ‘test’ results – you get the picture I’m sure. There was one lady in my class, she had never been to school, never been to ESOL classes but had been living in the UK for a few years. She had many children all of who could speak English and a husband who worked. She looked after her family. She was put in the ‘pre-entry’ ESOL class (who thinks of these horrific labels? So she’s less able than a beginner?). There is plenty of methodological debate about how to teach language and literacy to such learners but it is one I abandoned a long time ago.
Mariana (not real name) in my opinion was stripped of her identity the minute she walked into that classroom in the homeless hostel as a pre-entry learner. She became labelled by others, very much the way the ‘Japanese’ speaker of English labels herself (and by others) in the video. Mariana’s main identity was as a mother to her children of whom she was very proud. Of course this identity wasn’t at stake in the classroom but why not use it as a means on which to build langauge / literacy teaching? And that’s exactly what we did in class at every opportunity. I would ask questions of her children, their names, ages, what school they go to and so on. She would proudly reply and tell me all about them with a smile on her face. The ‘breakthrough’ in her literacy development came one day, through a very simple exercise. I said to her jokingly one day that she had so many children that I was struggling to remember who was who – so I asked her for ‘homework’ if she would write down a list of all of them for me and bring to class. She did so the following week. She read them all back to me from the list, she told me that her daughter had helped her write the list. I suggested that it was a good idea to let her children help her with her reading and writing. She was very pleased with this.
As a teacher my suggestion is to always try and find ways of enabling students to draw on who they are as people, to use their identities as a resource in the classroom. Let them tell you their stories and share yours with them. Chiaki in the video not only speaks English but she is a speaker of English (and not ‘just’ a Japanese one) – her identity is the most important thing – After all, it is who she is.
This blog post is kind of a follow on from the previous one inspired by the film ‘Blackboards’. Watching it again brought back memories of the many Kurdish students I’ve had the pleasure of teaching during my time as an ESOL tutor. I want to tell you a story about one of those students.
I was teaching a ‘typical’ ESOL class, a group of people bringing with them their rich cultures, languages and life experiences to the classroom but at the same time a feeling of the weight of the world’s problems resting there, and often on the shoulders of the teacher, or at least it felt that way at times. As always I was attempting to conduct a fine balancing act between allowing students to say what they wanted to, while guarding against causing offence to others.
I found it hard at times, and there were always cracks appearing all over the place with arguments breaking out here and there but nothing too worrying. I recall once saying to the class ‘we shouldn’t speak about politics’ – quite a ridiculous thing to say really, but I was at a loss with how to deal with the on-going political discussions that seemed to cause such division among the learners.
One day in class, the students were having to carry out some exam preparation with a rather banal task of ‘describe a past event in 150 words’ (yawn). No idea where these rubric writers get their ideas from – How about ‘tell me a story’ – the students had plenty of those, and were good at telling them too. Anyway the students started their writing in class and then finished it off for homework. One Kurdish student who we shall call Hamed (not real name of course) handed me his essay by hand at the beginning of the next class. I put the carefully written and presented piece of writing on the desk next to me and started class. But I was intrigued by it, the way Hamed had personally given it to me at the beginning of the lesson. So I waited impatiently for the break so I could read it.
Now this is how the story went (in my words from memory)
I will describe my past event – I remember one day. It was a terrible day. I was ten years old. We were running away. It was terrible, people were crying and dying. We were in the mountains, it was cold, very cold. We were frightened of soldiers all the time. Sometimes we stopped to have a rest. We didn’t have any food or water. Sometimes we stopped to bury people because they were dead and we buried them there. I was very sad but my life is better now. I know I shouldn’t talk about politics, I’m sorry Mr Richard.
From wikipedia:Blackboards (Persian: تخته سیاه, Takhté siah) is a 2000 Iranian film directed by Samira Makhmalbaf. It focuses on a group of Kurdish refugees after the chemical bombing of Halabja by Saddam Hussein’s. The screenplay was co-written by Makhmalbaf with her father,Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The dialogue is entirely in Kurdish. Makhmalbaf describes it as “something between reality and fiction. Smuggling, being homeless, and people’s efforts to survive are all part of reality… the film, as a whole, is a metaphor.
The story: Kurdish teachers, carrying blackboards on their backs, look for students in the hills and villages of Iran, near the Iraqi border during the Iran-Iraq war. Said falls in with a group of old men looking for their bombed-out village; he offers to guide them, and takes as his wife Halaleh, the clan’s lone woman, a widow with a young son. Reeboir attaches himself to a dozen pre-teen boys weighed down by contraband they carry across the border; they’re mules, always on the move. Said and Reeboir try to teach as their potential students keep walking. Danger is close; armed soldiers patrol the skies, the roads, and the border. Is there a role for a teacher? Is there hope?
I was very taken by this film on first watching and have been ever since. It tells many stories, and this short clips says so much. As the article on Wikipedia points out, the film is a metaphor, but there are many here, depending on interpretation. I see metaphors of identity, of people’s endless searching for themselves among the stones and debris of conflict and inequality. The teacher’s promises of empowerment through literacy are rejected and embraced in the film respectively by the two children. The first boy who doesn’t need the ‘stories’ as he already has ‘a hundred’ of his own, while in contrast the second boy ‘Reeboir’ seeks to discover himself through learning to write his name. Isn’t this where education begins, a border crossing between being ‘called’ a name and to putting it down in words for yourself, where what remained unseen, somehow becomes visible?
But at stake here are not only the identities of the children but also those of the teacher’s In the film we see the teacher’s struggle to ply his trade among the endless shifting to and fro across the border region. “What do you do?”, asks Reeboir. “I’m a teacher” comes the reply. I often feel like Reeboir the teacher in the film. As a nomad searching for that identity, that teacher-self, in a forever changing landscape, always moving backwards and forwards across borders, in a kind of no-man’s land where nothing stays still for too long.
Do you make this journey all the time? Aren’t you feeling tired?
I’m thrilled about the idea of taking the music back into the classroom where it came from in the first place. I’ve also got a few ideas lurking around on what is going to happen in class. I’ve been speaking to local musicians Plaster Knuckle and Glass Caves and have invited them to come into class and play some songs and talk about them with the students. I hope they agree that will be really great.
