- ASK students “Hi. Why is the light off? What’s up?” ELICIT “the lights aren’t working“. Ask for reason. ELICIT “There’s been a powercut – nothing is working“
- BOARD EXAMPLE/CHECK UNDERSTANDING (So when did this happen? Do we know exactly? Is there still an effect now?)
- UNPACK FORM (POS: S + have/has + 3rd form verb etc…) and MODEL/DRILL contractions/sentence stress
- WRITE 4-5 SIMILAR SITUATIONS ON WB in de-grammared form (e.g. A) “What/happen? B) THERE/ACCIDENT. TAKE/TO HOSPITAL”). Students re-grammar examples.
- CONVERT TO “DISAPPEARING DIALOGUE”, removing key grammatical elements, students recall and perform each dialogue with partner with decreasing scaffolding until performance is entirely from memory.
- ASK STUDENTS TO CONCEIVE AND SCRIPT OWN DIALOGUES. Repeat steps 4-5.
- STUDENTS MAKE LESSON NOTES
Materials light?
YES. Only used the whiteboard present and the students’ notebooks (paper ones!)
Conversation driven?
YES. The situation in the school was leveraged but not contrived (I didn’t cut through the power lines just for the opportunity to do this!)
Focus on Emergent Language? Innovative? UNPLUGGED?
NOT REALLY/NOT REMOTELY!/ABSOLUTELY!!! I had a clear agenda so this wasn’t very Dogme in this regard. However, the students provided the working language and later contributed their own ideas/language to the mix. The approach is pure Old School PPP but considering it was entirely on the fly, involved no materials and was a response to “the situation in the room” that fortunately coincided with curriculum requirements, I am still happy to consider this as my first Unplugged lesson.
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Thanks Anthony for sharing your experience which aptly demonstrates the advantages of material light teaching! I’m glad that you have brought in your interest of dogme and teaching unplugged, which the materials light challenge had in mind here at ELTBITES. I see from your blog that you also have an enthusiasm for using technology too which many people feel is at odds with dogme / unplugged teaching, like you I see an overlap between the two. Web 2.0 technologies are great with regards to learner-centred approaches, creating opportunities for conversation driven lessons, for example blogging, photosharing creating wikis etc . The ethos of Web 2.0 is all about sharing, collaboration and production so bang in line with dogme. I suppose the contrast is in that dogme adheres to a materials light approach while with Web 2.0 the focus is on ‘learner-generated’ materials. But I suppose they can be one and the same?
Reading your story reminded me of when I started out teaching English. I was working and living in Bulgaria back in 1995 and power cuts were frequent then. The first words I learnt in Bulgarian were ‘Nyama tok’. ‘Nyama’ means ‘there isn’t’ while ‘tok’ means ‘electricity’. I always told my Bulgarian students this story when they asked me about my Bulgarian language learning, much to their amusement.