Lesson talk:How to turn the English language into a living hell (and vice versa)

An interesting take on textual analysis. And it looks like a good way to get students looking at the structure of written text without worrying too much about context.

But if the object is to improve fluency I'm not so convinced by the text-based lesson. OK, I know that you get them to discuss the material - but is the result that they become more thoughtful writers or better speakers?--Bob M 15:25, 3 June 2011 (UTC)
 * But I see that you are still working on it.--Bob M 15:32, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments, Bob. This kind of feedback is really what I missed working as a teacher in Russia. I chose for the written approach because the students are familiar there. Working with written language gives them the opportunity to think while they are working. If I started off with speech right away, they'd keep on panicking. But I see the problem. The last activity is a roleplay. So there I move from a text-based approach to real life speech. It might be a bit late. If you have any ideas to make that shift in an earlier stage, I'll be happy to put that in this lesson.

Oh, and now I am actually talking to you, what about copyright issues? So the scientific article is public domain, and so is Lovecraft (blessed be his name). William Gibson's story isn't. The Daily Mail excerpt quotes a copyrighted text, but I can rewrite it if you think it is necessary. All in all I am working only with short excerpts, how big an issue is it? If it is a big thing, just tell me and I'll make some changes. It would be cool if we could link our work to some writers' community, there's bound to be some. You can't imagine how culturally isolated the second world is. I mean, nobody there had ever even heard about Animal Farm. People were so surprised it was about their country.--Dirk 15:32, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I'll do the copyright one first. If you're using a small section then you are always OK.  "Small" being defined as less than 1% of the original.  I'll have another look at the class itself later.  Cheers.--Bob M 16:25, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, it's still sort of text based. The problem is that it wouldn't really fit with my teaching style so I'm not sure what to say. But I'm happy to pontificate. :-) I'm of the opinion that you get good at whatever you do a lot of.  Pretty obvious I suppose.  But the result is that if your students read a lot they become good at reading.  If they write a lot they become good at writing.  If they study grammar for three hours a day they become good at grammar.
 * But they can do all of these things and still be barely able to say "hello".
 * The solution, then, is to make them talk a lot. Or at least it is if you want them to become fluent speakers. Personally I'm a firm believer in dogme type classes where the students talk about real things.
 * This also takes us into the accuracy versus fluency debate. Students always strive for accuracy (well many of them do) when they would be better advised striving for fluency. This is because a native speaker will be more tolerant of a speaker who speaks fluently but inaccurately then they will be of a speaker who speaks accurately but painfully slowly.
 * Though where this leaves us with your class I don't know.--Bob M 16:40, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The dogme approach looks really interesting. My handicap in teaching is that as a learner, I love grammar. I love schedules, abstractions, etymologic explanations of lexis. I need the linguistic approach to learn myself. I don't learn from doing, I learn from observing and studying. Most students do not like this approach at all.
 * Well, every teacher is different and what works best for you will probably be what you feel best doing. To put it another way it's unlikely that you will get good results using a methodology which you personally don't believe in.
 * On the other hand I think that both you and your students need to feel happy with the method being used. If they are not happy with the approach then that will also cause problems.
 * My style is explained here, but I have the advantage of only teaching one-to-one to students who have explicitly chosen my approach. When I used to give group classes they tended to follow the formats described  here.  Though I must admit that some students could have preferred a more structured approach.  I also used to create internet classes as described  here, but copyright issues prevented me publishing them.
 * But I am very hot on conversation and, as I said, I believe the only way to "teach" it is to give students lots and lots of opportunity to use it.--Bob M 17:54, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I checked this particular lesson in the field, and it worked fine. If it hadn't worked, I wouldn't have put it here. It is an unconventional lesson for a unconventional type of student. I have another lesson on conditionals and a marathon on reported speech and use of tenses. Such a shame I keep designing lesson around chunks of grammar. Well, I guess some people want to teach that as well. Copyright really is a bitch, isn't it?
 * Hey! I don't doubt it worked fine.  I wasn't trying to suggest otherwise! I'm really very grateful for anything you'd like to contribute.
 * Yes, copyright is a problem for this kind of stuff. I used to create two lessons a week but they are all unusable for copyright reasons.  Obviously we could put them up but if Google finds out they are likely to mark down your search engine status.  If not that then if I ever put Google advertisements on here then there would be a problem. Alternatively if the place ever got really big then we would have to clean out all the copyrighted stuff at some point. Finally we have a moral responsibility to obey the law. So it's best to keep things clean from the get go.--Bob M 19:28, 7 June 2011 (UTC)