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Habemus Linguistics I

Since always foreign students want to learn slang. I must say I don’t understand why they have this urge to learn slang that passes from generation to generation of students. Despite that, what matters is they want to learn, slang is part of the language and no, they definitely don’t disrupt the language whatever it is. I also decline the argument that internet has been hindering the language – after all, it is considered the guilty for the accelerated metamorphosis of the language creating, then, more and more slang. Ok, but what does this have to do with us teachers? Everything.

In our recent article Having Our English Outside The Box, we talked about the possibility to play with language and still be proficient. Well, you may not like this perspective, but I recommend you get used to accepting some students’ utterances that were once reckoned as “wrong”. We have already mentioned the ultimate use of ‘because’ playing the role of preposition, but what we have been witnessing every single day is a massive attack of linguistic creativity that we teachers need to be aware so we identify whether an utterance is slang or not and, in case it is one, we have to check if the context it was used is indeed appropriate. This is our role: show our students that language has an infinite number of possibilities, but there are situations in which some linguistic forms are more adequate. It is like I always say “if we are going to a barbecue, shorts and flip-flops are ok, but if we’re going to a business meeting, we gotta suit up”. This has to be our spirit whenever our students produce (1) or (2). We have to position the appropriate moment for their utterance.

(1)That film is amaze.

(2)Totes.

Notice that I did not use the “semantically strange” symbol for there many examples of utterances such as those, therefore I consider these slangs as part of a speech community. The case in (1) was not regarded as ungrammatical also for the same reason previously stated. Furthermore, although ‘amaze’ is a reduction of ‘amazing’, playing the syntactic role of adjective, we can take into consideration that this is a new word, thus eliminating any sort of confusion it may cause with the verb ‘amaze’ which would turn the sentence ungrammatical.

Alright. You might ask me then “what’s new about all of this?”. The greatest news here is the origin of this, the internet. This wonderful man made creation that connects everything to everything to everyone has rubbed on our faces how mutant languages are. Take Twitter, for instance. It is one big source of linguistic change. Tweeters know that the message space is highly limited which forces our students to express themselves in a more objective and reduced manner, generating a mutation in the language that would make Professor Charles Xavier jealous. That is why we have the commonly known OMG, LOL and they should never be considered a defeat in language teaching, instead they have to be taken as enriching factor of the language. Imagine how creative our students have to be to convey a message in a short space. With this scenario, we will obviously have abbreviations like IDK, reductions like ‘gonna’, ‘gotta, ‘wanna’, ‘shoulda’, ‘woulda’ and, why not, syntactic changes that end up being mistaken with slangs that are part of some speech communities. And yes, our students will do their best to speak “bad English” just because it is cool. Bucholtz already wrote about it brilliantly.

Thus, my fellow teachers, we have the duty (because we’re pros) to be in touch with the online universe for it materializes in the real world and makes our students coin words, abbreviate their speech, play with the language. Therefore I say it again, the internet has not been disrupting our students’ speech, it has only been going through some changes which is normal in the teenage years and with these changes we see a new type of language, pictorial for times, that facilitates communication.

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Video Game + PBL + English Class = Fun

Summer is over. I hear the sad trumpets echoe in the cloudy sky of a rainy day that this news carries while reaching every single fellow teacher. But this shouldn’t mean fun is over at all! As a friend of mine wrote in his thesis “let the games begin”.

Gamefication is hype. Teachers have finally realized that making some activities into games can be a fun way and also effective for language learning, for kids are crazy about games. If this game is any sort of video game, they will certainly ignore everything around them and they will focus 120% on the game – I speak for myself because my girlfriend always complains whenever I get a hold of my PS3. Using video games can also be a great experience forthe English classes we design so that we work the Project-based Learning approach (PBL). In addition to having students work ipfor a ling period, they will certainly become more motivated and excited to perform the assigned task.

Video game won’t actually teach English itslef, the great insight here is to use electronic games in English classes to make the student use their linguistic knowledge and apply it when playing, as James Paul Gee stated (2005). In the online course for teacher we offer – still on progress – we talk thoroughly about how to design PBL activities, but it is worth to remember the importance video games have in the learning process of our students. “Nothing happens until a player acts and makes decisions” (Gee, 2005: 34). This is the background for activities that involve video games and more precisely the application of PBL with these games even in the classroom, which means making our students use their language knowledge to take decisions, create and perform tasks. Before applying a PBL we need to have a well-structured lesson plan where the environment for communication in English already exists and is familiar to students so that information exchange and knowledge sharing happen. Language is a type of knowledge that we acquire and interaction with other students that are working on a similar project enrich the process of language acquisition as they pair up or gather in groups to work inside the classroom according to what you established in your lesson plan.

Maybe you haven’t heard of this game before, but your students have…. for sure. Minecraft. This game has been catching everyone’s attention and it has also been hooking up the kids’ time becoming a worldwide big hit even for some adults. Minecraft is a game available for PS3, Xbox, mobile, PCs and it consists of using a strategy to reach a pre-established goal. You have to stock up blocks to create a world that you imagine and according to the game’s play mode (survival, creative, spectator, hardcore) you need to build things that are determined by the game so you don’t lose. In our English classes we can create a project which students play Minecraft in survival mode and as the game offers guidelines so they continue their project, some lexicon can be drilled, i.e. we teachers play the game beforehand to get to know it and note possible words to present to our students in the classroom before we start the project. When they face unknown words, they look them up and bring the definition to the classroom.

There is also room to work out our students’ speech so they present what they have built and the reason to do so. This means, through this presentation students will have the opportunity to use the words they looked up and to tell their accomplishments in the target language. Thus, we will have the needed motivation for our students to learn English as a second language and the video game become our ally, not to mention that the game itself is really cool. The educational bias that Minecraft has is such that an educational version of the game was released a couple of months ago with special features that can be used in the classroom and, why not, in our English classes. We can also find other ideas to be replicated or improved on their website. Maybe even lesson plans for other subjects that can be adapted to our English classes.

Vacation must be over, but the fun must go on. Surprise your students with this PBL activity that involves technology right now for the beginning of the semester. They’ll love it.

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Around The World With English Language

Getting around to world to know it. Knowing that chopsticks are the silverware in Japan, that India has a religious perspective different from ours, knowing that Germany was once divided by a wall, that Brazil (our land) has states with no beaches. All this info play an important role in the acquisition process of a second language and having students without access to that knowledge or maybe not motivating them to acquiring such knowledge contributes to a poor performance from Brazilian students with regard to English as a second language. It’s time to make a change.

You might ask me ‘what’s the relation between learning English and knowing that Finland can go through a 6-month period without a blue sky’? Well, all possible. Starting from the awareness that the world is bigger than the community where our students live, that in certain places they may find different people speaking different languages. Thus, understanding that there places where people refer to something they liked using an expression other than ‘que da hora’ is fully relevant for ESL classes and the upcoming book of Professor Cláudia Zuppini for teachers development has an entire chapter about it. For our students with a better performance in English – or maybe those who have a clearer understanding of the language – language transfer is easier when learning that ‘que da hora’ is equivalent to ‘that’s awesome’ in English as it was mentioned before in our article about the use of native language in ESL classes. bur for the students who are still taking the first steps of the second language acquisition path – our younger students – our job finds obstacles for they don’t have the cultural knowledge yet due to their early age and sometimes the socio-financial situation of our students don’t allow the blooming of such knowledge. Thus, we teachers have double work: ring the students the cultural knowledge and turn it into linguistic knowledge, have them understand that the world is gigantic and that learning English as a second language will make the world just as close as our noisy neighbor.

How to bring together all the places of this planet and have them be close to our students given the difficulties our students have to travel and get to know the Eiffel Tower, for instance? Super easy. All it takes is a cardboard and a cutting-edge technology of virtual reality. Google has been invested in its educational department and it has just released the Expeditions, a virtual reality cardboard that let students “visit” any place in the world. Let’s try to come up with an activity for students of the first grades of elementary. The main goal here is to make students talk (of course that reading and writing are also important), so if we use this device and send our kids out in field trip to NY’s zoo, we are going to work on the acquisition of new vocabs, but in a very contextualized manner and also inserted in the syntactic structure. we can divide the class in two parts – since English classes in Brazil take place once or maybe twice a week and last 50 minutes in the average. In the first class of the week we can use our time to use the first two Ps: Presentation so we present what is new which is in our example here names of animals and sounds they produce. Then, the students can Practice with the assistance of flashcards and guidance from the teacher when they’ll tell the names of the animals they see and also the sound they make, all that in the target language. So far, everything looks simple and trivial. In the Performance phase, during the second class of the week, Google Expeditions comes in. After the presentation phase, have students “visit” NY’s zoo so that they know the animals from all parts of the world and later on present to the class the coolest animals and their sounds. as a follow-up activity, the teacher can compare the sounds animals make in Brazil with the ones in English.

The world is really big and we must try to show it the most we can to our students. Knowledge beyond community stimulates them to communicate, besides giving the students information that there are languages other than that they speak, and with regard to English, it is an international language. Travelling around the world is an impossible task to perform with all our students, but technology has come to our help. Have the students get acquainted with other cultures, it will trigger a global awareness that will definitely enhance the acquisition process of a second language.

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A GPS For The Scavenger Hunt

I am pretty sure that all teachers, and I am one of them, have already used bi-dimensional maps whether they were those fold-up maps, illustrations that were in  textbooks or even a simple map drawing on the board. But, imagine the reaction of a student whose daily routine is all about iPads, Playstations and smartphones. Such map would be really boring to this kid.

That’s exactly when someone might say “map apps are also bi-dimensional. How can they be so different from what has been done in the classroom?”. Well,  many maps nowadays are 3-D which means that teaching directions and even some expressions that are very useful for those who travel often or those who don’t want to get lost when looking for a place or address. As a drilling activity the teacher can design a game in which the classroom becomes a neighborhood and then students are separated in groups. Each group  can be a car, given that every car would have 4 people, then there would be around 10 cars on the “street”. In case there is and odd number of  students, there can also be pedestrians and bikers. The teacher can be a traffic guard controlling the “traffic” so that students respect the rules (all communication must be made in the target language). When students do something other than what they were asked to, the teacher corrects them using the appropriate technique granting the “traffic” flow.

I know I have mentioned Michael Tomasello and his study on language acquisition through its use before. This means that interaction takes an important role in the acquisition process of sintax, phonetics, semantics and pragmatics whereas the brain then has the responsibility of decoding  all these features, thinking, in other words, to produce sppech in an organized manner. I wonder if the proposed activity is aligned with Tomasello’s proposal. Let’s find out. The interaction between student and teacher happens naturally and the fact this is a group activity the Zone of Proximal Development takes place and students can assess one another and communication in the target language (maybe with very few words in Portuguese) stimulates cognition in the acquisition process. Mission accomplished! But what about the map? And what is so techie about it? At the end of the lesson plan there may be a performance activity, when students fly freely, without interference from teachers. Considering a class of Primary school, or maybe the first grades of Secondary, the teacher can suggest a scavenger hunt. The plus here is tat the teacher can hand out GPS devices and set them to English language so that students find their treasure by listening to the directions given by the device.

Almost everyone has seen and used a GPS device. Stepping into a classroom with an activity that requires old fold-up maps is nonsense in a context and reality where students use smartphones and tablets. Doing it so might demotivate students and they are not going to be as engaged as you wanted them to, resulting in a poor performance. Once motivation is zero, then the whole process is disabled. But that is an issue for another post.

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Let’s Hang Out

In the last 14 years working as an English teacher the top-3 most heard sentences from students are ‘I hate English’, ‘this present perfect stuff has no equivalent in Portuguese, does it’ and ‘this phrasal verb thing is too hard’. Well I would respectively reply like ‘maybe our previous teachers were not so good then’, ‘yes, there is’ and ‘yes’. Say what?! Sure it is hard, phrasal verbs are idioms that carry a strong semantic function and therefore are really tricky to be taught and learned.

The dilemma of teaching an idiom is how to shape meaning so that students understand it and at the same time the teacher’s talking time is reduced? Of course that depending on the methodology adopted, the teacher will indeed speak a lot (not recommended by CELTA), but with a fun and well prepared activity the teacher may have an A+ performance in the classroom and also engage his or her students. As it was previously discussed in another article, Google offers more than just a searching tool. There is something called Hangouts which is some sort of Skype embedded in Android OS and allows us to make calls and video calls with those who have a Google account. In addition, hangouts provides people with live stream automatically uploaded to a YouTube  account which means that someone might be visiting MoMa and call a group of students who are inside a school on the other side of the planet. Although this might look like a Google ad it isn’t. What happens is that there are so many resources available that can be used in the classroom that encourage the development of activities.

Let’s take the following phrasal verbs: ‘come up with’, ‘get along with’ and ‘set in’. The teacher can prepare a very interactive and communicative activity using Hangouts. Making use of context that involves friendship, social interactions as themes, it is possible to introduce such idioms and for drilling students can interview one another. To make practice more interesting, the teacher can hand out roles to students in which they can be athletes, celebrities, filmmaker, whereas the other student (considering an activity in pairs) plays a journalist. Students can also drill questions besides the idioms for many find asking questions quite hard to be produced. In order to make it up for the time possibly spent by the teacher to introduce the content of the day and the highly used talking time, the activity can have a grand finale with the students’ performance using Google’s tool. Inside the computer lab, students can make contact with other students around the world who were previously arranged by the teacher so that interview could be held and the studied phrasal verbs could be used. As the video is automatically uploaded to YouTube, the teacher can evaluate the students more accurately.

Thus, learning a controversial such as idioms (frowned by many) gets a plus through a very  real experience that might motivate your students. Leave your students hanging out with other from abroad with Hangouts using the phrasal verbs that were taught in the classroom.

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Google Beyond Research

Everyone is more than used to turning to the greatest research tool in the world: Google. Everything there is in this planet can be found there, there is not a single thing this tool cannot  fetch and if Google cannot find it, then it just does not exist. What maybe few second language teachers know is that there is also another tool that can be very well used in language classes.

Even those teachers who are not tech aficionados ended up giving in to Google. However, a very low number of them have used their precious time of lesson preparation to explore every single corner on Google For Education. Calendars can be synced, files are shared and edited there, which is good for students’ work. In case you haven’t been introduced to each other yet, Google Drive offers their users a powerful tool to receive and share content with your students which means that if you want to flip your classes, you can kiss goodbye your excuses. Inside the core of lesson planning (warm-up, drilling, performance), with the resource of Google Drive it is possible to create a video clip that is going to be used at the warm-up stage. For instance, supposing that the content of the day is about looks, it might be interesting to go to a park and record all walks of people tall, short, fit, skinny, blondes, brunettes, people with curly or straight hair. Such a beginning of activity can expand the options for other sections of the lesson plan and, in addition, you will not be stuck with the school’s technical resources which are, in many cases, unfortunately limited.

On the other hand if Google Drive is already your BFF and you think you know all its features like the back of your hand, coding may be a good option for you to work with in your classroom. Yup, coding. That programming language used to design websites, apps and softwares. Of course Google’s Made With Code is not going to teach us exactly how to write codes, instead it uses the concept of functional blocks and offers a valuable tool for second language classes. Creating an avatar through geometric shapes can also be a fun activity with a techie pitch for K-12 groups. In this activity creativity and logical thinking are worked on and the outcome can become a tangible evidence of how students perceive, for instance, a character of book previously read. The stimulus for students to present and justify, in the target language, what each part of the avatar represents will make them communicate and use the vocab they learned such as geometrical shapes, colors, body parts. And what about asking your students to reproduce a poem in another language, with the same theme, but with a contemporary viewpoint? Too boring? Not if they can make their work into music. After they make their version of the poem, the students can use Google to create beats and become a rockstar for one day.

We all know how powerful Google has become and its education division has developed so impressive tools as the research. Knowing how to use such tools hinges on how willing a teacher is to understand how they work and think about implementing them in their activities. Go beyond the basics.

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