Dogme with young learners?

by Chris Roland

Last week we had our mid-course parents’ evening. The mother of Manuel, one of my seven-year-olds, explained how she had overheard him telling a younger cousin about his English classes with me. ‘I have classes in the academy,’ he said ‘and guess what? You’re allowed to stand up when you want and walk about!’

That’s what Manuel takes away from my lessons – what he values or what seems noteworthy to his seven-year-old mind. I think it’s easy for us to forget sometimes just how much of an oppressive experience being in a classroom might become for our young learners if we are not careful.

I’ve already spoken at length about movement in the young learner (YL) classroom and you will find this in archived editions of English Teaching Professional and also in my methodology book Structuring Fun for Young Learners (2020). Whilst I’m hoping that we can get movement in class back on the agenda now that Covid-19 is, touch wood, making an exit, in this article I’d like to talk about another facet of self-expression: allowing our students more voice. Doing so will involve a small battery of techniques used in concerted fashion. It may open up a number of subsequent puzzles as well.

About this time last year, I started off a lesson with a group of twelve seven- and eight-year-olds, only to be hit, as usual, with an avalanche of questions even before we had got proceedings properly underway.

I’d been working the group quite hard with worksheets to prime them for some upcoming exams and felt that there hadn’t been a great deal of human connection of late. So, I decided to acknowledge some of these questions rather than deflect or dodge them.

Alejandro asked me, in Spanish, if I was wearing walking boots or ‘boots for the countryside’ as the literal translation might be. Instead of responding to his L1 question verbally, I boarded a translation into English:

Are your boots for the countryside?

Using pre-established signals and captivation gestures, I brought a halt to any other activity in the classroom, focused everyone’s attention on the sentence on the board, modelled it and got them to repeat it as a class.

I then prompted Alejandro to ask me the question in English on his own and replied to him:

‘Yes, they are. Problem?’

‘Problem?’ in my YL lessons, is the first part of an established adjacency pair (in the same way as ‘Salaamu alaikum’ and ‘Wa alaikum salaam’ or ‘How are you?’ and ‘I’m fine thanks?’ are). So it was no surprise he responded with the second part of our set sequence, which is: ‘No problem.’

I then noticed Sofía had her hand in the air.

‘Sofía.’

‘¿Que te ha pasado en el dedo?’ (What happened to your finger?)

I was indeed sporting a small plaster on one of my left-hand digits. I quickly boarded the English equivalent under Alejandro’s boot question and together we repeated it. Then Sofía asked on her own. My reply involved a short explanation about a new knife I had been using at home, together with a simple carving knife-type shape and the words ‘new’, ‘sharp’ ‘knife’ and ‘cut’. Victor had his hand up and asked me if I was going to use the knife again. We went through the same steps as before and once he’d asked me in English, I replied:

‘Yes, but very carefully.’

So this is what I’m doing is it? I thought. I’m taking that for as long as I could and spent the next 30 minutes reconnecting with the group, responding to their queries and listening to what they had to tell me. I used the same combination of techniques throughout. This involved taking my students’

L1 questions as entry point. It involved boarding the English equivalent of those to both create our language input and to make each enquiry the common property of everyone in the room, as well as a usable focal point. It also involved using the group’s, and to a greater extent, each individual questioner’s wish for an answer as leverage in order to get them to jump through the linguistic hoop of repeating each question various times, before receiving that answer. Finally, it involved alternating between whole class drilling where everyone was briefly involved before returning to authentic communication with the original questioner.

The next question was: Can we see the naughty Panda advert? The brand Panda Cheese has a series of commercials viewable on YouTube where a giant Panda appears in a number of everyday settings and does something naughty every time people are offered and refuse the cheese. My usual reply ‘Wait and see’ came as no surprise there.

This was followed by another child asking: ‘How do you write so quickly in English?’. I replied that it was practice. ‘Es su idioma.’ commented a second student to the first so I quickly wove that into our material by boarding It’s because it’s his language, asking the second student to repeat it in English then reaffirming his point myself.

I can write in some other languages as well’ I said, and scribbled up: Hola, yo soy Chris. as well as its Arabic counterpart:

‘Can you speak Spanish?’ asked one little girl, overlooking the fact that the whole activity was underpinned by translation and forgetting that the two of us had had various conversations in Spanish previously.

The next batch of questions consisted of variations on: ‘Can you write my name in Arabic?’ and soon the board was peppered with my own impromptu renderings of student names into that script and a couple into Cyrillic, of which I have an even more rudimentary grasp.

The next question was interesting: ‘How will our parents know where we are?’. It came about as we had changed classrooms five minutes in, from one building to another, due to the projector (which we were not using anyway) flickering in our usual room. I reassured Alba, the questioner, that I would lead the class out to the normal pick-up point and then received the question: ‘Which room do you prefer?’. This seemed like a good occasion for a whole class vote, so I boarded:

I prefer this classroom.

I prefer the other classroom.

and each student got to vote by repeating one of the sentences, with the teacher keeping a tally. Consensus was split, but the normal classroom came out on top. After a total of about 30 minutes, we repeated the questions remaining on the board one more time (I had needed to clear some of the earlier ones off to make some space), I allowed the children to each practise writing their own name in Arabic on a mini-board and we did indeed watch the Panda Cheese advert.

Since this first time, I have incorporated ‘Question time’ slots into lessons with six- to eight-year-olds on various occasions. I now tend to cap proceedings off at twenty minutes thereabouts, (or when my board is full) leaving some time to dedicate to our institution’s set syllabus as well.

In their 1969 book Teaching as a subversive activity, Postman and Weingartner suggest an entire curriculum based around students’ questions (thanks to Jim Scrivener for bringing that book to my attention in a talk he gave at IATEFL Exeter in 2008) and as recently as this summer Scott Thornbury, cofounder of Dogme ELT (a deep-end communicative, materials light, student-as-resource-driven paradigm, for anyone unfamiliar) gave an online talk entitled: When the learners ask the questions.

So we see that this strand of thinking in language teaching is an enduring one. I think the issue with trying to give lower and middle primary-aged groups an increased voice comes down to classroom management issues. I’ve heard statements along the lines of ‘You can’t do Dogme with YLs’ and whilst it is true that it would be unrealistic to expect them to sit around just chewing the cud, as it were, keenly and calmly listening to each other, by boarding up selected questions as I have described, and keeping things fastpaced, we can harness the enthusiasm that they too have for real communication with their teacher.

A number of additional techniques will help you to turn the language that emerges from a ‘Question time’ phase into lasting and useful input. First off, between hearing a learner’s question and boarding the English equivalent, you have a few brief seconds of think time in which to decide what language will be most useful to your students, most suited to their level and the closest to the rest of the language in their coursebook.

For example: Are your boots for the countryside? was not a bad sentence for Alejandro’s group but perhaps walking boots or hiking boots would have been a more useful term for them to learn, and the sentence: What are you wearing on your feet? though not exactly what he asked, would have lent itself to future classroom practice and activities better.

Another point to consider is the importance of having students repeat the boarded language multiple times to increase uptake. If a child asks a question that is the same or similar to a previous question, we can have them repeat what is already on the board. Thisnot only speeds things up and saves board space but it also provides that valuable repetition.

When reviewing the boarded questions at the end, another technique we can employ is to ask the class if they can remember who asked each question. As we work through the questions, we can add the initials or first few letters of each child’s name to the question. You can see this is what I have done with questions from a more recent ‘Question time’ in Figure 4.

This was a much more functional spot, as it were, and mostly involved questions about what we were going to do later on. Not all of these questions will be 100% transparent to the reader. Several concern a memory challenge and progress chart as well as a turning ‘wheel of fortune’ that we use to keep track of who is doing what each lesson in terms of being the monitor and other helping roles. Again though, it shows how boarding questions in this fashion is a productive way of harnessing students’ energy at the start of a lesson. Recording language resulting from such phases, such as by taking a photo of the board, enables you the teacher to revisit and rework some of that language in future lessons, perhaps adding a number of items or whole questions to your set language syllabus.

Another very important consideration is that we want our YL students to understand the questions we are giving them. As well as them knowing that the question just boarded is the equivalent of their own attempt in English or their own L1 utterance, we can wholly or partially use their L1 to check understanding of various elements within the question. For example, pointing to the following line:

What happened to your finger?

I might ask my Spanish students:

‘Which word means dedo?’ (finger) or ‘Which word means ‘pasó’? (happened).

Finally, leading an extended round of student-fielded questions does require some assertive and pro-active classroom management. To this end, it’s useful to establish the idea of what Sue Cowley calls ‘one voice’ – the idea that we all listen to whoever’s turn it is to speak at that moment.

Teachers in larger set-ups than my own (I currently teach groups of 12 in the private language sector) might ask: ‘But how can I do this with a group of twenty or thirty?’ My response is to come at the question from a slightly different angle. Blanket suppression, where no student is given the option to ask any questions at all, is going to sound the same in any set up, small or large, as it will result in zero student voice. In a larger class, you might not get through every student in one phase, but you can still continue till you have filled up your board and surely this is better than only the teacher asking questions? I would also argue that in some cases, question phases like this might even be better-suited for mainstream settings, where classroom conventions and protocol for turn-taking may be more firmly established and, often, where teachers have larger boards.

As soon as your young learners realise that this is part of the lesson where they have a mandate to ask questions, you will see hands shooting into the air. If they haven’t got questions, they will start to invent them. You may also notice that some of their questions are not questions at all, but rather them telling you stuff. Whether you distinguish between ‘Question Time’ and ‘Telling Time’ (as in ‘Who’s got a question for me?’ one day versus ‘Who wants to tell me something?’ another – both extraordinarily powerful prompts) is something for you to decide. What I would reiterate though is that YLs relish the chance to be heard and that a meaningful conversation with an adult who they can trust and respect is often far more motivating and rewarding for them than any points system we can come up with.

References

Cowley S (2018) Behaviour Management Strategies Every Teacher Should Know. Available on Tips 4 Teachers YouTube channel.

Roland C (2020) Structuring Fun for Young Learners in the ELT Classroom. Pavilion Publishing.

Postman N and Weingartner C (1969) Teaching as a subversive activity. Dell Publishing Co, Inc: New York

Thornbury S (2021) When the learners ask the questions. Online plenary for APPI given 17/06/21

source: www.modernenglishteacher.com Volume 31 Issue 3