A Success Story! 

It is always satisfying to hear that an idea picked up during a MATEFL workshops has proved useful. Back in June 1998 one of our members Oisin Jones Dillon attended a workshop on teaching beginners led by Michel Spiteri. One of the ideas outlined by Michel during the workshop made such an indelible impression on him that more than two years later Oisin was able to recall it and use it successfully. One day during summer he was asked, at 5 minutes notice, to do a lesson for two Russian students who had arrived in Malta the previous day. He was told that they were brother and sister; the sister was a zero beginner and prone to fits of crying due to her total lack of confidence, and the brother was a false beginner. Not being used to teaching this level Oisin was a little apprehensive to say the least. Fortunately for him, Michel's idea on activating students' passive knowledge and thereby building confidence in beginners came to mind and saved the day. Here is his account of just how this was achieved.

As I was walking to the classroom, my mind totally void of what I was going to do, suddenly many of the notions expressed by Michel in his workshop on beginners started passing through my mind. Does a zero beginner really exist? How can I make them feel good about themselves after the session? Surely they must have some passive knowledge of vocabulary that they may not even be aware of. How can I draw out this passive knowledge? What area should I start with? By the time I arrived at the door of the classroom I had formulated an idea of how to start the lesson at least and hoped that I could play the rest by ear. As these students had just arrived in Malta their journey would still be fresh in their minds and that would therefore be the area of passive knowledge I would try to activate. 

After my cheerful "Good morning, how are you today?" which yielded no more than a weak attempt at a smile from him and a mournful look from her. I tentatively launched into my new found yet untested passive vocabulary activating mode! Much to the amazement and guarded amusement of the students I spread my arms and made the appropriate sound effects of an aeroplane, and gestured to them to tell me what I was. After what seemed like an hour, but was in fact only a few seconds, the brother said the word 'plane' … "Eureka!" I thought, perhaps a little prematurely, "this just might work". I asked him to write the word 'plane' on the board and then proceeded to try to extract further words associated with air travel by similar miming, gestures, and crude drawings. After a relatively short time I had managed to get, airport, pilot, hostess, passport, visa, tickets, seat belt, passenger and duty free on the board. Not all the words were spelt correctly of course, but this was soon put right by a little eliciting or correction from me. By this time I was feeling quite positive about the way things were going and decided to pick up on one of the vocabulary items 'duty free' and brainstorm as many words as possible from this in the same way. Amazingly they came up with, vodka (obviously!), gin, whiskey, cigarettes, clothes, perfume, mascara, and lipstick. As they were having some problems with pronunciation I felt it necessary to pause at this point and do a little work on the pronunciation of the vowel sounds, nothing too intense but just to clear up a few particularly troublesome sounds. I also briefly covered the indefinite article as they themselves were starting to use it… yet more passive knowledge!! 

By this time the board was covered with air travel related words and I felt that I had probably exhausted their passive knowledge in this area and decided it was time to recycle what they had already produced. I turned the board around so that the students could no longer see the words and started to elicit the words from them verbally by miming and gestures as before. Eventually they came up with all the words again. To finish off the students wrote down the words with pictures in some cases to remind them of the meaning. By the end of the lesson they had touched on all four skills, had spent the entire time speaking English, albeit in lexical units only and there was a tangible difference in the demeanour of both students. As I left the room they smiled broadly and bid me 'goodbye', which was a pleasing and satisfying contrast to the cold and apprehensive reception I had received on entering. 

Thanks Michel! 

[This article appeared in the Winter 2000 newsletter]