Camp the Program Teaching, Part 2

My second teaching experience with English as a Foreign Language (not Second Language, as there’s a big difference) was quite a bit more successful than my attempt at teaching about American Folktales. There were two major reasons for this, I feel. The first is that the Advanced-Intermediate students were a lot better at English than the Low-Intermediate students I had before. The second is that I tried to dumb the lesson down quite a bit—lowered my expectations on comprehension, left myself enough time to explain things thoroughly, and made my production project fairly simple.

The lesson itself was on circumlocution, and by that I mean, we messed around with riddles. I originally thought that circumlocution would be too hard of a word to even bother trying on EFL students, as some of my Program colleagues didn’t even know what it meant. This class was reading The Giver, though, so I tried it anyway. I don’t know if any of them will remember the word, but they understood it well enough when I said, “It just means to talk around something.” Lots of head nods and “OK!”s to that.

As I said, I did the lesson on riddles. To hook them, I used a couple of movie clips from “Batman Forever”, a movie which none of them had seen. (I’m getting old. First my campers at Arrowhead Lutheran Camp didn’t know the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song, now this…) We then moved on to looking at some “Who am I?” riddles, which were a hit in general. I had some rather smart cookies who got some of the hard ones even, but the hardest ones no one got, mostly I think because of some gaps in language. After this followed a production section in which they were to write their own riddles. If they could stump me, then they would get a prize of a lollypop. Actually, I understood all of their riddles, but I let them think I was stupid for the sake of giving away candy. Maybe Rebecca H. is right… I am a softy. (Again, I’m getting old.) Smiles all around. A successful lesson. Still, my supervisor, Kiehl C. advised me to stay flexible in the future. Usually lessons built around activities tend to flop. This is worrisome, as I intend to be very “activity” based when using TPR in the Hamlet.