A Sample Communicative TBL

Today I had a class with 4 Jr. High School students.

I wanted to teach them simple present and have them use it.

On the board, I wrote the following 9 questions;

1. Where were you born?
2. When were you born?
3. Where did you go to grade school?
4. Who was your favorite teacher?
5. What was your favorite subject?
6. Where do you go to Jr. High School?
7. Who is your favorite teacher?
8. What is your favorite subject?
9. What is your future ambition?

The idea being that I wanted them to notice the difference between Questions 4 and 7 and Questions 5 and 8. I wanted them to be able to make the distinction that starting question 6, the tense changes and becomes present.

The first 5 questions went rather smoothly, questions did arise, such as 'How do you spell September?' or 'How do you say 地理学' in English? (Geography).

One student raised his hand and inquired about the question 4 being repeated again in question 7, but he immediately withdrew his question when he noticed for himself that the question 7 pertained to Jr. High School. The others were listening to his question and at that point they all realized that the part starting at Jr.High was in the present tense.

We had covered the past tense in a previous lesson, but we hadn't really covered the 'be' verb past tense to any great degree. But no questions arose about this and they had completed the task by the end of the lesson. They had to ask all other students, all of the questions.

They communicated pretty much in English for the most part, but this kind of lesson raises the same question as outlined Hobbs, J. 2005 'Interactive Lexical Phrases in Pair Interview Tasks' in Edwards, C., Willis, J. (2005) Teachers Exploring Tasks in English Language Teaching. MACMILLAN, Hampshire, U.K. pp. 143-156. There needs to be some focus on helping students become less stilted in their language and more smooth in their interactions. By introducing students to lexical phrases as suggested by Hobbs, it could help the students use more peripheral language and less of their own Mother tongue.

A definite case for action research on how we could do this within the school as a whole and not just for this class.

Mark