By Richard Firsten
Retired ESOL Teacher, Teacher-Trainer, Columnist, Author

One of the many challenges that all teachers face is finding ways to keep the learning experience interesting and dynamic. A good way to do this in a language classroom is to introduce thought-provoking themes or topics that students will relish discussing. Not only are such topics great for conversation practice, but they also allow for flexibility so that a teacher can apply them to focus on specific grammar points and writing assignments.

Here are two juicy themes that always get students thinking and discussing:

In Exile

Teacher speaking to class . . .

You were part of a group that tried to start a revolution in your country. You didn’t succeed and the government captured you and your group. A court has ordered that you and your group will be put into exile. You will be transported to an island where nobody lives. There are many animals and plants on the island that you can use for food, and there is a lot of fresh water. You will have to spend 15 years on the island as your punishment.

You will have no way to communicate with the outside world: no radio, no television, no phones, and there is no electricity on the island. But the government will allow your group to bring ten items – only ten – to the island to help you survive. You need to work together to decide which ten items you should bring to the island. You have 20 minutes to do this.

If you have a small group of students, treat this as a whole-class activity and let everybody discuss the topic together. As they suggest which items are important to take, list them on the board and let the whole group discuss the value or worthlessness of each item. Try to reach a consensus to create a final list of which items they will take. Make sure they clearly explain the reason they have suggested this item or that.

If you have a medium or large class, break the students into small groups, perhaps five or six students per group, with one student acting as the group secretary who will write down which ten items the group decides on. Walk around the room and eavesdrop on your students’ discussions. Help out if need be. When time is up, ask one person in each group to call out the list of items and write them on the board. Then compare the items in each group and have the class as a whole choose which ten items from all those lists should be the final list of things to take to the island.

Who’s Most Responsible?

Teacher speaking to class . . .

A young woman is married to a salesman who travels a lot on business. In fact, he’s almost never home. She’s very lonely. There’s a river that separates her town from one on the other side. While her husband is away on another business trip, she decides to go to the other town to have an adventure. She doesn’t want anybody in her town to know what she’s doing. To go to the other town, she decides to take a ferry across the river.

When she arrives in the other town, she goes to a ____ (You can fill in a place that will be appropriate for the backgrounds of your students. For example, you can say a bar or night club, a park or an outdoor café, etc.) She meets a young man there, they talk and feel a natural attraction for each other, and later she goes with him to his apartment, where she spends the night.

The next morning, she remembers that her husband is coming home that day, and she panics. She must get home right away. She runs out of the young man’s apartment and makes her way back to the ferry. But there’s a problem. She doesn’t have enough money to pay for the ferry ride back to her town and the ferryman refuses to take her if she can’t pay. She runs back to the young man and asks him for money. He gets angry, thinking she’s really a prostitute, and throws her out. She begs the ferryman to take her and she’ll pay him later, but he refuses again.

The young woman knows that there’s a bridge over the river about a mile away from the ferry. Nobody uses that bridge because there’s a dangerous mentally ill man who lives under it. She doesn’t want to use the bridge because of the danger from the man under the bridge, but she’s desperate. She must get home. When the mentally ill man sees her start to cross the bridge, he thinks she’s the Devil who has come to hurt him, so he runs over to her, attacks her, and kills her.

My question to you: Who is most responsible for the young woman’s death? Is it her husband, who was almost never home and made her feel so lonely? Is it the young man in the other town who wouldn’t give her the money to take the ferry back home? Is it the ferryman who refused to take her if she couldn’t pay him? Is it the mentally ill man under the bridge, who killed her because he thought he was protecting himself from the Devil? Or is it the young woman herself who is most responsible for her death?

Have the students discuss this question just as in the first discussion mentioned. Make sure they understand that they have to be able to defend their choices of who is most responsible for her death by giving convincing arguments.

Believe me, you’ll find your students get fully immersed in these discussions with lively, animated conversations. And if you choose to, you can create all sorts of exercises like open-ended sentences and modified cloze procedures based on these topics to practice specific grammar points. You can also have them work on short writing assignments to get the most bang for your ESOL buck.

Have fun with these and any other thought-provoking topics you come up with.

By Tamara Jones
ESL Instructor, SHAPE Language Center, Belgium
jonestamara@hotmail.com

Asking for a favor is a necessary part of life, no matter what country we live in or what our native language is. From small favors, like borrowing someone’s pencil in class, to big favors, like asking a neighbor to keep an eye on our home when we are on vacation, we are constantly requesting assistance from the people in our lives. However, HOW we ask for favors differs vastly from culture to culture.

This can cause problems for students who are trying to ask for a favor in a native English-speaking culture while following the rules of their native language culture. Although the student most likely intends to be polite when asking for a big favor, if he/she is not following the steps we have come to expect in English favor asking, the request might sound too demanding or even rude. The problem is that most text books don’t teach students how to formulate a request for a big favor. While it is perfectly acceptable for someone to say, “Can I please borrow your pencil?” it is much too straight forward to ask, “Can I please borrow your car?” without any preamble, even when the “please” is thrown in and a modal is used.

The 8 Steps of a Request

According to linguists such as Trosborg (1994) and Goldschmidt (1998), native English speakers follow several steps when asking for a favor that requires someone to go outside their daily routine in a noticeable way.

1. Introducing: “Hey! How’s it going?”
2. Warning: “I was wondering if I could ask you a favor?”
3. Disarming: “I know you are really busy right now, but …”
4. Giving a Reason: “My husband is out of town and I am having oral surgery and there is no one to pick me up from the dentist afterwards.”
5. Asking the Favor: “If you are free on Tuesday afternoon, would you mind giving me a ride home?”
6. Minimizing:  “It should just take about 30 minutes.”
7. Promising: “I’ll reimburse you for gas.”
8. Checking – only done with positive responses to the request:  “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

We don’t always use all of the steps, but we pick and choose according to our personal preferences and the relationship we have with the listener. Of course, this is all subconscious. We don’t think, “Okay, now I am going to minimize.” These steps are just an inherent part of how native English speakers have been socialized to ask for a big favor.

Something else worthy of note is the fact that we break basic grammar rules when we ask favors by using the past tense (“I was wondering”) when we very clearly mean the present. As demonstrated by Wigglesworth and Yates (2001), we also use a lot of mitigating words (“just”) to soften the request.

Favor-Asking in the Classroom

It behooves students to learn these steps because pragmatic errors are much more dangerous than grammar errors. If a student makes a grammar mistake, the listener might just think, “Oh, that person is not a native speaker.” But, if a student makes a pragmatic error, the listener probably won’t hear a mistake, he/she may just think the speaker is rude.

Unfortunately, most text books don’t teach these steps and grammar quirks. In my class, I first ask students to think about how they ask for favors in their native language. Then, we watch a video I made of a friend asking me to watch her dogs while she goes out of town. Then, we talk about the steps she uses in the video and why she says what she does. Finally, the students write dialogues in which they ask each other for big favors.

Asking for a big favor is a delicate conversational act. If we don’t explicitly teach students how to maneuver through this linguistic terrain, we may be setting them up for a slew of negative responses.

Goldschmidt, M. (1998) “ Do me a favor: A descriptive analysis of favor asking sequences in American English,” Journal of Pragmatics, 29/2, 129-153.
Trosborg, A. (1994) Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies, New York: de Gruyter Mouton.
Wigglesworth, G. and Yates, L. (2001) “Focusing on Mitigation in English,” paper presented at TESOL, St. Louis.

By Dorothy Zemach
ESL Materials Writer, Editor, Teacher Trainer
Eugene, Oregon
Email: zemach at comcast dot net

A Conversation Board Game

My previous post, Playing Games, Part 1, offered my reasons for playing games in the language classroom and a description of what I feel makes a successful and useful game. However, what most teachers really want to know is, What are some good games that I can make and use? So in this and the following two posts, I will describe how to create and play some games. These can be adapted to a variety of classroom levels, and I have used them with private students and huge classes alike (though note that in larger classes, students will be playing in groups, and  you will need one set of materials per group).

This conversation board game is easy to create, but one of the most useful ones I have in my magic bag of teacher supplies. If the ones in the photos here look a bit beaten up, it’s because I’ve been using them since 1992! The originals are made of heavy cardboard that has been painted and then shellacked; the questions are written with permanent marker. I have also made color photocopies of the boards and had the copies laminated, so that I can roll them up and travel with them when necessary.

The game is a merely a series of questions, such as What do you like to do on rainy days? What is something that makes you angry? How does your family celebrate birthdays? I have simpler versions that feature only topics: children, money, television, birthdays. Students play in groups of 4-5 (more than that means that some students will fall silent).

Each student places a marker on start, and then they take turns to role a die and move their marker around the board. I buy the 8- or 12-sided dice from hobby shops to spread students around the board more; if you don’t have access to these, I recommend using two of the traditional six-sided dice.

When a student lands on a question (or topic), she speaks about it as much as she likes. She can address any aspect of the topic; it is entirely her choice. Her group members ask her questions, but do not offer their own answers or opinions. When she feels she has finished, she passes the die to the next student, and play continues.

It’s not a game that anyone can “win”—if someone reaches the end of the path, the final square says “go back,” and play reverses. I generally have students play for 20-30 minutes, but I have never had a group where any player got all the way back to start.

This is my game for the first day of class. Students get to know one another, and while they are playing, I walk around and listen to them—this is my evaluation of their English level. It provides solid practice in speaking and listening and turn-taking. An extremely simple activity, and yet just having the questions in a “game” format makes it more interesting than the standard pair interview presented on a worksheet. I’ve frequently had classes request to play the game again during other sessions.

More complex questions can of course be designed that practice only the past tense, or conditional structures, or certain vocabulary.

I’ll close with a look at a blank game board I’ve used for grammar games—this takes more effort to create, but you can also consider having students make your game cards or at least using the game over and over again if you are lucky enough to teach the same class for several terms.

This game board, as you can see, has nothing written on the squares other than a few simple game-play instructions not related to language; however, the squares are all painted one of six colors. Each color represents a type of task, and I create a stack of cards with the tasks on them. For example, yellow might indicate “spell this word.” If a student lands on yellow, he draws a card and hands it to a fellow player without looking at it, and the other player asks him to spell the word. If he succeeds, he stays where he is; if he makes a mistake, he moves back one square. Blue squares might ask a student to put a sentence in the present tense into the past, and so on. You could assign students in groups to come up with a series of tasks or exercises as homework and then have each color represent a different group’s cards.

Really, any type of drill-based language exercise can be put onto cards, where suddenly it becomes fun instead of boring. You needn’t think up all of the exercises yourself, even—copy them out of your class textbook as a review. A student who has done Exercise 13 on page 143 doesn’t want to do page 143 again. However, if items from Exercise 13 appeared on the backs of cards in a stack—well, you would be surprised at how happily students drill themselves with those items again and again!

I cannot quite get away from the issue of usefulness, however! And I would like to stress again that the use of any game must not only be clear to you, but clear to your students. You should always let a class know why they are doing what they are doing, and when the game is concluded, point out to them what language they practiced and how they practiced it.