On Topic - How do I introduce the theme of a unit?
Activating schemata, retrieving prior knowledge, accessing students’ background experience, whatever you want to call it, is a key element to a lesson’s success. For students this allows them to open up their internal resources to engage with the lesson content or language and sets up the lesson in a way to encourage the use of English and a sense of collaboration from the get go. For teachers this allows us to be more efficient and get a sense of what students already know. This information can drive what we might need to teach or what we can avoid doing in the lesson. This blog will show you some ideas of how we can do this and introduce topics and themes of a unit to ensure our students are engaged and ready to learn. I am going to use the new Macmillan adult coursebook Speak Your Mind, Level 1 to illustrate how this can be done. I will also use the Speak Your Mind teachers’ edition for ideas and inspiration. Please feel free to adapt as you see fit.
Individual work
To start off have students work individually to list familiar words and phrases related to the unit topic. This simple activity helps build their confidence by highlighting the fact that they already know a lot of English. Use this part of the lesson to give students an opportunity to think about how the unit topic relates to their own lives. Look at the example below from Speak Your Mind.
As you can see students are encouraged to look at the things they do on a daily basis and make a list. This is highly personalised and by being so will bring more motivation to complete the activity. To adapt this you could ask them to list this by using clines. A cline is a scale of vocabulary items that goes from one extreme to another, for example, from high to low, or from big to small. By using clines we are focussing the activity more and asking students to take a bit more time and thinking before completion.
Peer teaching and learning
The next stage is to add some collaboration and discussion. Students can simply compare their clines and discuss the areas they have chosen. See an example below of this follow up to individual work.
You will notice that students can now add more words they may not have thought of themselves to their clines, or using a different colour, could add words that they do not know or may not have thought of. With any peer teaching or discussion it’s important to think beforehand what kind of language students’ may need to complete the discussion. This ‘process language’ or ‘scaffolding’ is essential to ensure the activity is completed effectively in English. It is particularly important when teaching monolingual classes to maximise the English used in class. Examples of this process language could be in the form of questions such as “What do you think?” or “What did you put?” You might want to also add language for agreeing and disagreeing like “I agree but….” or “That’s what I thought”. The activity you do, will dictate the language needed.
An adaptation or follow up of this collaboration would be to write percentage scales on pieces of A 4 paper. For example 0 - 25% on one piece, 25 – 50% on other, 50 – 75% on the next and 75 – 100% on the final one. Stick these in the four corners of the room and then using students ideas read out the vocabulary items. Students then move to the corner that corresponds to their own reflection and then discuss with the person next to them using the pre-taught process language.
Video and Speak Your Mind Questions
Videos are a great way to engage 21st century language learners. They can be used to provide context, language or content knowledge. In Speak Your Mind the videos are designed to provide input and a model to encourage critical thinking and discussion. They complement a Speak Your Mind Question which you can see below.
In each video, two vloggers answer the Speak Your Mind question. One vlogger expresses one point of view, while the other one answers with the opposite point of view. The video ends with the vloggers posing the question to the students. The two opposing answers provide a model for the students’ own responses.
The Speak Your Mind Questions do not have specific right or wrong answers because the purpose is to make students think and allow them to express their opinions. These questions are part of the critical-thinking thread in Speak Your Mind. Students are encouraged should think in terms of a continuum. For example, in Unit 2 Work/Life Balance, some students may think that it’s best to work a great deal in order to be successful, some students may think that it’s best to have a lot of personal time in order to be happy, while other students may think that the best work/life balance is something in between those two extremes. Again you may need to provide process language and scaffolding here but by using the model provided students should be more comfortable providing reasons why they agree or disagree.
For me this is an excellent use of video and critical thinking and I would encourage you to try something like this with your classes. To follow up students could record their own videos and post them on a platform where they can comment on each other’s work.
If you don’t have a video here, you can still come up with your own ideas to give two different opinions. Encourage students to act as devil’s advocates and come up with opposing views even if they don’t necessarily agree with the views themselves. This could be done as a speaking activity where people move to different areas of the room that have been designated as areas that correspond to their views and then discuss or as a writing activity where a question is posed, but in order to answer, they must provide two different points of view.
Unit Summaries
At the bottom of the Unit Opener page, there is a summary of what students will learn in the unit. You can use this to go over so students know what they will learn in the unit. See below for an example.
Another way to use this summary is to have students close their books and you dictate parts of the summary to the students. They then have to draw a picture that reflects the summary and then share this with each other. After dictating once or twice and the students sharing the pictures, they then have to recreate the sentence or sentences you dictated. Once you have checked that they are right you can then go into more detail about what the unit is about.
Alternatively, you can use this summary to create a flipped student centred approach. Split the summary up and give students homework to research about different areas of the unit. For example, everyone must complete the first summary sentence and be ready to present something about their families and the jobs they do. Group A have to research and explain briefly about sentences 2 and 3. Group B have sentences 4 & 5 and group C have sentences 6 & 7. When they come back to class they are put into groups of 3 members each consisting of an A, B and C student. They then have to explain what they researched. This peer teaching approach is a sure fire way to make sure that all students do their homework as other students are relying on them to do it.
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