Sean Banville's Blog

7. Discussion

Create your own discussions/questions tailored to what’s happening around the world. Quite often they students are unaware of the bad things happening in the world so creating a discussion that raises their awareness of this can start their interest in different issues.

The following questions about the East Africa famine are based on information from the front page of UNICEF.

Instead of you writing the questions, give students a blank template for then to write. The questions my students write are usually a lot more original than mine.

8. Inter-cultural communication

Technology affords many teachers the opportunity to really talk to the world and get to understand other cultures. Try to team up with teachers and classes in other countries. Sites like Twitter are great places to start to arrange inter-class chats / discussions.

9. Support the less fortunate of the world

• Write to people in troubled situations or countries with letters of support and friendship. Start a pen pal project with people in another country.
• Skype them.
• Set up a web page that shows you care about people in less fortunate situations than yours.
• Create a Voxopop or Voicethread page for your students to reach out.
• Get students to tweet their support when people rise up against repression or show they are not alone when a natural disaster strikes.
• Provide opportunities to give. There are so many charities and organizations out there that need our support. Putting the logo, URL or live link on your materials will encourage students to give. Make it relevant to the content in the materials. Every little helps.

10. Student campaigns

• Make writing activities real by getting students to write to political leaders, UN representatives and other key figures who can help bring about change.
• Encourage students to use social media to make a difference. One tweet on Twitter or comment on Facebook can get a multinational scrambling into action to change its ways. Encourage students to believe they can make a difference.
• Get students involved in a project in which they create an awareness campaign – they have to make the posters, design the logos and website, create the aims and ideas, etc.

If you have success with any of the above, please drop by again and leave a comment to let us know about it.

News agencies, newspapers and news channels can be biased or sensationalist, choosing to tell what they think their audience wants to hear instead of the truth. They often lie, play into the hands of political parties, spurt out government propaganda, or misrepresent the facts.

This is often damaging and changes the world in a negative way

How?

• It makes people believe things that are not true
• It propagates hatred of others
• It fuels conflict
• It tarnishes whole cultures, religions, nations…

We see, hear and read examples of this everywhere:

• Our own press (wherever we are in the world) is driven by political agendas. In many countries the press is used by governments to maintain power.
• Dictators use the press as a tool to sow seeds of mistrust, fear and hatred of neighbours or each other.
• Or the media just wants to paint a more dramatic story to sell more newspapers. Japan’s nuclear crisis turned into into a scaremongering-fest for the press with headlines of “Armageddon”, “Apocalypse”, “Worse than Chernobyl”, etc.
• Many newspapers see a good story in hurting people’s careers, lives and reputations as a good way to increase sales. The truth often comes second.
• Newspapers influenced by political parties tell people how to vote.

One of the things teachers can do is to bring into the classroom different stories and get students to question the truthfulness or integrity of reporting of the news. Foster a sense of “media-bias literacy”.

How?

1. With lower levels, we can bring in a news story from two very different perspectives and let the students find differences. Get them to choose which country’s media each report is from.
2. Ask students if they think the story is 100% true. Get them to provide a percentage of the “falseness”.
3. With monolingual students, show them a report from their country’s media (if there are English-language newspapers available) and the same news from a less partisan country’s media.
4. Ask students to find two sides of an argument in a news report.
5. Ask pairs/groups of students to list three parts of a story they think might not be totally true.
6. Get students to find (or you provide them with) synonyms for more emotive words (terrorist, apocalypse, collapse, chaos, thugs…) and ask them to swap them with less loaded alternatives to see how the tone (and perhaps the truth) of the text changes.
7. Look for hidden agendas in stories on the environment. Why might a news report be defending logging or the mining of a protected area?
8. Get students to rewrite or summarise an article in a fairer, more balanced way.
9. Get students to write a letter to the Editor to point out a report’s bias.
10. Analyse the headline – marks out of 10 for sensationalism or bias.
11. Analyse the headline, accompanying photos and captions for nastiness or silliness (especially with tabloids.
12. Write down some ideas from the article you think are biased and get students to find them.
13. Ask students to debate both sides (or the alternative side if not given) of a story.
14. Ask students to discuss what the bias is and why, and what harm it might do.

Getting students to question what’s in the news may go a small way in creating less negativity and more understanding towards others.

I’d be happy to post your comments on ideas you have for introducing bias in the media in the classroom.

If you try any of the above ideas, please let us know here.

The Internet is a great medium to get things changed and flex your muscles. It can greatly reduce the power balance between the powerful and mighty corporations, and Jo Average – almost to the degree that Ms/Mr Average is stronger. A single tweet, a comment on Facebook or a blog post can change the world. We do have power to get things changed.

Three examples

a) Tweeting for Rwanda

Make writing activities real by getting students to write to, tweet, comment on the Facebook page of political leaders, UN representatives, business leaders  and other key figures who can help bring about change or who are doing great wrong. One great example of this was Tara Kendyle’s project in which her class http://www.tm4rwanda.com/. In Tara’s words:

In April of 2010, we started a student project to spread awareness of the Rwandan genocide that occurred in 1994. My students and I wanted to remember the victims of Rwanda because there is no “real” memorial here in the U.S. Our goal was to receive 1 Million Tweets in 100 days in remembrance of those who died at the hands of hate. The project earned us a complimentary ad valued at over $50,000 in The USA Today newspaper to spread our message of remembrance and peace … While we did not reach our goal of 1 Million Tweets, our lives were changed. My 23 teens now know their voices make a difference. These students are changing the world!

Copyright - http://www.tm4rwanda.com/

b) The Arab Spring

No real need here to explain how social media has had a major impact in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Syria, Yemen…

c) Britain’s “News Of The World” newspaper

Britain’s top-selling Sunday newspaper closed down after a flood of revelations that newspaper workers hacked the phones of murder victims, terror victims, and the bereaving families of military killed in Iraq and Afghanistan (as well as politicians, sports starts, singers…). The British public were appalled at this. A torrent of tweets were aimed at the newspaper’s advertisers. Many of these succumbed to this (among other pressure) and decided to withdraw their contracts with the newspaper.

So how do teachers (and students) flex their cyber-muscle?

You can probably think of dozens more examples of how the use of social media and the Internet can and has brought about change.  Here are a few we could use (carefully and with students likely to be interested) in the classroom

1. Discuss with students how social media can and does make a difference.
2. Encourage students to join Facebook groups
3. Show students what a hashtag does on Twitter and get them following or using some.
4. Discuss how effective it is to post comments on the Facebook sites of companies or people doing wrong. (My experience has been that companies take negative comments seriously and will quickly start addressing issues).
5. Get students involved in their own campaign for change, like Tara’s above. The students make the online posters, design the logos and website, create the aims and ideas, etc. – all in English.
6. Get students blogging! When they are given a voice and an audience you start to see their ideas taken seriously as well as spreading throughout society. You can do this with kids of all ages. (Thanks to Pernille Ripp for this suggestion.)
7. Students visit http://freerice.com/   It’s a small way to make a difference with world hunger, yet students can benefit from it too by improving their vocabulary. (Thanks to HSeslteacher for this suggestion.)

More?

I’m not overly happy with this post as I think I could have thought of more ways for teachers and students to use the Internet to get things changed. If you can think of more ways, please comment and I’ll add them to the list.

We all know there are so many people out there who need our help and support, and so many charities and organizations that are able to help.

Some ideas to encourage giving into our lessons:

1. Make lessons on what’s happening in the news for students to discuss how to help
2. Role play being in a situation of need
3. Create a ranking activity on which charity is most important (children in need, the local hospital repairs, cancer research…)
4. Put the logo, URL or live link to charities on your materials
5. Put posters up in your classroom about local charity projects
6. Do a lesson on different charities and the difference they make
7. Talk about a charity you regularly donate to
8. Start a class help project
9. Create a peer tutor programme for more able students to help ones falling behind.
10. Have a charity box in the corner of your classroom and encourage students to put things they don’t need in it

A lesson idea
Here’s some material I adapted from a best-selling course book (New Headway Plus Beginners) to provide a focus on giving – while still keeping intact the language focus of ‘can’.

The title of the reading in the activity is:

From New Headway Plus Beginners (John and Liz Soars) OUP, 2010. Page 84.

Which I changed to:

Here’s part of the reading from the activity:

From New Headway Plus Beginners (John and Liz Soars) OUP, 2010

Which I changed to:

The end part of the reading in the book is nice:

From New Headway Plus Beginners (John and Liz Soars) OUP, 2010

The activity I adapted here would also work with many other structures (should, be going to, will, have to, future continuous…).

It’s a small change that teachers (and course book publishers) can make, but a very worthwhile one. I think.

PS – Please consider sponsoring a child via Plan International:

“Founded over 70 years ago, Plan is one of the oldest and largest children’s development organisations in the world. [Plan works] in 48 developing countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas to promote child rights and lift millions of children out of poverty. Plan works with more than 3,500,000 families and their communities each year.”

http://plan-international.org/what-you-can-do/sponsor-a-child/sponsor

Questions for discussion in course books are usually not overly inspiring. I always find the speaking activity dries up fairly quickly. Perhaps it’s my teaching or it might be a problem with the design of the discussion.

Looking at many of the discussions in course books, I found I would have problems talking for any length of time in English, my own language. Invariably, the discussions in course books are three or four (at times quite peculiar) questions. They usually come under a heading called “Speaking practice”. This post contains a few ideas for getting students to practise more while getting them to talk about the world and how they could help it.

Task 1

Here is a discussion activity from “What A World 1” (Milada Broukal) published by Longman. Think about what kind of discussion students would have using this:

Suggestion

If a course book publisher is going to use the space in the book for an activity and call it a “discussion,” they should consider the following:

a)  Choose authentic questions (ones we might naturally ask each other).

b)  Try to avoid questions for which the normal answer is “yes” or “no” (end of discussion).

c)  Include more questions.

d)  Incorporate instructions that get more mileage out of the activity.

e)  Base it on something meaningful that students might want to discuss.

f)  Base it on what students are likely to be discussing in their L1 – local issues and problems, international events, etc.

Now… how to change the world?

Points e) and f) above are the ones to do this. Most discussion activities in course books can easily be adapted to get students really talking to each other, and talking about real-world, local and/or global issues. A comment by David Deubelbeiss (@ddeubel on Twitter) on my last post reminded us that local issues are also key – especially so with a monolingual students coming from the same country or town. Real opportunities here to use classroom content to get students emotionally involved in and thinking about changing their communities.

So…

Create your own discussion questions (tailored to your students’ level and culture), or get your students to create the questions they want to ask.

Task 2

Look at my adaptation of the above 3-question activity.

Would it work better for students?

Why? / Why not?

Would students have a better time with these questions?

Would they talk more?

Would the questions help them to think more about how important Antarctica is to our world?

Task 3

I probably wouldn’t use a 3-question discussion anyway. Here’s what I would/might do. What do you think?

a)  I would make this a bigger activity using more questions.

b)  I would also make sure student(s) A cannot see student(s) B’s questions (just to promote a little more listening).

c)  I would find some real-life facts to include in the questions.

d)  I might add a quote from someone the students might know.

e)  Maybe a question that asks for 3 things, to get students thinking and talking more.

f)  Possibly a question to speculate about the future.

g)  A compare and contrast question.

h)  Include instructions that encourage more recycling of the activity.

i)  Make space for students to add their own questions – they’re often better than the ones I think of.

j)  Add a question or three on what students could do to help (as in Q3 in Task 2).

So the end product could be something like this:

Happy discussing. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.

Course books generally portray the world as a happy, smiley, safe place where everyone wears nice clothes and drives a car. Everyone has ambitions and dreams. Everyone has clothes that are not ripped or dirty, dreams that are not filled with horrific images, lives that are not ripped apart by nature or unscrupulous individuals. Their world is full of colourful markets in which to shop and wonderful sites to see. People make nice cups of tea in nice kitchens. Nothing is wrong in the course book world.

But that’s not our world (for most). What do we see when we turn on the news?

•  Stories about child labour
•  Testing on animals
•  Child prostitution
•  Human trafficking
•  Child soldiers
•  War crimes
•  Cyber-bullying
•  Domestic abuse
•  Injustice
•  Unvaccinated children dying
•  Genocide
•  Poverty
•  Homelessness
•  Victims of drug abuse
•  Corporations with zero social responsibility
•  Greed
•  Corruption
•  The rape of the environment
•  etc – the list is endless

Most of the world’s people do not have a nice car. They’re lucky if they have access to water. Their dream is usually an impossible one of sending their children to school instead of down a mine. Their markets are full of people wondering how the handful of vegetables they bought can feed their family. They are abused and without hope; victims of wars, corporations that have little regard for human dignity, corrupt leaders… The list of things not nice in their world is endless.

We can do a little to highlight this and perhaps change it for the better -

Adapt your course books and other materials to highlight things not nice.

Why?

1.  Students will probably be more interested in this than in the course book materials.
2.  Students will probably appreciate your efforts to highlight things wrong with our world.
3.  You can provide links to charities that can help people.
4.  Your materials may encourage your students to join in campaigns or other things to help alleviate suffering.
5.  Your students may be more motivated to help people in their own countries.
6.  Your content can greater highlight what’s wrong with the world – multiplied by hundreds of thousands of teachers, this will have a far reach.
7.  It’s an easy and good thing to do.
8.  It saves students from yet again asking each other about riding a bicycle, doing sport, going shopping, and all the other generic course book questions.
9.  It makes a change for the teacher and allows them to be more creative.
10. It’s a good thing to do.

Task 1
Look at the two activities focusing on the grammar “When was the last time you…?” Choose which activity (A or B) your students (and you) would like better:

Task 2
Try this for yourself. Adapt your materials and highlight things not nice. Add a link to a charity. Direct students to real stories online.

Task 3
Visit http://www.worldvision.org and help a child experience fewer things not nice.

Good luck