The Magazine for English Professionals - English Teachers ...

SIGDAY
Special Interest Group
teaching our Business English students.
These include, like any ELT course, the
teaching (or reminding) of basic grammar
and vocabulary, but also functions which are
appropriate to a working environment, an
understanding of style and formality in a given
setting, and cultural aspects. In so doing, it
often seems that what we are doing could be
better described as CLIL (Content Language
Integrated Learning) than as ELT.
I loved Stuart’s conclusion: “Business English
is General English dressed in Armani”!
Cindy Hauert
Drama & Literature SIG
A2
Write now! Creative writing for the ELT
classroom
Antoinette Moses
Antoinette Moses started this fascinating
workshop by explaining that she is not an
EFL teacher, but a published writer of several
plays and stories and a tutor on the University
of East Anglia’s famous MA course in Creative
Writing. She then cleverly linked her workshop
to Dave Willis’s excellent plenary talk, agreeing
that, as with Dave’s granddaughter, our
need to tell stories precedes language and
we use language because of this need – a
realistic task.
Creative writing, therefore, has a place in the
language classroom. Students can practice
and gain confidence in writing and speaking,
can develop cooperative teamwork (as there
is often a pre-writing collaborative task), can
improve editing and rewriting skills, and, by
understanding the process of writing, become
more appreciative readers.
We brainstormed ideas for generating stories:
books (a topic which was explored further
in her second excellent workshop which I
also attended), newspapers, and especially
pictures. Pictures are very powerful as we can
look both into and beyond them to explore
character, causality, motivation and mood.
Character is the key to good writing (which
explained a puzzling sentence in the workshop
description “writers never write dialogue”
– this is because once a character is created,
the dialogue comes naturally!) We
18 ETAS Journal 24/3 Summer 2007
experienced a powerful example of this
phenomenon ourselves. Antoinette showed us
a black and white photo of a man looking
through a window onto a bleak snowy landscape
(which she had just found on Google
Images) and we had to answer the “W…”
questions: Who? Where? When? Why? about
him. We did this individually but it could also
be done in groups. After this stage, we had
to move into the first person and write his
story. I experienced myself how powerful and
effective a writing experience this was, as the
character developed his own “voice” and, as I
wrote, the story and character developed and
became clear.
We then compared our stories, discussed
the names we had chosen and the evocative
power of a name. Antoinette also gave us
other ideas for generating stories, like discovering
a character from the contents of a bag
and “hot seating”.
Unfortunately, there were only seven people
at this workshop but every participant was
enriched, not only with ideas for the classroom
and tips from a published writer, but
also a key to unlocking creativity in ourselves.
Many thanks to CUP for bringing Antoinette to
Switzerland.
Alison Taylor
Drama & Literature SIG
B2
Poetry for the classroom
Eva König
In total seven people attended this workshop
whose stated aim was to provide ideas and
suggestions about the ways in which teachers
of English might incorporate poetry into the
classroom and how poetry might provide the
stimulus for a variety of other activities including
language acquisition, developing language
skills, as well as forming the basis for reading
and writing tasks.
These aims were most certainly well fulfilled
over the course of this fascinating and thoughtprovoking
workshop. The success of Eva
König’s workshop lay in the way in which she
anchored her theoretical framework – the
value of something that at times can be
abstract and intimidating to students – in concrete
examples in which workshop attendees
were invited to participate. Thus we were
given an idea how the exemplars might
actually play out in the classroom and the
manner in which the primary text, the poem itself,
might serve as the basis for further work.
The first exercise in which we participated
was based on the Roger McGough poem
‘Forty Love’. The text of the poem was
handed out to us as continuous text and we
were invited to punctuate it. Our suggestions
were then discussed as a group before Eva
König showed us the actual, very novel way
in which the text appears. There followed a
discussion as to why the poet chose this particular
structure and the exercise terminated
with a chorus reading between two groups.
This was great fun and showed the possibility
of teaching poetry without being bound to
discussion of tone, form, imagery, etc. which
students frequently find monotonous.
Another particularly successful exercise was
the one that used the Peter Appleton poem
‘The Responsibility’. We were given the poem
with each stanza printed on individual sheets
and had to create our own sequence for the
stanzas. This was a very effective exercise as
it meant that you really had to concentrate on
the text and what was being said, and evaluate
your own ideas about what was the likely
logical order and thus the message the text
was conveying.
Personally, I thought that the workshop taught
me more about teaching poetry than a year
of seminars on English teaching during my
teacher training, the reason being that Eva
König illustrated her examples so clearly
that each exercise functioned almost like an
individual lesson plan and that was extremely
helpful. Especially as I find that when teaching
second-language speakers, the teacher
constantly needs to come up with innovative
ideas to maintain their interest.
Joan Ennis