Last Saturday the 21st of February I had the privilege of attending the workshop ‘Learner-tainment’ in Geneva, Switzerland that was organized by E-Tas (English Teachers Association of Switzerland).
The workshop was brilliantly conducted by Mary Patricia Schnueriger – an ESL/EFL teacher and ELT consultant at Pearson Switzerland – who was kind enough to give me her blessing to report here at ESL Drama Queen the content of what was discussed.
Here is an overview of the event and my personal take on it.
Workshop
Learner-tainment
21.02.15 – Bell School Geneve – E-TAS
Speaker
Mary Patricia Schnueriger – Pearson Switzerland
Subject and scope
Suggest and facilitate the elaboration of games to be used in ELT
Intended audience
EFL/ESL Teachers with students of all ages and levels
Schnueriger was throughout the workshop the very definition of a facilitator for a hands-on workshop: she proposed many activities and promoted several discussions to attendees and kept the focus on the subjects discussed rather than her personal views on the ideas. The overall feel of the event was that the participants themselves were active in the delivery of the talk – which I personally think is great.
She started with a quote that set the tone for the whole afternoon: “There is no right or wrong, only ideas’. Since it was a very heterogeneous group of people from different parts of the world with diverse views on what the ELT classroom should be like and also with eclectic goals, this first moment was quite important to make sure everyone felt welcome and all ideas would be heard and respected. As one might say, everything is try and error – many activities may work for one group and not for another, and vice versa.
During what I can surely refer to as a very pleasant afternoon, many games and activities for the ESL/EFL classroom were mentioned by both Schnueriger and the participants.
Although no one mentioned the word Drama during the workshop, there were lots of ideas that emerged and were clearly connected to the idea of Drama Games. That makes me both happy and worried: happy because there are lots of teachers out there willing to use this amazing technique to teach their students a foreign language; and worried because I guess this approach is still fairly unexplored academically and very poorly advertised.
Next is a brief description of the ones I personally felt more inclined to trying out due to its proximity to Drama Games. For full lesson plans of the games below, stay tuned for the next posts.
Paper Balls
Overview
Students write questions on a piece of paper
Make a paper ball with it
Throw it at someone (teacher or other colleague)
Whoever has the paper ball reads it and answers the question
Elfti with Art
Overview
Present students with a painting (connect the theme of the painting to the topic you are covering in class)
Elicit from students single words that the painting evokes from them Show students the structure of an Elfti: an 11-word poem
Ask students to come up with an Elfti based on their feelings towards the painting and the topic of the class
Candy Topics
Overview
Offer colourfully-wrapped candy to your students
Each student can get as much candy as they like
Show them the colour code
Arrange students in groups
Each student should talk about the topics they have (depending on the colour candy they picked)
‘TABU’ variations
Overview
Word sneak
Overview
Arrange students in groups or pairs
Give each students a set of words or phrases
Students should engage in natural conversation, trying to sneak in the words or phrases without the other students noticing
(Jimmy Fallon, an American comedian, plays this game on his TV show. For the Youtube video, click here)
I hope this post could be as helpful and enlightening to you all as the workshop was to me and I’ll just leave you with a last quote from Mary Patricia Schnueriger: “Any games you see can be adapted into language learning”.
As usual, see you next time and have fun with the games!
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