by Deniz Köse
Love sincerely, laugh loudly, discover enthusiastically, and live life to the fullest. Start evaluating your life with a single question: ‘How is a balanced, joyful and meaningful life possible?’ The answer is passion… Whatever you do, do this with passion.
Passion can be a trigger for language learning - but how can you bring passion into your classroom?
For me, passion can be built. It can be built through the use of a variety of activities and games, but more than that, it can be built by bringing sustained attention to specific ideas - which is what led me to introduce my “Golden Months” activities into my school.
Let me explain the process. I wanted to help my students develop their four skills - reading, writing, listening, and speaking. But I felt that simply adding a few games to my lessons would only pay lip service to their importance. Therefore, I decided that for each of four different months we would focus on one particular skill, centering our attention on this skill as much as possible.
The key, beyond the organising principle, is what you might call “follow-through.” For each of the months, I worked with my colleagues to redecorate part of the school environment so that, as my students made their way to class, they would be reminded of our latest project - and thus, our latest goal. We put posters up, refreshing these as the month progressed, and adding examples of the students’ work as it was produced. We even renamed the month for which the project was devoted, as you’ll see below in my short summary of each of the four “Golden Months.”
Novembook – Improving Reading Skills
Reading exercises the brain, improves the ability of focus, and sparks imagination and creativity. Above all, it helps to build vocabulary and improves understanding of the language - and how it is used by writers to communicate subtleties of message.
The first of the Golden Months starts with reading activities in November and I rename the period ‘Novembook’. This month, the benefits of reading in language learning are processed in every aspect. Younger learners read graded readers. They play games to reinforce vocabulary and to present stories. One student might design a mind map to introduce the story’s characters while another draws pizza slices to summarize the chapters. Older students look at more demanding texts, taking part in wider cross-class interactions that provide a model for how we can approach literature - all while maintaining a safe and supportive environment.
Other students read the biographies of famous people and create large posters promoting what they have learnt. These posters are displayed on school boards and a school-wide quiz is held. In this quiz, the teacher asks questions about the information on the posters and Novembook ends with the winning students receiving medals.
But there are other ways to take advantage of this material, of course. If your students are building up a bank of material based on their reading, this will support other students in their own reading. A word that stumps one reader will likely stump another, but if all of your students are reading the same text, building a glossary of difficult words will help everyone. And those biographies? It’s not only the teacher who can make a quiz for their students - the students can do this too, and share it through social media, perhaps in the form of a treasure hunt to encourage others to read what has been posted around the school.
Januarticle – Improving Writing Skills
First comes reading, to establish how to present ideas on paper. The productive outcome of this skill is writing. Writing can be a difficult task in the classroom, as it requires planning as well as sustained effort - but it improves critical thinking skills and works extremely well in reinforcing learning, not least because the work leads to the creation of something permanent that students can return to.
January becomes ‘Januarticle’. This month, the students find themselves in scenario-based learning (SBL) activities. The dialogues introduced through this method will help the students to write stories about the characters that have been introduced in the dialogues. This form of scaffolding - of supplying a context and ready-made characters - means that the students can focus first of all on the act of writing.
The writing they produce is posted on the boards in the school, and many follow-up projects can then take place - including my favourite, a big photography competition called ‘Through My Eyes’. This takes the writing project and gives the students a creative outlet to explore - but it still involves writing, as every photograph requires a caption! When the competition ends, the winners are announced at a karaoke party attended by all school students. The best photographs and stories are exhibited in a public place within the school so that everyone can see what’s been going on, and can get even more excited about the next challenge!
Marchallenge – Improving Listening Skills
Listening builds trust and strong relationships. Listening is not only about hearing. When you listen, you seek to understand the facts and ideas that are being communicated to you.
Throughout the month, the students are invited to nominate a song that will become the song of the week. The students’ task is to listen to the song, and the content of the song - maybe its message, maybe its lyrics, maybe even its rhythm or the instruments it makes use of - can be discussed in class. Because the song’s identity is revealed on the Friday before that song’s week in the month, the teacher has a few days to prepare fun listening activities using the lyrics (for instance) to make gap-fills or jigsaw texts.
But ‘Marchallenge’ gets its name from the idea of challenges, and my favourite here is the creation of a treasure hunt. The teacher records a series of instructions - just like you might hear on an audio guided tour in a museum - and the students need to listen to each step to find the surprise at the end. Once the model has been given, the students can work in teams to devise their own challenges - and when these have been recorded on Vocaroo or some other online audio sharing service, the other students can listen and follow the instructions to find a whole series of other surprises.
I May – Improving Speaking Skills
While writing is undoubtedly an important productive skill, most students will find that they communicate best - and most readily - through speaking. Having the opportunity to speak is often seen - by my students, at least - as a major motivational tool, and one of the best reasons to want to learn a language.
This month can be seen as an opportunity to both improve speaking skills and involve students in a social responsibility project. But since not every student will be comfortable speaking in public, I recommend this as a group project so that quieter students still have the opportunity to contribute.
This month’s challenge is to prepare a kind of fancy dress project. The students choose someone from history - perhaps even one of the famous people they wrote a biography of in an earlier Golden Month, so make sure not to throw away those old posters! - and find out as much as they can about them, but in a more ‘communicative’ direction. They can find videos of these famous people talking - or, if they choose someone from earlier in history like Beethoven or da Vinci, they can look for film representations of their famous person. The idea is to get a sense of how they spoke and acted, so that they can then role-play as their chosen person.
But role-play is not complete without looking the part, which is why this is such a team effort. The members of the group can work together to design and make an outfit, to be worn by their nominated speaker; and on one of the last days of the month, these students will be gathered in the corridors, waiting to field questions about their lives from the other students.
Conclusion
Language learning is a process. It is possible to turn this process into a remarkable and entertaining story with some games, activities, and small changes and innovations that the teacher can add to the curriculum. As long as we continue to keep our passion to teach alive, our learners will always be there with desire and enthusiasm to learn.
Biography
Deniz Köse has been an ESL teacher for 16 years. During this 16-year period, she has taught English lessons at all levels and skills, from kindergarten to high school. She has taken part in teaching English at universities. She is CELTA qualified and since she sees teaching English as a passion, she has written and implemented many projects and taken part in various national and international organizations and competitions with her students. She has been involved in some educational processes such as student coaching and storytelling in teaching, and added these qualifications to her career. She currently runs an Education Consultancy, ‘Be Social’, in Türkiye.