Introduction

The learners in this class are aged between 14 and 16. They are mainly at intermediate level. The learners and the teacher are speakers of Chinese. They have just completed the vocabulary quiz, which is one of the clip for chapter 10. In the part of the class, the teacher is looking at the grammar related to location and in particular the use of prepositional phrases such as “in the city centre” and “on the left of the class.”

The teacher uses a technique that she describes as “Run, read, return and write.” She puts post-it notes on which she has written one sentence on the white board e.g. “My home is in the city centre”. The learners come to the board and read and memorise one sentence. They then return to their seats and write out the sentence. In groups they underline the part of the sentence which give the location. In the video clip, the example she uses to explain what she wants to do is

Two other sentences she uses are:

Italy is in the south of Europe
India is in the southwest of Asia

She had ten sentences in all. She then asked the students to get up and read the sentences on the post-its, take them back to their groups, identify the phrase which indicates location and then translate the sentence into Chinese. This took about ten minutes. The video clip only includes a few seconds of this. The teacher then looked at some of the location phrases. She asked the students for these but then showed four of the phrases on her PowerPoint. a. In the south of Europeb. In the south west of Asiac. On the east coastd. On the south east of China.She provided a couple of minutes for the groups to check that they had identified the location phrases for the other sentences. The teacher asked a learner to translate the sentence

Italy is in the south of Europe

She then highlighted the preposition in the location phrase .

Activity

1. What was the aim of the lesson?

2. Because the teacher spoke the same language as the learners, she was able to judge what knowledge the learners would bring to the class about location phrases. If you are able to speak a language other than English, look at the four location phrases the teacher identifies above (“in the south of Europe” etc.) and translate them into your other language. To what extent does this help you predict how easy or difficult this will be for speakers of your other language?

3. The activity in the lesson seems to be about getting the learners to notice the difference between prepositions in Chinese and in English. How effective do you think translation is as a way of encouraging noticing? If you were teaching a class of learners who spoke a range of languages, could you adapt this kind of activity so that it would not involve translation?

4. Within a cognitive model of learning, the clip is about helping the learners develop a declarative knowledge of prepositions in English (Badger, 2018 :30-33). The next stage in learning is turning this declarative knowledge into procedural knowledge. What kind of activities would you use to achieve this aim? 

Badger, R. 2018. Teaching and learning the English language: a problem solving approach. London: Bloomsbury.