Филологические науки/Методика преподавания языка и литературы

Kurochkina O.F., Zagoruiko T.I.

Donbas National Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture

TEACHING ENGLISH USING PICTURES

Classrooms are complicated social communities. Individual learners come to them with their own constellation of native language and culture, proficiency level, learning style, motivation and attitudes toward language learning.

Our adult elementary classes contain complete or false beginners. Many students at this level are not used to learning a foreign language and have different expectations of a classroom. Their previous experience of learning a language was probably very different. Many adult students lack self–confidence in learning a foreign language, especially if they are aware that this process involves not only cognitive-logical, also cognitive-sensorial elements which are more difficult to” master”. There is also the matter of innate ability, the absence or scarcity of which may seriously hinder the learning process.

One more effective variable relevant to success or failure in foreign–language acquisition may also be more intense with adults. They are not likely to adapt easily to new learning situations.

We have also to overcome the difficulty generated by the discrepancy between the complexity of the content (ideas, feelings, attitudes, etc.) the students are eager to communicate, on the one hand, and the scarcity of their grammatical and lexical knowledge, on the other hand.

Consequently, the teacher must create an appropriate teaching-learning environment that prevents embarrassment and encourages the students’ active participation in the learning process. How to carry out this task? – this remains an open question we must keep in mind when planning our classroom activities.

Individual teachers have their own distinctive styles, and use many different materials and teaching techniques in the course of a single classroom session, countless ones in a given week or semester. We also have as wide a range of resources as possible in the classroom so that the students can have a rich base and stimulus for this development. And the resources include pictures. After all, verbal language is only a part of the way we usually get meaning from contexts. Things we see play an enormous part in affecting us and in giving us information. We predict, deduce and infer, not only from what we hear and read but from what we see around us and from what we remember having seen. Pictures are not just an aspect of method but through their representation of places, objects and people they are an essential part of overall experiences we must help our students to cope with.

Although pictures can be used to advantage at all levels of proficiency, a guiding principle of using pictures at an elementary level is to build students’ knowledge in achievable measures, in order to prevent any loss of confidence and give confidence to those in whom it is naturally lacking.

It is very common to hear people say that pictures are all right for beginners and for young people but not for advanced students or exam classes. This generalization is unhelpful and untrue. Any activity done in the classroom must be efficient in achieving its purpose. Pictures should certainly be subjected to some practical criteria for assessment of their value, but such criteria should apply to all activities whether they involve pictures or not.

Specifically, pictures contribute to:

· interest and motivation;

· a sense of the context of the languages;

· a specific reference point or stimulus.

Pictures can be used by teachers and students whatever the emphasis of the syllabus they are following. One picture can be used as a reference and stimulus in order to promote five very different language teaching emphases: structures, vocabulary, functions, situations and skills.

A good picture is invaluable. One picture can be used in dozens of ways. A picture can elicit emotion or be used to tell a story. It can illustrate a verb tense we are teaching or be used for teaching vocabulary and colours to beginners. Pictures can be presented in pairs: the same object or person on two different occasions (e.g. a building before and after reconstruction, an American and British houses). Pictures can be grouped into semantically related sets that contain from ten to twenty items , representing vehicles, types of dwelling, building parts, building elements , etc., or actions, such as daily activities, hobbies, etc. Everyday activities pictures are effective for presentation and structured practice of all types of questions and tenses, for practicing then, before, after as well as for teaching vocabulary and telling stories.

In an activity that provides communicative practice of both yes/no and wh-questions with reference to location, pairs of students are given two mismatched pictures of an office/sitting room/city street, etc. Students must be told in advance not to look at each other’s pictures. The two pictures contain, among other things, some identical objects in different positions. The task of the students is to discover through oral communication and then to write down (a) which objects are in both offices/sitting rooms/city streets and which are not; and (b) which appear in the same location and which do not. After the oral and written work is completed, students should compare their lists against the actual pictures to see whether they have communicated effectively.

To elicit a discussion of travel plans using present continuous, be going to and will for the future and because of reason, the teacher gives students picture post cards of some scenic place in their homeland or any place in the world. Each student presents a card and gives a short narrative about travel plans using the proper tense form. The teacher should give the class a few examples so they know what to do.

Another activity uses pictures of two or three different people or things as a context for communicative or structured practice of comparison. The teacher gives each pair of students two such pictures, e.g. three buildings, along with the data specifying them: name, age, function, number of rooms, conveniences, garage, garden and other information. Both students share information orally and generate a series of sentences comparing the three buildings in their pictures.

In addition to their usefulness in teaching tense, time, comparison, a series of pictures that tells a story can be used for communicative practice of conjunctions and subordinators that overtly mark the sequence of events in a narrative. In activity that allows practice of expressions of temporal sequence, such as first, then, and next, each pair or group is given an identical set of six to ten pictures in random order that tell a story. The students must first reorder the pictures so they tell the story and then write up a group account using temporal transitional expressions to reinforce the sequence of events. One member from each pair or group then shows the pictures and reads the story developed by his pair or group.

Very often we do not want to challenge our students, but rather wish to give them an opportunity to do something in a context full of encouragement and free from stress. For example, the teacher might want to encourage the students to talk about themselves, or perhaps to speculate about other people. In each case, the role of the teacher is to provide a broad suggestion, a gentle stimulus and a helping hand. Consider this activity.

· The teacher projects a slide or gives a picture of a person. It shows the person’s appearance and perhaps an indication of where the person might be. The students, first of all individually and then in pairs, make notes on who the person might be, their age, interests, occupation, etc. These speculations are then discussed by the whole class. If the teacher has shown a picture of someone he or she knows, the true information can be given and the students’ speculations evaluated. The discussion may continue into more general area of how easy or difficult it is to judge people by their appearance. Students might like to describe how they have misjudged people or indeed how they themselves have been misjudged by others.

Sometimes students need an opportunity to investigate subject, or an opportunity to express their feelings about a subject, rather than a challenge. Of course, there is an overlap between ‘challenge’ and ‘opportunity’ but the distinction is worth making as it leads to a different kind of work. Activities based on an ‘opportunity’ tend to take much longer than the various ‘challenge’ activities. Activities in each category include the full range of ‘controlled’ to ‘open’ use of language.

In such activities students of any level can study at least some aspects of a topic through the foreign language. Consider these activities.

What’s this?

Pairwork. Each pair is given a postcard of a place. The students study the card and try to deduce what sort of place it is and write down their observations. (The teacher might discuss with the class what aspects to consider before starting the activity.) The students then exchange postcards with another pair and do the same again. After this, the pairs divide to form new pairs and they now discuss what conclusion they came to.

What’s this?

Pairwork and classwork. The students examine a picture of an object and decide what it is, what it might be used for, how valuable it is, where it is, who it might belong to, how important it is to that person, how they acquired it, etc. These and other associations can be discussed in pairs and then in groups or by the class as a whole.

The pictures we use in class are organized into categories such as the following:

· Vocabulary

· Verbs

· Stories

· Family personalities

· History

· Arts and architecture

· Holidays and celebrations, etc.

In this paper we have tried to show that pictures are a very effective resource for getting students to match form with meaning and we suggested several areas of language teaching for which pictures constitute particularly effective resources. They can be used in all phases of an English lesson (e.g. in presentation, focused practice, communicative practice, and for feedback and correction).