Iron Man to my rescue..

 I had spent much time planning as I had really wanted to come up with a fun activity for them (just as fun as last week’s Bingo). I had made up my mind to talk about movie vocabulary and feeling words. Then, I eventually decided to use a movie poster for my preview. I wanted to, however, pick a movie which was popular for Korean boys that age to get them interested. I got my husband’s opinion and did some research. Iron Man was my answer!

Throughout the class, I tried to use simpler words to speak and pose authentic questions. Although I am able to use simpler words without much conscious effort now, there remains much work to be done as far as my authentic language use. Every Saturday, I am trying to pay more attention to how Tom talks to us. I wish it would come so easily for me as well. I need to keep on FIGHTING!!

As I had mentioned in my last blog, I did ask my students if they would be ok with listening to music while working on activities at times. I suggested easy listening music and played a little bit of Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon” after describing to them what easy listening music was. They all said they liked the song and they were ok with playing music. However, later on, when they were working on an activity, although I had the opportunity to play some music in the background, I completely forgot about it. I made a big reminder note to myself for this coming Sunday… :)

After showing them Iron Man 3 poster as the preview, I asked them to brainstorm and write down all movie-related words they could think of in pairs. One group had 18 and the other 17 words (two students were missing last Sunday). We were all quite surprised that it was such a close race in the end.

Afterwards, I distributed a handout where they had to match movie vocabulary with definitions on the right (e.g.: character, scene, sequel, genre, chick flick, etc.). As I wanted them to work in pairs, I gave them only one set of worksheet per pair (Tom’s previous suggestion). It really did go much better this way. They needed some guidance and help along the way. I went over regularly to assist them (and hence forgot to play any music).  I gave them cues and described some words for them to guess to help them along (for example: what do we call the type of movie which tells the story of someone’s life?). They did not know how to complete a matching activity either. So, I worked the first question out with them and just said “do the rest in pairs!” We had talked about this in class when Liz had taught the Harmer activity with the car and car vocabulary…  I heard quite a few “ahh”s immediately after and subsequently they did not have any problems completing the worksheet.

Next we looked through a list of positive and negative adjectives (15 each) to describe movies such as hilarious, brilliant and gripping for positive; dull, disgusting and unimpressive for negative. I asked them individually to circle the ones they were not familiar with. Then I asked them to compare their “unknown adjectives” in pairs and try to explain to each other. I had not initially planned to ask them to compare with each other and somehow suddenly on the spot decided to go with it. It was a good exercise. I realized that although one student had not circled “charming’” (meaning that he knew what it meant), he could not explain to his partner. So, he ended up circling this adjective as well.

When I asked the two groups to tell me all the positive and negative adjectives they had circled and I wrote all down on the whiteboard, I noticed that they had almost all the same adjectives circled. Moreover, they had to read their adjectives to me to put on the whiteboard. Therefore, although they had not encountered these words (they were not present in their lexicon) they had to try to pronounce them building on the phonemes they could recognize. These included words such as genre, fascinating, uplifting, etc. For example, in the case of “genre,” they were able to realize that it contained similar phonemes as the word “gender” and they tried to steal strategies to pronounce this word. This impressed me very much. :)

To help to explain the meaning of all these adjectives, I had prepared yet another handout where I had given them an example to a sentence using each of these adjectives. They practiced taking turns to read these sentences and we clarified the meaning of the adjectives. This is also where my gestures and proper intonation came in very handy as additional MIC techniques. Next week to recycle TLC, I will bring in three other movie posters whereby they will use the vocabulary we had studied last week to tell me what type of movie they think is being portrayed in these posters. I will give them an example (modeling) to get them going. They will get to work in pairs/groups and share with the rest of class what they have prepared afterwards.