Live Reading

One of the shiniest jewels I've recently discovered is Jason Renshaw's blog. This guy is prolific every day there is something new and it's giving me such a lease of life. I've tried several of his ideas... some with a certain amount of trepidation but so far every one has been a complete success.

The Live Reading looked interesting so today I tried it with my ESOL Entry Three group of Asian ladies. Seeing as it's Valentine's Day on Monday I thought that would be a good place to try. So armed with my Wikipedia entry and a few key words I started the conversation. Chatting with this group is never hard and we had 20 minutes of free flowing conversation where I asked them questions and they asked me some. They were really interested especially in the story of St Valentine.

Then despite nerves and a temptation to do something I knew would work like the Music Live from London I had prepped as a backup... I went for it. Wow it was so much fun. My ladies loved it. They were all shouting out ideas, suggestions, even the quieter ones would come up with just the right phrase at certain points. They were very enthusiastic, told me how much they needed activities like this and I know that they will retain a lot more about V Day than if I'd just plonked a reading with questions in front of them.

Here's a picture of my (very messy) but 1st ever Live Reading!

 

Comments

[Chris Miner]

How does the 'generation' of the text actually work in concrete terms? How do you go from talking for 20 minutes (presumably about valentines day) to "Valentine's day is ..."

I take it you prompt them with questions or a stock outline format, and then they have answers or they don't and you write something. Or maybe they write something. On your way to your first complete sentence, what do you say? What do the Ss say? What do you actually write on the board? Do you rework it after writing?

[EnglAdvantage]

Would also like to hear more about this. This looks really interesting for my discussion club next Monday. Was also thinking about the theme of Valentine's Day and trying to get more discussion going. Too often it turns into either lecture, or me asking one off questions and a few students giving answers.

[Anna Rose]

Hi Chris

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

Yeah the 20 minutes was about Valentine's Day although it did slightly branch out a few times mainly to other celebrations. But during that process I'd given them quite a bit of information and they'd given eachother quite a bit of information. More than enough knowledge to write the article.

I can't remember the process exactly. I did do a bit of prep beforehand. I'd found an article and looked at how it was set out... e.g. Intro and date, the history and the present day so I had some stock questions I'd prepared before hand that I thought would elicit that basic information. e.g. What is it? When is it? Why do we celebrate it? What's the history? And today? How do we celebrate it?

I also had some vocabulary that I'd pulled out of the Wikipedia entry on V day that I thought it would be good to add in e.g. annual, commemoration, confectionary etc... so if they made that suggestion e.g. chocolates I could change it to confectionary and expand their vocab a little bit.

However, once we got started I ended up asking quite a few more questions.

So I asked my first questions... what / when ... then various students shouted out ideas e.g. "14th Feb", " a celebration" . So I responded yes it's the 14th of Feb and yes it's a celebration... so how could I put that as a sentence? A few suggestions including "Valentine's Day is celebrated on the 14th February." Perfect .... we were away. Then I asked how often do we celebrate it. They responded with every year and I asked them if they knew a word to express every year... and suggested annual. One learner had said "This is an every year celebration" so I wrote that up but exchanged every year for annual.

I did keep prompting them with questions either about the content or about how they were phrasing their sentences e.g. so how could we start a sentence about that ... and then made minor adustments as we went along e.g. ok so Who was St Valentine? He was Christian... yes that's right what kind of christian? They took a while to think of the word it's the English imam isn't it? Yes that's right... and then priest. "He was a Christian priest". Great... I wrote it down.

So I guess the reworking was done orally back and forth between me and them until they had a sentence that was pretty close which I then wrote up.

That may not be the best way to do it but it seemed to work extremely well... they were all engaged... and making contributions... talking to eachother shouting out to me etc...

Does that help? Feel free to ask anything else...and thanks again for stopping by :-)

[Anna Rose]

Hi EnglAdvantage

Thanks for your comment... does the comment to Chris help? I'd love to hear how it went if you do give it a go... like I said... even my quieter, weaker learners did engage and contribute although not as much perhaps as some of the others...

All the best with it... I can't wait for my follow up session on Monday... they were quite excited when they realised their next class actually was Valentine's Day :-))

[Chris Miner]

Thanks for the response. The part I was interested in was covered in "So I asked my...". So basically you prompt them with a/some question(s), which they answer orally, then you prompt them more to get a sentence which you write (potentially reformulated) on the board. Did you follow the writing (it's really live writing isn't it?) with Jason's word swimming idea or did you do something else? Hypothetically speaking how might you have followed up the writing activity with a focus on form?

[Anna Rose]

It actually took longer than I anticipated so, although I gave out the wordwise sheets, we didn't have time to really get going before the end of the lesson so we're going to have a go with them this coming Monday with the worksheet I adapted ( see Live Reading follow up)

I also want to have a go at the disappearing text that JR talked about but wasn't quite brave enough to do both my 1st live reading and 1st disappearing text the same lesson!

To focus on form... I guess hypothetically I'd just have a look at what we had in the text... ok so it's mainly present simple and past tenses so I might give them highlighters ask them to go through the text and highlight all the verbs, then think about what the tense was, then think about why that tense was used.

Also, maybe looking at connectives and relative pronouns as there's quite a few there so again could get them to find the joining words or look at how the sentences were started. Then we could maybe do a bit more focus on say relative pronouns helping us write more complex sentences. (They need to use complex sentences in their exams)

Then maybe brainstorm some other connectives or relative pronouns and orally think of some sentences we could make with them.

Or maybe demo with a few examples

This is the house. We want to buy this house.
This is the house that we want to buy.

She is my friend. She lives in New Zealand.
She is my friend who lives in New Zealand.

And show them how the pronoun replaces the subject. Then perhaps I could get them to lengthen some of the sentences in the passage e.g.

It is in commemoration of St Valentine who was a Roman priest.
St Valentine disobeyed the rule when he married the young couples secretly.

Then stick up some relative pronouns / connectives on different pieces of coloured poster paper put them up round the room and ask the learners to go round the room in pairs writing sentences on the poster paper using that particular pronoun or connective. So if they had 'which'... they could write any sentence using that e.g. Here's the book which I promised to lend to you.

Actually I quite like the poster idea... I might try it thanks for getting me to think about it a little more :-)

There's also quite a few prepositional phrases in there so could focus on that...

Is that what you're meaning?

[Chris Miner]

Yes that's the sort of info I was looking for. Thanks! I haven't done live reading, but I've worked with other bits of text/audio that were spontaneously generated in class. I'm usually not sure what to do with them, after we've worked through what the text actually means.

[Anna Rose]

Oh great... I'm glad that helped... it was good to spend some more time thinking about it. I'm also just learning how to work with the language once it's emerged. It's challenging... especially when it's off the cuff but it certainly gets me thinking and I'm hoping I'll get better at it!