how-to-books.pdf is a lesson that uses 14 pictures of book covers, each of which contain the words ‘How to …’ in the title.
All of the images were downloaded from Amazon.com, an example of a Learner-Friendly Corpus.
I haven’t actually tried out this lesson yet so I don’t know how well it will work. I’m going to keep it until one of my students comes out with one of those, “I don’t know to cook” statements which can potentially lead to misunderstanding.
Incidentally, I had to include Jeremy Harmer’s How to teach English. For a while, this was my favourite teaching prop. Whenever I lost control of my class to a serious oubreak of L1, I would take the book out of my bag and start reading (recall the image of Homer Simpson frantically tearing through the pages of the instruction manual to his plant’s reactor in order to avert a possible nuclear meltdown).
Students’ curiosity would often get the better of them and once this happened, the result could be a constructive discussion on the points that Jeremy offers at the back of the book that address the issue of what a teacher can do if his or her students keep using their own language.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Becca // Mar 6, 2008 at 12:17 pm
I used this lesson with my intermediate 121 the other day and at the end he said “I really liked the class today - well done!”
I veered from the plan a little, bouncing off a conversation about making paella the day before - he couldn’t correct “I don’t know make paella”, so I introduced it by saying I’d need a book of tips about Spanish cuisine (How to Cook like a Spaniard) . After the dictation we discussed which he’d be interested in, and translated the titles. I then read those titles in Spanish and he translated back to English (this was also useful becuase it highlighted problems with the position of ‘really’, and negating infinitives). We needed some more discussion and L1 L2 comparison to make the link between the ‘how to…’ and ‘I don’t know how to….’ wasn’t imediately obvious. It took us the hour, and like I said he found it really useful and enjoyable. So, thanks for that Jamie!
2 Becca // Mar 6, 2008 at 12:19 pm
sorry, just missed out the bit about bringing it back to correcting ‘I don’t know make paella.’
3 Suzanne // Oct 1, 2008 at 11:32 pm
I tried this with my senior one students. They had fun.
But I threw in a “distractor”, in the form of a “How to …….” Goofy Disney clip, before they did the translations back to English.
It worked.
Thanks for all your ideas, they make me think.
4 D // Nov 29, 2009 at 9:40 am
What am I missing? It seems as though this lesson is about testing one’s memory. Is that it?
5 admin // Nov 30, 2009 at 10:45 am
Hello D
Thanks for you comment. I suppose that this is why we are always told to explicitly state out aims. And I didn’t do that here.
This is what the activity sets out to achieve:
1. Introduce students to the “how to do somethings” structure. Despite the simplicity of this structure, students often lose marks in exams when they omit the ‘how’:
“I know to dance”
“I don’t know to cook”
2. The memory part of the activity serves to have students recall and importantly, *reproduce* the target language. It’s as simple as that.
3. There is also a speaking aim in the activity - the part when students have to guess the type of advice that the books offer.
Does that make sense?
Jamie
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