Just as lively, Just as fulfilling

A day in evergreen TESL journey,

10 Dec, 2018

It was a bright sunny day, energetic enough to plan and deliver a lesson to the tenth grade learners of Government CoEd school Karampura in Delhi.

At the very initial phase of lesson - The printed picture I presented to them really helped me in contextualising the language, while I was playing the audio dialouge. I then initiated a cue-response drill where, learners were seeing a picture of two persons conversing with each other while having some cake and hence they were able to instantly guess and speak what probable talking there could be between the two persons. At that moment I could feel by observing them that how so involved learners were while able to feel that exposure of language awareness to them. Some learners even wanted to feel that exposure more, and it was seeming like a validation to the initial timings being spent with the learners.

While practising this structural-situational teaching, where I presented the targeted language focusing mostly around ‘would you like...?’, I wanted them to arrive at a realistic communication where successful achievement would be guaranteed by their extent of accuracy in language use while they speak. This was taking shape as learners were constantly exposed to audiolingual drill for many number of times via recording as video material, by me role playing with my colleague and learners themselves dialogue playing by looking at the script.

As learners were practising this language aspect while writing the role-play for themselves using the picture they were exposed to, I was overwhelmed at what I saw! It wasn't until I assessed them that I realised how besides the targeted language focus on one aspect, learners were actually able to discover and create other language aspects as well. So that instead of focusing targeted language that revolves on the context of ‘would you…..’, most of the learners were brainstorming more ideas to depict the picture in their script of dialogue writing. And that was wonderful!

Then in production stage, where learners were role playing, was the moment of going ‘immediate-creative’ for them. Each learner has a distinct dialogue writing for themselves, but when they arrived at presenting it, they got little perplexed on whom to indulge this written dialogue with? Hence, for each pair of role play, one partner was there who was completely or little unaware about what other partner’s dialouge writing is about! And that exactly where unleashed the ‘ahha moment’ for me, when that partner who knew nothing about the written dialogue, was actually discovering ways to respond in role play as he got some idea about the context about where the role-play revolves around (probable from the question or the first sentence raised by the other member).

This situation of role-play was planned in the way I’d be prompting them to write but got to saw how the moment gets turned into magic by unexpectedly getting so well organised.

It was just a gladful moment at the end of the one hour lesson, to observe and see, how learners’ status changed from ‘abit shy, little reluctant’ to actually feel ‘more confident and non-hesitating’ towards using any aspect of language throughout the lesson execution.