Q. I’ve watched some videos of Tina doing OWI and would like to try it. What are your tips for starting with a level 1 class that already knows some descriptive words and a level 2 that knows much more but could use some new adjectives/detailed ways to describe things?
A. The way I do it with both levels, with any levels, is to see what in the discussion has energy and then expand on that. I know that the expression “has energy” is vague, but let me try to explain what I mean. The big question in language teaching, in my opinion, is not about how to best teach the material, but rather how to make the discussion first and foremost interesting, even compelling, to the students.
So Tina and I talk a lot about having the kids draw pics and talking about their creations in really slow stress ways, because low stress classrooms have more energy. The focus is on the kids and letting them relax and listen. Or we tell them a story in the TL where they have no anxiety as they listen bc they don’t have to furnish cute answers or take tests on the story – they just get to listen! (See what Gary Wass wrote about that topic of no grading here recently.)
It is like letting the horse (natural language) pull the cart (full of students) into a direction that the students want to go in instead of the teacher sitting on the horse whipping it to go in a particular direction to teach words that the teacher wants the kids to know, and the kids have to get dragged along in class after class until about March or April in the year when everybody in the room just wants to vomit.
That is what we have done historically in our profession – tried to get the kids to learn certain words that they don’t know yet but are “important” for them to learn. I don’t care how important the words are – it the kids aren’t interested in them, they won’t learn them. That happens even in stories.
But when the horse (natural language that goes where it wants) pulls the cart full of students into areas where the kids want to go, where the energy is, the interest level of the students goes way up as they are taken to new lands. This is what non-targeted comprehensible input does. When that happens, the vocabulary (CI Liftoff is dedicating an entire conference this summer in Portland to this idea) sinks in much deeper because the kids aren’t being taught from lists, which bore them, but they are rather allowed to learn words that THEY want to learn.
This is the value of putting the horse before the cart in the natural order and let vocabulary acquisition be the result of compelling language and not of us teaching something they “have to learn” because we teachers have bought into the importance of thematic units/word lists in language learning.
The kids are far less stupid than we think. Worrying about lists of words has literally put the cart before the horse in our profession and the kids and the horse can’t get going down the road toward real acquisition. The words cannot be acquired unless the kids are interested in what they mean, and so we must now focus as teachers on making interesting messages the center of our instruction.
Then the words will stick. Moms don’t teach their toddlers by showing them words. Nor should we. That’s not how it works. We are awakening from a dream. Sorry about overworking the metaphor.