ELT in Brazil

This lesson is a sequence of TBL Lesson #5. If you haven’t read that post I highly recommend you do so you understand where this is coming from! Btw, I’m well aware this has become a pyramid scheme ahaha!

This is a lesson for a pair of students who are roughly at CEFR A1. One of the students communicates almost at word level, stringing together key content words to make meaning and the other is able to build longer sentences with some function words (4/5-word-long sentences, give or take). We have been talking about and describing our bedrooms and the furniture we have in them for the past few classes. In our previous lesson, students had two pictures that were similar but not quite the same and had to interact to find the differences. Classic!

I thought a sequence to this lesson would be an input-focused, closed task to provide students with some new language. I recorded an audio talking about an apartment (in the audio I say ‘my apartment’ but that is not true!) and told the students to listen and draw the whole apartment including all the furniture they could grasp from the audio in their pictures. I told them not to focus on the spelling of the words nor on how to position the items in the rooms properly – all they had to do was draw all the rooms and get the furniture in them. You can hear the recording by clicking below.

I sent the recording to the students in our WhatsApp group and told them they were allowed to listen to it as many times as they needed. They were also allowed to pause and rewind at will but could not slow the track down. Students took around 12 minutes to finish the activity which means they listened to the track around 4 times to be satisfied with their answers. Even though at first I was worried they were taking too long to complete the task, I later understood there was nothing to worry about. My students were fully engaged in a meaning-focused task and properly challenged.

When they returned (I always ask them to turn their cameras off while doing something individually and then back on when they are ready to share) I asked them to compare their answers orally, without sharing the pictures they drew. Students interacted for some minutes to compare their answers, I took some notes and then I gave them some feedback, and worked on some emergent language and that was the end of the lesson.

I believe it is time we move on from this unit of learning on rooms and furniture. Students have acquired some interesting language to describe their homes, the rooms in their homes, and the furniture in them. Also, they developed language skills to compare answers, to check understanding, and some formulaic, classroom language such as “your turn”, “my turn”, “and that’s it”. Perhaps next class I’ll begin by starting a conversation and see what theme they bring to class so we can choose our next unit of learning. What do you think it will be?

Oh, and I forgot to mention there was some homework! I sent students the script of this audio with some inaccuracies: I changed a couple of rooms, furniture, and their position in the script. Their homework, you might’ve guessed by now, was to listen to the audio again and correct the script. See you next class!