ELT in Brazil

This lesson comes after TBL Lesson #9! If you haven’t read that one I suggest you do so you understand where we’re coming from.

This is a lesson for a pair of A1 students taking General English classes – meaning they have no specific need for English at the moment but would like to study and learn the language. In our previous lesson, we found out that the topic of this unit of learning would be grocery shopping. We began that lesson by eliciting some items, then we built a mindmap and finally carried out an input, closed, listening task.

For this class, I mentioned I wanted to move our focus to output and that’s what we did. Before setting the main task of the lesson, I elicited again some items we could buy at a grocery store. I wanted to help students with some key vocabulary before we actually got to the task itself. Students came up with some words and asked me to translate a couple of terms. We built the following mindmap together.

Then, I gave one student a picture of a grocery shop and told them that they were now the owner of that shop. I told the student not to show the other student the picture. Then, I sent the other student a shopping list and the task became obvious. Students had to interact to ask whether the shop owner had the items in the “customer’s” list (click!). I told students I would give them a minute to think about how they would complete that task.

Students began the task. There were some items in the shopping list that the “customer” did not know what they meant. I told them it was ok to look for a picture of the item online as needed. However, when it was the shop owner who didn’t understand what item the customer was asking for they were not allowed to translate, but had to describe the item to make the communication work. To be honest, I think this was the most productive part of the task.

For example, the shop owner did not understand the word “onion”.The customer said:

“You know Burger King? Whopper and potatoes?”

“Yes”

“But no potatoes, another”

“No potato?”

“No. White and (mimicked the crunchiness of the onion rings)

“Oooh ok! I have”

Then, the shop owner did not understand the word “garlic”. The customer said:

“Garlic white.”

“Not onion?”

“No. Edward from Crepúsculo” (that’s the word for Twilight in Portuguese)

“Edward?”

“Yes! Edward don’t like garlic. Kill Edward!!”

“Oohh ok!!! I have”

The students had a blast and so did I. When they were done with the task, I gave them some feedback, worked on some emergent language and that was the end of the lesson. Next class students are going to switch roles and repeat the task with a different picture and a different shopping list.

See you next class!