"English - the Language of Rock"

This week our students in the field of health and social services have started working on the topic "English - the Language of Rock". It is a fact, like it or not, that most Norwegian artists sing their songs in English rather than Norwegian, and one of the things I wanted the students to think about why this is so. It is quite obvious that artists in the whole of Scandinavia have to sing in English in order to reach out to a wider audience than just the other Scandinavians, but why do most Norwegian teenagers prefer listening to English texts rather than Norwegian?

When working on this topic, we want all of the students to prepare a presentation of a Scandinavian artist or group singing in English, and they are also going to present a song by the same artists. To prepare them for this mini-project, we have used the text "English - the Language of Rock" in the textbook "Tracks", and also some pre-reading activities dealing with English and music. You can read my entire lesson plan on this page. As you will see, I also included some grammar in the lesson plan, trying to make the students aware of the use of the definite and indefinite article.


Photo: "Guitar hero"

Paired reading

It has been a bit of a slow start in my class this morning. Only half of the students were in the classroom on time, and quite many very obviously too tired to do anything before their first break... Knowing that time flies (and I have also heard that some pigs might fly on a lucky day...), I still have to rush the students through the lesson plan of the week and the topic of Global English. The class I am teaching this morning are the first year students at the course "Health and Social Services", and even if the curriculum is the same as for my other English class, I have to do things quite differently with this group. First of all, almost none of the students in this class likes to speak English in front of the others. Second, many of them are not all that positive when it comes to learning English and some say that there are just too many things they have not learned, so that the gap between their knowledge and our curriculum is too big.

So what do I do? I decided to just go for the text I had planned, "A Global Language" from their textbook Tracks. What I really like about this book is that there is a "shortcut" to many of the texts, so that the weakest students can read a shorter version of the original texts. Today, however, I asked all the students to read the longer text and to use the method of paired reading when doing it. Paired reading is a fairly simple activity and I am sure most have used some kind of version of it at some point in their teaching career. To students sit together and take turns reading one paragraph each. When the first student has finished his/her paragraph, his/her partner has to repeat what the first one has just read. In this way, both students have to be active all the time, either as reader or as listener. I use paired reading a lot in my classes, and I strongly believe this is a good way of working with longer texts. The twist of the day was that I opened up for the students to speak in Norwegian, hoping that that would help them understanding the text.

By now all the students have been through the text twice, once by the paired reading, and once by listening to the text on CD. At the moment the classroom is all quiet and the boy (yes, there is only one boy in this class) and the girls are busy working on some of the activities to the text. The combination of activities from the textbook and from Track's web pages seems to be working fine, and it seems like the slow start this morning has turned into quite a productive working session after all. Indian summer has also come to this part of the country and the sun is shining. I am quite sure it will be a nice day!

Picture: "Early Morning Reading"

The English language - how did it all start?

One of the competence aims for the first year students that really scared me when I first saw it, is the one that says that the students should be able to "explain the main characteristics of the development of English from an Anglo-Saxon language to an international world language". I guess I have always taught my students about how English came to be a world language, but the history of the language was not a part of the curriculum here in Norway until "Kunnskapsløftet" in 2006. Honestly, I believe the first time I really learned something about the history myself was as a master student at the university, and I therefore thought it a bit over the top to teach my own students about the topic. My opinion has changed, however, and knowing that they have to learn something about the history of the Norwegian language, too, it makes sense to point out some of the similarities between our own language, spoken only by 4,5 million people, and the number one world language English.

Using online resources for most part of my teaching, it has been a challenge to find pages on the internet dealing with the history of the English language in a way that is not too difficult for my students. EnglishClub.com has a page that can serve as a starting point, and I am also happy to find that Norsk Digital Læringsarena, NDLA, has come up with varoious resources on the topic. On this page we can read a short text about how the English language has developed through history, and I particularly liked the audio clip with examples of various varieties of English. I guess the students will also like the "Drag and drop" activities trying to place the origin of various words in the English language. So now that I have found some internet pages that I can use in class, I hope neither language history nor the teacher will scare away the students tomorrow afternoon. It will, after all, be our first meeting this year...


Picture: http://www.llp.armstrong.edu/5800/histho.html

Term papers, grammar, multiculturalism and a dog

Right now I feel panic and frustration lurking in every corner and corridor; there are so many things I should have done, and there simply is not enough time for it all. Tomorrow I will meet one of my groups for the last time before their term tests next week, and the main focus will be on the upcoming tests. This term test will be the last chance for the students to really show their skills when it comes to writing English papers, and I will therefore start this week's lesson by giving them time to browse through all the comments I have given them on their papers this year, and also time to dig into various grammar topics. I made this collection of task and activities on grammar last week, hoping that everyone would find some exercises that could help them improving their grammar. We started working on these exercises last week, and I hope that some saw that this could actually help them; many asked if I could explain a bit more, and some said that they finally understood why I corrected them when they wrote "everybody are doing their best." Most of the exercises in this lesson plan are taken either from the Tracks/Passage pages or from Exploring English. I find it useful that these pages explain the grammatical topics in Norwegian, and that the English terminology is listed at the same pages.

This week I have also planned to continue working on multicultural Britain. The film last week was a success, and this week it is time to look at some facts and figures concerning immigration to the UK and how multiculturalism affects the British society. As I have said before, I have had some problems finding up to date-information on the topic, but hopefully we will manage by the resources available. My idea is that the students are to work in groups of four preparing a presentation on multiculturalism, hoping that a group activity will keep most of them busy and forcing them to read some of the texts I have picked out for them.

Last stop on this week's agenda is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Most of the students have managed to get hold of a copy of the novel, and it is time to start working on it. Knowing that reading is not the favourite occupation of many of the students, I believe it is necessary to give them time for reading at school, at least in the beginning. I suppose most of the students will find that reading the novel is not all that hard, and therefore I want them to do a close reading of at least parts of the book. My colleague Ann gave me the idea of letting the students pick out central paragraphs in the novel and then to explain their choice. I have therefore planned this rubric for them, and I will introduce it before they start reading so that they know what to put focus on. My colleagues Anne and Kjetil also suggested that we put focus on the characters and Anne has prepared this rubric in which the students have to fill in information and reflections on the various characters we meet in the novel.

My guess is that I have more than enough activities to fill the days this week, too, and that I have probably tried to squeeze too much into one day. My main goal, however, is to present activities that will engage my students in various way, and that they feel that they have actually done a good day's work by the end of class.


Photo: www.flickr.com/photos/62518311@N00/86907303

East is East and multicultural Britain

Walking the streets of almost any British city you meet people from all corners of the world, and stating what is typically "British" gets harder and harder. Ever since World War II a great number of people from the former British colonies have come to England in pursuit of a better life. All these people have, of course, given their contributions to the British society and influenced post-war Britain in various ways. This week we wanted to put focus on multiculturalism in Britain in class, and as an introduction to the topic we showed the movie East is east. The film is hillarious, but there is also a serious tone throughout, displaying the problems second generation immigrants face in Britain early in the 1970s. Growing up with a strict Muslim father from Pakistan and a more liberal British mother, the seven children in the Khan-family find themselves torn between the wishes of their father and their ever-growing identity as British.

In an interview the author of East is east, Ayub Khan-Din, tells that there are many parallels between the story of East is east and his own life: The parents are drawn directly from my own family. The youngest boy, Sajid, is me as a child. All the arguments in the film, all the theories behind the father's way of thinking, are my own arguments and theories which I developed from writing the first draft of the stageplay to the last draft of the screenplay. The different issues, the different aspects of different relationships - they're all very similar to my own background. Hence we can probably see the film as a realistic portrait of what life was like for young, ethnic Brits at the time. But what is the situation like today? Is the gap between the generations as wide as it used to be? Do second generation immigrants face other problems in Britain today than they did 40 years ago? I have tried to find some resources that could highlight some of these questions, but I have not found many yet. "The truth of multicultural Britain", published in The Guardian in 2001, is quite informative, however, telling how there is not "a single 'ethnic minority experience' of life in Britain", but a complex pattern of opportunity and disadvantage with as many differences within and between different ethnic groups as can be found by comparing the 'ethnic minorities' to the general population. An other page I like is the UK in the USA-page where we can read about the history of immigration, and also about how Britain is a result of its post-war immigration history. "Everything in modern Britain - from music and fashion to food and language - has been shaped by different ethnic communities, cultures and social groups," the article says, and in this way we may all be seen as influenced by this multiculturalism. One final page worth mentioning is the BBC page on the history of immigration from the 250 AD to the present.

Photos from allmoviephoto.com

About "About a Boy" and reading in general

Earlier I have told that I have used Nick Hornby's novel About a Boy in class several times. I think this novel is great, that it provides food for discussions, and that the language is not too complex and difficult for Norwegian 17-19 year old students to cope with. It is a pity, though, that many of the students think that they can just watch the film instead of reading the novel. Personally, I really love the film, too, but I believe some central scenes have been omitted and that the book is so much better. I also find it a bit sad that so many of my students are so negative when it comes to reading literature. I know that it takes a whole lot more time getting through 300 pages in a novel than watching the film, but what about slowing down the pace once in a while, enjoying a good book and a moment of peace? Since I have always loved reading, I really have a hard time understanding that some people simply do not like reading, and that well-equipped bookshelves are not to be found in every house. On the other hand, I have never liked football, and know that many cannot understand how I survive without watching a single match...

Anyway, About a Boy has been replaced by The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time this year, but I have nevertheless collected some online resources on the novel, in case I will use the book another time. British council has this page on Nick Hornby and his works, whereas at Penguin Readers I found a factsheet which can help us teachers preparing for this novel. On the page of Manitowoc Public Library I also found a page on the novel, on which there are also some questions for discussion, and finally, we have the Nick Hornby homepage where there is material both on About a Boy and on the other Hornby novels. Enjoy the novel!

Building paragraphs

I have just corrected another pile of papers written by my students. The topic of these papers was the film Whale Rider and the culture of indigenous people. Many of the students said that they found the essay questions a bit harder than usual this time (but that is just natural, is it not, knowing that the exam is just three months away), but I still feel that many had managed to come up with fairly good answers anyway. What I usually do when the students write at school, is that they write for a certain amount of time, they hand in their papers and I correct them. Then it is time for feedback and for the students to read my comments and correct their own mistaks. This time we decided to do it a bit differently, however. The week after they had written the papers, they were all given some time to go back to their texts and work on the language. We even allowed them to work in pairs and to give each other feedback on what they had written. When correcting the papers I could clearly see who had taken this seriously and who had not. In many of the papers there were almost no spelling mistakes, and there were also fewer grammar mistakes than usual. This made my job a whole lot easier.

Even though the language part seemed to be better, many of my students still have problems structuring their papers. There is often no logical order in how the various points are presented, and sometimes the paragraphs are so poorly structured it totally ruins the message of the paper. My number one task this week was therefore to put focus on paragraph building and text structure. I first gave them a presentation in which I told them some of the basic rules when it comes to writing papers. In this presentation I have also included some small exercises to keep the students busy. They were then to work individually on various exercises and activities I have found on the web page of Exploring English. The students all worked quite well on these exercises. Hopefully it will pay off when their writing their term papers next month, too.

Image: Introspection

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, part one

'The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs Shears' house. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog.'


This year I have decided that I want to read Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with my first year students. I have heard about this novel since it was first published in 2003, but this is the first time I have read it. This is not the hardest novel to read when it comes to the language part, and I believe many will find the story quite simple. I nevertheless believe this novel can help my 16 years old students understand that a novel can be read and understood at various levels.

I have just started planning how to teach this novel (please leave a comment if you have any great tips!), and I will come back with a lesson plan later on. When searching on the internet for resources, however, I came across this Swiss page, which has various ideas for teaching literature. My plan so far is to use the audio book-version of the novel in the beginning, so that all of the students get into the novel as fast as possible. My experience is that even students at 16 like to listen when someone reads to them, and even if the language here is not a challenge, it may help them through the first pages. At Randomhouse you can also read an extract from the novel and also listen to a section from the text.

More resources on the novel:

• Bookrags.com
• Readinggroupguides.com

Picture: http://www.markhaddon.com/curious.htm

Teaching Sue Monk Kidd's "The Secret Life of Bees"

One of the things I find difficult when teaching English, is to find novels that my students really enjoy reading and discussing. Nick Hornby's About a Boy has been one of my favorites for several years now, but I have realised that many of the students just watch the film instead of actually read to novel. Last year, I therefore wanted to go for a new novel, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. Personally, I find this story to be just beautiful, and I believe there are so many aspects that can be discussed when dealing with this novel. I was quite lucky when we were to read this novel. We had asked the students to chose between "my" novel and About a Boy, which my colleague Ingunn was to teach, and only a group of 15 students ended up reading The Secret Life. Talking about literature with only 15 students is so much easier than doing it in a class of 30, and even though not all of them were as active as I had wanted them to be, we had interesting discussions.

We had only set aside three weeks for working on this novel, and looking back I admit that was too little. It takes time getting the students to start reading, and they read a whole lot slower than we do. I was therefore not completely satisfied with the result, and I am not even sure all of the students finished the novel before the end of the year. Evaluating the novel, one of the conclusions was also that this novel appeals more to girls than to boys.



You will find my lesson plans and questions for discussion here:

• Week one


• Week two


• Week three

Online resources (you will probably recognise the questions in my lesson plans...):

• Reading group guides


• Book Rags


• Contemporary literature

Native Americans, Glogsters and "The Bottle Queen"

New week, new topic. This week: Native Americans. I really needed some activities this week which would make the students work without me hanging over their shoulders. I had promised them discussions in smaller groups this week (more discussion on Obama's inaugural address), and I could therefore not be in the classroom with the others all day. My solution was to provide various sources on Native Americans and to ask each student to make a glogster on a topic related to Native Americans. Returning to the classroom after approximately one hour, I found all the students busy creating their own digital posters; they were eager to share ideas about how to make interesting posters with pictures, text and videos, and asked for more time because it was funny. Running out of time and wanting to spend some time on factual texts and literature, too, I have therefore asked them to finish their glogsters at home and to publish them on their blogs. If you want to have a look at some of the results, you can visit Henrik and Caroline's blogs.

Working on Native Americans, we have also used a couple of text which we found on the internet. "The end of the Native American way of life" is a text from the BBC pages and tells about how the US government defeated the Indians, whereas in "Native American Voices" you can read about indigenous peoples in all parts of America.

I find it useful to use short stories or extracts from novels when teaching the various topics. This time we plan to use two short stories by William P. Kinsella, "The Bottle Queen" and "Panache". In between parent-teacher meetings, correcting papers and fighting the flu, I have not managed to get around to all the details on how to use these stories yet. It probably will not be all that revolutionary anyway, but hopefully both stories will provide food for thought and discussions with the students. Time will show.

"I get by with a little help from my friends..."

You may have noticed that I very often use phrases like "we decided that...",
"we asked the students to...", etc. This is not because I like to use the "royal we", but because I, 95% of the time, work in a team with my colleagues. This year there are four of us at my school who share the same course in English. We each have groups of 30 students, and we spend a considerable amount of time planning our lessons together, so that the students will be dealing with roughly the same things in the different groups. I really like this way of working. I am not left all to myself when it comes to coming up with ideas for project, texts and topics, and it is nice to know that there are other teachers around who can share their knowledge, experiences and thoughts. I do know that not everybody appreciates working in teams like we do, and I am aware of the fact that not all teams are working as well as ours. Therefore, I would like to say thanks a lot to my team mates this year and those I have worked with the previous years. I really appreciate our cooperation!

Photo: http://www.worth1000.com/entries/8500/8925_w.jpg

Rabbits, whales and indigenous people

Our curriculum says that the students are to "discuss literature by and about indigenous peoples in the English-speaking world." As I have said earlier, we put focus on the Aborines and the Maori last year when we did the "hole in the wall"-project. So far this year, we have also focused on these two groups of people, but in a different way. I have realised that the students have limited knowledge about indigenous people in general, and just a few of them have heard about how these peoples have been treated by the Europeans and their present governments. To me it was important to rise the students' awareness of the "stolen generation" in Australia, and to make them understand that this is something that happened in our recent history, not way back in time. As our point of departure, we read a factual text about the Aborigines which tells about the history of the people, their meeting with the Europeans and so on. On the BBC pages we found an article called "The Anguish of the Stolen Generation", which tells the story of the stolen generation first hand. Although the language of the text was a challenge to some of my students, the text still worked well to illustrate what has actually been going on in Australia. We also spent time watching Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the Aborigines, and finally, we saw the film Rabbit Proof Fence with our students.

Our next stop was with the Maori of New Zealand. Again we read a factual text about the people which we found online, and then we turned to the novel and the film Whale Rider. We have, in other words, watched two long film about indigenous people in this part of the world. Is that too much? Has my focus been wrong? Should more time have been spent on other indigenous people, on other parts of the curriculum? I am not sure. What I know is that very few of my students would have seen these film on their own, and I believe it is one of my tasks as a teacher to present to the students other films than just Hollywood-movies.

One final point about how I have worked with this topic: our curriculum says that the students should "discuss social conditions and values in various cultures in a number of English-speaking countries." I found some facts about the social conditions of the Maori on Wikipedia which I presented to my students, and I also gave them some questions to discuss. I split the class into groups of five, and asked all of the groups to discuss these questions for 15 minutes. The students did great! Many of them were also quite active in the class discussion afterwards, and some of those who had never said a word before suddenly presented good arguments and were very talkative.

Almost five weeks' work on the Maori and the Aborigines will end this week with the students writing papers on the topic. I will come back to the essay topics and some comments on how the students did later.

Photos: http://www.artemis-film-guides.com/Whale%20Rider_files/image005.jpg

http://www.nrk.no/programmer/radio/filmpolitiet/2302198.html

Obama vs. McCain - Election 2008

I guess most of you have covered the US Election '08 this year, and that you have done so in various ways. Even though our curriculum does not specifically say that the students have to know how the political system in the US works, I do believe that some knowledge of this is important. After all, we are heavily influenced by the USA here in Norway, and we cannot be indifferent to what is going on in the political life "over there". As an introduction to the topic I therefore asked my students to read a text called "13 questions on politics in the USA", and tried to tell them something about how the political system in the USA works. I also found various webpages that explained the election process. I deliberatly gave the students several texts on this topic, and made sure the texts had different levels of difficulty. One I found on EnchantedLearning.com, another on chevroncars.com (believe it or not!), whereas the last page is totally meant for kids, but nevertheless working quite well with my 16 year olds.

Together with my colleagues we also decided to do a project on the two running presidential candidates, Obama and McCain. My two classes were both split into seven groups and each group got one key topic from the campaign that they were to present. The assignment was that the groups should find as much information as possible on these topics, and present the candidates' point of view. We also wanted them to tell why these issues were so central in the campaign, the historical background, etc. It was important to me that the presentations should be more than just a presentation of the two candidates, and I think most of the groups did quite well. I had also encouraged the groups to chose other ways of presenting their material than just using power point presentations. I must have done something wrong here, however, because only one of the 14 groups I listened to had chosen to do something different. This group had made a role play in which they had a television debate. This was entertaining and fun for the others to watch, too. I also found that they had managed to find quite a lot of material to present, and that they used a language that was adapted to the situation and to the audience. What about the other groups? 13 power point presentations, some quite good, others just boring... Anyway, at the end of the project I asked all of the students to write a closing argument for one of the candidates in which they commented on all of the seven topics that had been presented, and it turned out that most of the students had actually learned quite a lot from working on this project.

Photo: Reuters.com

Buddha, Bowie and Suburbia

In September 2007 we were going to put focus on multiculturalism in England. As our point of departure we chose an extract from Hanif Kureishi's novel The Buddha of Suburbia. The text deals with clashes between different cultures in England, and also clashes between generations. As an appetiser to the text, we found a video with David Bowie's song from the TV series which also includes some glimpses of the protagonist of The Buddha, Karim. We also watched an interview with Hanif Kureshi that was given when the TV series was to be broadcasted in Britain. Unfortunately, I cannot find this interview on YouTube at the moment, this is of course a weakness of some of the resources you can find on the internet, but there are several other interviews and videos out there which can be used when introducing this text/topic. The students seemed to like the two videos because they gave them something visual that could be linked to the text, and I believe some were a bit curious too having seen Karim's father upside-down, in the nude, practising yoga...

Anyway, some of the students found the extract we had chosen for them to be quite difficult, and I believe an easier text could have presented the conflicts of this novel just as well . We therefore decided not to put this text on our reading list this year. Maybe the text would have worked better if the students were older, and also if we had read the whole novel, not just a few pages. Talking about The Buddha of Suburbia we also have to keep in mind that this novel portrays multicultural London in the 1970, and that a lot has happened since then. My point is, however, that using videos from for instance YouTube can serve as an introduction to various topics we all deal with when teaching a foreign language like English. I am 100% sure that the introduction to the novel that Hanif Kureishi gave in the interview mentioned above is a whole lot better than any introduction I could have given.