Lost in translation: breaking a taboo

As a rule, I never use my students’ mother tongue in my lessons.  Of course, that’s not to say that my students don’t!

Sometimes it can be useful.  For example, if I’m teaching a new expression such as ‘It serves you right’ and someone shouts it out the Italian translation (‘Ti sta bene’) – well, it gives me good evidence that they’ve understood what it means.  So I usually say ‘Yes, that’s right’ and get on with the lesson.  It’s nice and quick and should be clear.

In this way I don’t use the students’ L1 myself – and this can keep up the illusion that my lessons are events where we only use English to communicate with each other.  I think that if I used Italian myself, it would break the ‘spell’.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with another way of getting my students to use their L1.  It’s called ‘retranslation’ and I find it really helps my exam classes with the Use of English papers.  It works at all levels and requires very little preparation.  What more can we ask?!

The procedure goes something like this:

·        Find a short text.  Take this from the Use of English paper.  It could be a paragraph e.g. I’ve used  paragraphs from Parts 1, 2 or 3 from Cambridge First (it needs to be the complete version with the answers included) or a series of single sentences e.g. from Part 4 of the First exam.

·        Give the text to your students and tell them to translate it into their L1.  They can work in pairs or groups here.  When finished, get them to fold over or cut off the original English text.

·        Do something else for a few minutes e.g. correct homework.  This means the original text will no longer be in the students’ short term memory.

·        Now get them to look at their L1 text and translate it back into English.  Again, they can do this in pairs.  Make sure they understand that this isn’t a memory test – it’s not a problem if they have forgotten the exact forms used in the original test (actually, it works much better if they can’t remember them).

·        When they’ve finished, they can compare their version with the original one.  This is the interesting bit!  Write the following questions on the board: Is this correct English?  Does it mean the same as the original?  Using these questions, students can explore – with the teacher’s help – the ‘gap’ between what they wrote and the ‘native speaker’ version.

·        In a following lesson – a week later or even more – give them the First exercise for them to do i.e. with the gaps as they will find it in the exam.  They will immediately recognise it and – in my experience – will be motivated to see if they can remember or work out what needs to go in the gap.

Here is an example of a retranslation exercise that I did with one of my First groups.  This is the original text, taken from Part 2 of the Use of English paper:

Lake Titicaca, often known as the ‘holy lake’, is situated in South America on the border between Bolivia and Peru.  The lives of the people whose tools and pottery have been found on its shores have long remained a mystery.  However, scientists taking part in an exploration project have found what they believe to be a 1000-year-old temple under the water.

Here is my students’ version:

The Titicaca lake, known often like ‘holy lake’ is located in south America on the border between Bolivia and Peru.  The persons’ life whose tools and ceramic were found on the sides remained a mystery for a long time.  However, the scientists who take part in a project of exploration found that which they believe that is a 1000-years-old temple under the waters.

 Some of the issues that came out of this particular exercise were:

• Articles: not with lakes (the Titicaca lake)
• Word order: (Lake Titicaca, not Titicaca Lake)
• Nouns in groups: the ‘s structure vs. the of structure vs. compound noun (The persons’ life .vs. The lives of the people / an exploration project vs. a project of exploration)
• Vocabulary: shores .vs. sides (for lakes)
• Singular vs. plural (life / waters / 1000-years-old)
• Simple past vs. present perfect (was found vs. have been found / have found vs. found)
• Present simple .vs. continuous (take part vs. taking part)
• Ellipsis in relative clauses (scientists taking part…)

What I like about retranslation is that is it clearly very focussed on grammar – and yet it has a very different feel from our usual grammar lessons.  This is because it is the students who are deciding what they want to focus on.  So you might use the same text with 2 different groups and the lesson will go very differently each time.  And because it is so student-centred, there is a better chance that the new items will ‘stick’ and be remembered.  Try it out and see what you think!

PS Have a look at my post on Dictogloss for a different technique that creates a similar sort of lesson.

Expanding sentences – encouraging students to write more

I got a bit fed up last week when I did a Cambridge Key (KET) for schools writing exercise with one of my classes.  It was one of those tasks from Part 9 of the Reading and Writing paper.  Do you know the one?  Students have to answer a text with a short message, like this one:

From Alex, to Roger:    It’s great you can come to my house this evening to watch a DVD. What time can you come? Which DVD do you want to watch? What would you like to eat?

A typical reply from one of my pupils was:

I can come at 7:30.  I want to watch ‘High School Musical’.  I would like to eat a pizza.

Now that’s OK – it certainly addresses all three points of the message, which is really important if they want to get a good mark.  But it’s not very personal – or very interesting.  Some of my pupils tend to do the absolute minimum – and that’s a bit frustrating…

So I had the idea of putting the student-generated text up on the board, creating two teams (or I guess it could be 3 with a big class) and telling them that they had to add 1, 2 or maximum 3 words to the text – all at the same position in the text though – so the message still made sense.  They would get one point for every word they managed to add.  I wrote the new words up on the board at each turn.  In this way the text gradually got longer and longer.

The competitive element seemed to motivate them –  and at the end of the game, this was the final version of the email:

Hi Alex, I can come to your house this evening at around 7:30. Is that OK? I really want to watch ‘High School Musical’ if possible. I love it, especially the fantastic songs! I would like to eat a tomato and ham pizza and a coke. Is that OK? I hope so. See you later.

Well, it’s not going to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but it’s certainly better than the first version!  I’ve started doing this at various levels and contexts, and it seems to be a nice activity that gets analytical learners thinking.  You can see them working out what sort of words can go where in a sentence – so it brings up all sorts of grammar/syntax issues.

Here’s an example from one of my Business English classes.  Original sentence:

Companies manufacture products.

Final version:

Some Italian companies tend to manufacture environmentally-friendly products abroad because it is much cheaper for them, significantly reducing their costs.

Try it out with your classes and see how it goes.  It can make a nice warmer.  Make sure you remember to give the points to the correct group, otherwise there’ll be trouble…!

Teaching grammar – dictogloss

I teach a lot of higher level students – and prepare them for Cambridge First, Advanced and Proficiency exams.  Of course, many of them find the Use of English paper very tricky. I find that the usual approach to teaching grammar – ‘OK today we’re going to do the present perfect continuous (class groans!)’ – doesn’t really work as it did at lower levels.

This is partly because at B2 plus level, students have already ‘done’ most of the main grammar areas.  And I find that doing more lessons on these areas doesn’t seem to make much difference in terms of how accurately they use them.  Students also seem to get a bit bored by these sorts of lesson (or is it just the way I teach them?!)

So I started using Dictogloss activities, also known as grammar dictations.  These are intensive grammar lessons, but they have a very different feel to normal coursebook lessons, and – in my experience – are more memorable and relevant.  Here’s a basic procedure:

• Find a short text (about 4/5 lines long).  For exam classes, I often take them from the Reading paper – for example, a paragraph from one of the reading texts.  See this link from the Cambridge English website – scroll down for the Cambridge First Handbook with a sample paper.
• Read out the text at a normal speed and get students to write down as much as they can.  They will soon realise that it’s impossible to write down every word as in a normal dictation – they need to listen out for the key words such as nouns and verbs that convey the main message of the text.
• In pairs, students need to try and reconstruct the text.  This means they will need to add the bits that are missing – trying to make sure it means the same thing.
• If you have time, create bigger groups, with pairs checking their version with other pairs.  If you can, try and get one final version which everyone more or less agrees with.  Don’t get involved here – let the students battle it out together – your moment will come!
• Get the final version on the board so everyone can see it.  The show them the original text.  Of course there will be differences – some predictable, some unexpected.  The idea is that you help the class explore these differences, using these 2 key questions:  Is your version grammatically correct?  Does it mean the same as the original or something different?
• You’ll find yourself clarifying all sorts of grammar areas that coursebooks don’t often touch on.  It’s a very student-centred approach to grammar teaching: they show you what they need, by focussing on the gap between their version and the original.

Here’s an example of a dictogloss I did with a group of proficiency students. 

This is one sentence from the original text:

It has succeeded in capturing the imagination of millions since it first emerged as a genre back in the 1930s. 

This is the final students’ version:

It succeeded in the capturing of the imagination of millions since the genere emerged first in the 1930’s.

 It brought up all sorts of grammar areas – past simple vs. present perfect / verb patterns (to succeed in doing something / to capture something) / article usage / position of adverbs (first) / etc.

Try one out with one of your classes and let me know how it goes!