Overcoats and underpants and bears, oh my!

Oof. I got “clothed” again a few days before writing this.  During a lower level English class I was visiting, the instructor had a page projected with a dozen pictures of clothing items.  The screen showed the usual clothing vocabulary: shirt, shoes, hat, etc., but also overcoat and underpants. Overcoat?  I think we use that word in the U.S. when the weather is in the 1950s.   Underpants? Most people in the U.S. probably say underwear, but even so, why is it being given high priority in class along with this list of clothing items? The students repeated the names of all of them, did a fill-in-the-blank exercise, and then the teacher moved on. What was gained?

English language learning textbooks frequently have a unit on clothing (types of hats included, if you're unlucky). Over the years we’ve fallen for it. We’ve fallen for the book publishers’ themed units.  I’m sure many of you had that experience in your language classes. The sad part is that I know the students in that class I visited cannot ask and answer everyday questions accurately.

Honest question: If you had a trip planned to Italy, and you also had an Italian tutor to help you prepare for your trip, would you even ask your tutor to teach you the words for twelve clothing items?  If you really need to know the Italian word for socks at a store in Italy, you could point to them and they’ll tell you. You’ll likely remember it because one day you really need that word so you look it up or you ask an Italian speaker.

Hopefully you’ve had a chance to read over the PRACTICE Plan.  The P for prioritize is a mantra of mine (if you haven’t noticed). The overcoat/underpants fiasco illustrates the need for the R, which is Run from “covered”.  Putting up pictures of things and having students repeat them isn't class time well-utilized. It's "The School of Next Page". It’s not language training. It’s going through…stuff.

One of the pitfalls of language classes is the assumption that moving through a prescribed book makes sense in some efficient progression towards fluency in English. Perhaps that's understandable, though, since it has been the norm for so long.  Why would a book publisher keep making new editions of books that are structured by topics like clothes, body parts, and furniture?  Hmm.  Great que$tion.  

We remember words and phrases that we need.   Wouldn’t class time be better spent speaking in complete sentences with complete questions where the students can immediately converse? In my next email I’ll share a lesson idea that you can use with [gasp!] clothing items. It allows students to converse in a meaningful way, a concept at the heart of The Language Sport course for teachers.

As for bears–you can guess where that’s going–but that’s a fun little story for another day.