ENGLISH CORNERS
13 June, 2005
What is an English corner?
- One teacher speaks to row of students for an
hour. As s/he speaks s/he writes up key vocabulary on a white board.
- Students speak to each other in small groups
while one teacher orchestrates and walks around or monitors. A
communicative approach is adopted.
- Students speak to each other in small groups and
each group has one teacher talking with them.
- Students organise themselves into groups and
there is no teacher at all.
- Students chit chat about anything in small groups
- Students choose a topic to discuss
- A teacher chooses a topic to discuss a week
before and students can go away and prepare for it.
What is the aim of an English corner?
- To create an English environment where people can
develop their listening and speaking skills.
- To offer an opportunity, after class, for
students to practice their English.
- To give students information about English
speaking countries' culture and customs.
- In some way an English corner should be different
from a class.
What problems do organisers of English corners face?
- Mixed level students all together.
- High drop out rate.
- Students become listeners and expect the foreign
teacher to come up and give a lecture.
- Students always ask foreign teacher the same kind
of questions and so the foreign teachers become bored and de-motivated
- Teachers find it difficult to come up with
topics.
How can we achieve a successful English corner?
Stream levels.
Have a special English corner for low-level learners only.
If it's in school, this could focus on language learnt in recent classes and
give an opportunity for students to recycle this language. This type of
English corner is often very successful if it is well structured and lead by
a Chinese teacher instead of a foreign teacher.
Give topics in advance.
This allows everyone to prepare well in advance. Some
schools keep and build up archives of past topics, often with related
vocabulary in English and Chinese.
Have task based English corners.
Instead of having as topic, put the students in small
groups and have them do a task (e.g. plan a holiday, make a plan to improve Beijing's
traffic problem, solve a problem, etc). This makes the English corner much
more interactive and communicative.
Have a topic, vocabulary brainstorm and then a task.
This way you are getting the best of all worlds!
Use charismatic speakers.
Especially for teacher fronted English corners, many
students are attracted just by the personality of the speaker.
Don't have chairs or tables.
If the participants are comfortable they won't move, they
won't mingle. A kind of stagnation sets in.
Mix levels in each small group of students.
Avoid having all weak students in one group together. A
big part of English corners is learning from other students.
Be sensitive to the choice of topics.
Whilst you want to get people talking, you don't want to
provoke world war two! Themes to be wary of are clearly religion and
politics.
Choose topics well.
In addition to the usual topic of education, environment,
marriage and so on, you may want to be a bit more original. Here are a few
ideas that have worked very well:
Time travellers. How would
people in the future describe today.
Ten tips for boys (by girls)
and Ten tips for girls (by boys)
Love. What is it? What does
it mean?
Advice and role swapping. If
students are teenagers, they play the role of parent. If students are
parents, they play the role of teenager. They then give each other advice.
(do same for husband-wife, boss-employee, teacher-student, etc.)
There is a useful book with some ideas for topics and
activities by Penny Ur, called "Five minute activities".
When choosing a topic, one should bear in mind that the
higher the level of learners, the more able they will be to talk about topics
not related to themselves. That is, lower level learners can only talk about
themselves. They will personalise topics. However, higher levels can branch
out and handle more abstract topics.
Have a question and answer session.
Learners can ask teacher or learners can ask learners (bit
like a TV quiz show)
Encourage learners not to be listeners only.
Many participants like to just sit back and listen at an
English corner. The reason clearly is they do not want to go out of their
comfort zone. While there is no harm in this, it often leads dropping out. It
seems the reason is they are not going to get the necessary ingredients that
will make them come back long term. Those "English corner
ingredients" are:
Interest
Encouragement
Improvement
Don't have a foreign teacher!
One of the most successful English corners held right here
in Beijing is at RenMin
University. It's held on Friday
evenings and can have anything from a hundred to a thousand participants. And
there are no teachers leading it!
Here's what they do. Anyone can go along and pick up a
whiteboard. That person then sets up a corner and begins speaking on his
topic. People will gather and listen and start to participate. The
"leader" or listeners can write up new words at any time.
What happens is, quickly you have many different topics
going on all over the place and participants can wander around and "drop
in" on any conversation they like for as long as they like.
There is free movement. Of course, there are some
"responsibility" rules that speakers have to follow.
All the while there is some soft background music going
on.
The key is that this atmosphere gentle turns the listener
into an expresser. When there is Interest, Encouragement and Improvement,
then people keep going back.
A final note. We have talked about English corners. To
what extent would all of the above apply to Chinese corners?
If anyone has set up Chinese corners or has any experience
of any, please let us know, we'd be interested to know more.
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