18.2.3. The English corner and the English walls

It is always very useful to organise a corner where all the ‘English stuff’ is stored or where the various posters made up during the school year can be stored. Call it ‘the English corner’ and use it to display books, magazines, cartoons, brochures, drawings, flashcards that you used or will use in class. Put an English bulletin board there, where learners can hang up their favourite wall-charts or cards. Encourage the students to feel responsible about it and encourage them, in turn, to keep it in order and add new material if they wish to. Obviously, this will be hard if you teach several classes, but you can manage easily if you have only one or two groups.

Choose two walls in the classroom, use these ‘English walls’ as often as you can. Display as much as you can on them and change the posters displayed from time to time. This will be fun for the students and will make the classroom environment lively. The posters displayed will help the learners recall the activities performed more easily and the language input introduced through them. Also use the materials displayed on the walls as a resource for reviewing activities. Thus, the following poster demonstrating onomatopoeic sounds in different cultures will undoubtedly provoke your primary students’ interest and will prove helpful while teaching them reading.

	English	Italian	Spanish	French	Russian
	Ring-ring	Drin-drin	Ring-ring	Drring-drring	Дзинь-дзинь
	Woof-woof	Bau-bau	Guau-guau	Ouah-ouah	Гав-гав
	Crunch-crunch	Gnam-gnam	Chump- chump	Croc-croc	Чав-чав
	Tick-tock	Tic-tac	Tic-tac	Tic-tac	Тик-так
	Knock-knock	Toc-toc	Tan-tan	Toc-toc	Тук-тук
	Hiss	Hiss	Ss-ssh	Ss-ss	Ссс-ссс
	Buzz	Zzz	Zzz-zzz	Bzzz-bzzz	Джж-джж
	Squeak-squeak	Squeak	Iii-iii	Iii-iii	Пии-пии

Students can bring their own cut-outs from cartoons or pictures and stick the cut-outs on the poster. They can add their own drawings if they wish.

18.2.4. Blackboard

The blackboard is perhaps the most useful of visual aids and the majority of teachers would feel hampered in a classroom which did not have one. Unfortunately many teachers do not make full use of the blackboard or they use it badly by neglecting to take the following points into consideration: increasing student participation; planning the blackboard work; blackboard drawing; picture composition on the blackboard.

Increasing student participation

If you are labouriously copying something long onto the blackboard, it is very easy to turn round and find your students’ attention wandering. This can happen especially if you are engrossed in copying a blackboard drawing in small detail.

The answer is to try to involve the students, especially weak ones, as much as possible. The following are just a few ways of doing this:

1. Talk to the students as you are writing and turn round frequently to face them.

2. Ask the students what to write as often as possible and get examples from them.

3. Ask them what they think this word or picture is going to be.

4. Get them to read things as you write them.

5. Ask them to spell the difficult words for you.

6. When writing try standing on the right of the board as the students see it. This has the advantage of forcing you to write in straight lines. You are facing the class, and what you write is revealed to the class as it goes up.

Planning your blackboard work

The blackboard is always available and can be used for various purposes: presenting new words, showing spelling, giving a model for handwriting, writing prompts for practice, etc. Our aim in using the blackboard should be to make things clearer to the class and help to focus their attention. So in order to use the blackboard effectively, it is important to develop good basic techniques of writing on the blackboard and organising the layout of what we write.

Much of the chaotic and untidy work on blackboards can be avoided if the work is planned in advance and included as part of the lesson plan. Ideally the blackboard can be sectioned off into areas. There are various ways of dividing it up, but it is as well to keep one section free for things can crop up in your lesson, that you have not foreseen.

Lesson 27: At the market

go shopping

a kilo of fish

groundnuts newspaper carpet

beans mat

midday magazine knife

knives

When I arrived she had At 7, she sold one basket

sold all her baskets By 7.30, she had sold three

baskets

Here is an example of a teacher’s blackboard at the end of a lesson. Let us see how the layout has been organised.

It is obvious that the lesson developed in the following sequence:

• The lesson was about people selling goods at the market (shown by pictures in the textbook) and how much they had sold by certain time.

• The teacher introduced the past perfect tense and students practised sentenced like ‘By midday she had sold five mats’.

• The teacher introduced key vocabulary for goods (mat, pot, basket) and added some other words which were not in the lesson (plate, bowl).

• The teacher revised time expressions and introduced the new item ‘midday’.

(This lesson is taken from M. Bates: Nile Course for the Sudan, Book 3)

We can see that:

• The blackboard is too crowded. Some items could have been presented orally, or written on the board and then rubbed off again soon afterwards.

• The most important item is the example showing the past perfect tense. It would be clearer if it were written in the centre of the board.

• Key vocabulary could be written down the side of the board, with similar items close together.

A possible layout (omitting some items) might be:

Lesson 27: At the market

basket sell – sold

mat buy – bought

pot

At 7, she sold one basket. knife-knives

magazine By 7.30, she had sold three baskets.

carpet a kilo

When I arrived, she had sold of fish

all her baskets. beans

midday ground-

nuts

T his way of dividing up the blackboard is the H-model, which effectively divides the blackboard into four.

As you can see from the example above, any part of these four can be subdivided if necessary. Part of the board can be kept for pictures, part for writing tables and for lists, or part can be kept for planned work and part for impromptu work. Besides, although you will rub most thins off the board when they have been copied and are no longer needed, you can have one permanent section for vocabulary items, which probably benefit from being exposed on the blackboard as long as possible. The permanent part of the blackboard also serves at the end of the lesson to refresh the students’ memory of the different activities that have been done and the language that arose out of them.

Don’t forget that you are not limited to the blackboard itself. The areas on either side can be used equally well for display purposes.

Blackboard drawing

Many teachers are reluctant to try their hand at blackboard drawing, saying that they can’t draw, often without ever having tried. However, simple stick figures are not beyond even the most hopeless artists and, with a little practice, every teacher can learn enough to draw simple pictures for drills or picture compositions. Simple pictures drawn on the blackboard can help to increase the interest of a lesson and are often a good way of showing meaning and conveying situation to the class, especially with less able learners.

Blackboard drawing should be as simple as possible, showing only the most important details. It is important to draw quickly, so as to keep the interest of the class. It also helps for teachers to talk as they draw. We will now demonstrate how to draw faces, stick figures and other simple pictures.

Faces. Heads should be large enough to be seen of the back of the class. Here are examples how you can indicate expression, especially by changing the shape of the mouth, or by raising eyebrows and a frown:

happy crying laughing sad surprised angry

Y ou can indicate which way the speaker is facing by changing the nose. This is useful if you want to show two people having a conversation:

I t is easy to indicate sex or age by drawing hair:

Stick figures can be made to indicate sex, age, motion and position:

It is no more difficult to indicate buildings, towns, and directions by a combination of simple pictures and words: