I’m told that many of the English classes in Budapest consist largely of rote, and very still, learning. Students sit at a desk with a grammar book and do grammar exercises. Granted, that certainly happens in the United States, and it is a part of how I teach in my classroom. However, it does not seem that the students in Hungary interact with English on a more creative level, which is something that I find to be an essential component to learning a foreign language. My focus today, in all my classes, was to bring creativity and spontaneous language to the lessons. I have found that students learn better when they have some agency in their education, and they are able to interact with the material in ways that are meaningful to them.
Most of my classes today at the chance to use the English language in novel ways to talk about things that were interesting to them. At the very least, each class got to play a game, making the material more interesting and appealing.
I started the day with a new group: 7th year. The students here have shown a lot of interest in learning about the United States and our culture. So, I introduced this group to different regions of the country via food. We looked at a map of the USA (each student had his own copy) and talked about the locations of the states. I asked them questions about where to find the states (is Wyoming north or south of Montana) and relative sizes (is Texas bigger or smaller than Maryland) and we talked about why different regions of the country might have different cuisines (location, climate, immigration). Since Hungary is so much smaller than the United States, the idea of different parts of the country eating vastly different cuisine was very new.
My next two classes were both groups that I had met with the day before, which was wonderful. Being able to pick up where we were before, already knowing some of the names, and having an established relationship with them made this day even more fun. With the 13th year, we started off by reviewing the prefixes we had discussed yesterday (with a memory game), and I challenged them with some sentence corrections. I gave them a list of sentences written by real non-native speakers that all had some sort of error, whether it be grammatical or orthographic. The students worked together to try and figure out how to fix each sentence. While on the surface it seems like a straightforward activity with little creativity, because of the higher-level thinking involved, it created quite a bit of spontaneous conversation. The students had to discuss English using only English. Sometimes when they weren’t sure what to do, they created new sentences that allowed them to test out hypotheses about the language and see if they couldn’t figure out what was wrong.
The 5th year, which I loved yesterday, was a joy again today. Somehow, they had mysteriously doubled in size! I was told that the 5th graders who had not been included in the group yesterday were very disappointed that they did not have the opportunity, and they asked if they might join. As far as I am concerned, a student that cares that deeply about joining your class is the kind of student that you want in your class. So, with my double-sized group, we worked on parts of the face, using games (Simon Says, 7-up), a book (Go Away, Big Green Monster) and a puppet that allowed them to create a new monster face over and over. Using English vocabulary, the students helped each other place the various parts of the face on the puppet to create looks for our monster. With so many students in the room, this could have been a chaotic and loud class. Instead, they were focused, excited, and full of enthusiasm for the whole lesson. What fun!
Finally, I had a double period with a different 7th grade class. While this group was clearly less advanced than the first group, they were very brave and pushed themselves to use English as much as possible. Once again, we played games, moved around, and did communication activities that asked them to speak to me and each other in novel ways using the target language. This class had a great deal of energy and was certainly less focused than other groups I have taught thus far. But they were every bit as engaged as the others. We had a lesson that focused on the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.” I am told that there is a similar story in Hungarian, but they did not recognize it right away. This allowed me to introduce culture as well as language. I am seeing them again tomorrow, so this was a more involved lesson that I have been able to teach with the others. We played games with the vocabulary, we read the story and answered questions about it, and I introduced them to the simple past in English. They had a chance to talk about themselves when I asked them to tell me something they did yesterday. Nervousness about speaking in English was overridden by the opportunity to tell me something about their own lives. We are going to continue tomorrow with this lesson, getting into some of the many, many irregular verbs in English.
It was a long day, and I am exhausted now (which is why I’m wrapping this up with little segway). However, I found so much joy in being watching the students start to realize that communication, not perfection, is the goal in a language class. Ultimately, through spontaneous talk and creative activities, they all began to recognize that you don’t have to know everything to be able to share your ideas with others.
