Hi Larry, I wasn't out bending my elbow last night, but I perhaps should've been! (I had to look that up and found that is in indeed an Americanism, I was actually thinking it meant something a bit naughtier than drinking, but then, the "out" should've clued me in quicker. In the UK I recall we'd talk about drinking - glass lifting gesture - being the only exercise we got, as opposed to exercising our wrists or fingers...um...er...on a keyboard, of course!

What I mean is, I think I've been spending too long on Dave's recently is all

).
LL wrote:I've always assumed that students learn most when they are required to think about what they're trying to learn.
Of course they do...but I've also assumed they learn most when they simply are, well, learning most i.e. have "the most" to learn.

(Sorry, I'm being a bit silly here still).
As I keep saying, I do think what revel is saying is worth reading, and I do want to introduce elements from areas such as theatre into my classes (and a few years ago, I guess I was). I therefore find the activities mentioned (regardless of whether or not revel himself actually uses them, and he shouldn't feel he should't because of whatever "reservations" I have expressed

) interesting and worth considering. I am just wary of opening up a can of worms (too strong and negative an image, but what the hell), is all:
LL wrote:For example, if I ask them to say to their classmates, "The door is open.", and then ask them to pretend they are a bank manager who has just come into the bank for the morning and found the vault door open, and say it again the way they think he might say it...then from the point-of-view of a woman in bed with a bad cold in winter...wouldn't that cause students to think more about how they say things? This is not anything that a teacher would "correct"! What the student thinks about it is what he/she thinks!!! No one in her right mind would imagine that it should be "corrected" to match what the teacher thinks!
This activity is connected to and leads into a consideration of the "second" conditional, right? It is also connected to creativity (to allude to a keyword at the end of revel's last post), and imagination. But do you know, when I start using language like that myself and getting imaginative with very competent Japanese speakers of English, they often look at me like I am from Mars. Perhaps I chose the wrong moment, or am too much of a joker with them, I don't know. In my own private conversations I guess these things don't matter...but I think they do in the classroom! I suppose if I appear confident and whip students up, they will do anything, but just from these kind of experiences, I wonder if students really do want this kind of thing (unless they are natural actors, always ready to assume a role assigned to them). I think many students, serious students (or perhaps they are just serious people, at heart?) get to a stage where they know what they can say, and expect me to be teaching them what they can't say. To them, spending time on intonation would maybe seem a retrograde step?
It kind of reminds me of the time that is spent teaching reading "strategies" in random texts, when the problem for the students in reading is not so much recognizing that this is, indeed, a newspaper article with a headline, but in understanding some if not many of the words within it. I am also reminded of things I said at the very end of the very last post on the "Cognitive and contrastive linguistics thread" (in connection to you and revel saying that students need to get away from constructing meaning word-by-word), despite - no, perhaps indeed BECAUSE OF - my passing mention of intonation there

:
http://www.eslcafe.com/forums/teacher/v ... 8&start=15
Believe me, I actually love roleplay, theatre, imagination, you name it, but I am not letting it distract me (at the moment) from seriously considering the students' wider linguistic or general needs, and non-linguistic expectations (about learning styles etc); I will be more than willing and happy to find find a synthesis eventually. It's just that, I feel that most syllabuses aren't comprehensive enough, and use "language awareness" activities to try to compensate for their shortcomings (kind of like giving a student a desert survival kit and hopng it will not let them down in any other environment). Maybe prosody is more generalizable...but still...I want them to learn the appropriate prosodies of actually what needs to be a much wider range of phrases.
I'm trying to make sense here, but am going round in circles again, aren't I? Maybe I need not just you, Larry, and revel, but also a woodcutter to fell some trees and clear away the foliage I'm tangled up in here...
P.S. Edited SIX times?! Jeez...
