Lissette Lorenz

As of today I have worked with all four of my classes once. Tomorrow I have the day off to breathe.

If a stranger was to walk in randomly on one of my 90-minute classes, they would probably not guess that it was an English class. I had my students jumping, clapping, playing with a ball, singing like opera singers, and pretending to develop from a dinosaur egg to a dinosaur grown-up. It probably looked more like a structured  version of recess than an English lesson.

That is not to say that they were not learning! Far from it. Together we used silly games and exercises as a way to lower people’s defenses and insecurities about using English in front of others, to distract them from their preconceived notions of The Boring English Class, to help the 90 minutes pass quickly, and all the while building vocabulary and providing many opportunities to speak in English freely. This type of teaching style is called Organic Language Acquisition (OLA), or the Circle Method (because students spend most of the class period standing in a big circle). It was developed in recent years primarily by Darcy Rogers, an awesome Spanish teacher who gave an OLA workshop at Oberlin last February.

Here’s an example of an OLA teacher teaching Spanish to her students:

http://youtu.be/rHeDcwbqeVE

I have the students help me move all the desks and chairs to the edges of the room so that we have plenty of space to bounce around like monkeys or have epic Rock, Paper, Scissors matches. At first I was afraid that my students would think I’m crazy and would rebel against me or complain to my superiors that I don’t let them sit in desks for most of the class. But my classes all went relatively smoothly. Everyone participated. No one left the classroom, or refused to stand up. Success!!!! I think most of my students were too surprised by the change of pace in the English classroom to complain.

I teach level I and II English reading and writing. This is the beginner’s level of English at my university. Japanese students studying beginner’s level English in college are known as “false starters” because they have in fact already had at least five or six years of taking compulsory English classes in junior and high school. Those who end up in elementary level English in college despite more than several of years of studying it have not really had a fruitful experience with the language. In fact, many students are indifferent and uninvested when they end up in another English class. They are tired of the rote memorization, tedious worksheets, and less-than-expiring readings.

So that’s why I’m going to make them play sentence-building leap-frog next week.

I can’t wait for leap-frog.

P.S. During my last class everyone kept laughing nervously at first, so I taught them “What’s so funny?” To show them the meaning I wiggled around like drunk trying to belly dance. Then, I taught them “awesome” by doing two cartwheels and a split in the middle of the circle. Go me.