Skip to main content

Using pictures to generate discussion

With A-level students I have enjoyed some good lessons over the years using a simple, suggestive picture as a basis for discussion. You begin by getting students to simply describe what is in the picture. You then get them to use their imaginations to make up a back story to the picture.

Questions run along the lines:

C'est qui?
Comment s'appellent-ils?
Quel âge ont-ils?
Qu'est-ce qu'elle porte?
Que fait-il comme travail?
Quel sont ses passe-temps?
D'où vient-il? D'où vient-elle?
Pourquoi est-il ici?
Qu'est-ce qui s'est passé?
De quoi parlent-ils?
Que se passera-t-il après?
Quelle est leur relation?
Pourquoi ils se disputent?

You cannot tell in advance where the questioning will lead. You depend on what the students come up with and hope they are imaginative. They may need some prompting if they are short of ideas. Encourage them to think like scriptwriters for a soap. The more inventive they are, the better. Grammatically there are good opportunities to practise various tenses, including imperfect (what was just happening befor the scene?) and conditional: what would happen if...?

Once you have done a group discussion, you could then present another picture and ask the students in pairs to write a scenario for the picture. You could give them a 15 minute time limit, then get them to report back to the class.

This can easily lead into a piece of writing in play or narrative form. Maybe with some groups a scene could be acted out.

You can easily find suggestive pictures from the web. Here are some I've just googled:













Comments

  1. I used to do this too and it worked really well. Another similar idea was to post up on the board 1 screen's worth of random vocabulary, random phrases, nouns, verbs, adverbs + verb tenses, + anything else that might have been recently studying, eg relative pronouns, subjunctive etc. The pupils had to work in groups to write a story that used all of the vocab and structures on the board and present the story to the rest of the class. The resulting stories were often hilarious!

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's a great idea. I keep meaning to try this and now you have made me want to do it even more. I've a feeling it's something I could even try with Key Stage 3 students, too.

    ReplyDelete
  3. What a lovely idea. My mind is already ticking over which groups I can use it with in the next academic year. It would be an excellent way to recap grammar and vocab at the end of a unit. This is going to be a priority in my to- do list of activities. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks for commenting. I'm glad it's useful.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,