#boreda

This week, we've lost 2 students (one from Hungary, one from Spain) and gained a new one (from Spain), but there were still 11 in the class...

At the end of last week's class about Chinese New Year, via the tenuous link of it being the Year of the Sheep, I asked the class if there was any connection between that and Wales. I did say it was tenuous! Lots of blank faces, so I had to explain Wales and sheep and the jokes about the two, and move swiftly on to saying it would be St. David's Day in Wales over the weekend. So, after the brainstorm today, I asked if they had noticed this celebration, and no one had.

To the brainstorm. I certainly didn't expect Princess Diana to feature in things known about Wales, but there she was, the first suggestion, given by our new student. Still, it gave an interesting start to the lesson, linking the Royal Family to Wales, and you can see from my boardwork that all the other suggestions were more or less what you would expect.

Next, on to famous Welsh people. I should say that this lesson plan was taken from the British Council, which was fantastic, although I had to adapt some of the worksheets for the E1 learners so they had pictures of Anthony Hopkins, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Catherine Zeta-Jones which had to be matched with the correct name. All the others had written descriptions, from which they had to guess the same famous people. Despite checking in pairs, only one person 'got' Ms. Zeta-Jones, although when I showed the correct answers on my Powerpoint presentation, most of them had seen the films or knew the songs.

The class split into 2 for a team quiz on Wales next - they selected their own team members. This was rather more successful than the previous task and both teams had all the correct multiple choice answers. The hardest question was about the population of Wales (just under 3 million).

Next, there was a jigsaw reading exercise, with students divided into A, B or C, with each of these having a short passage to read about A Living in Wales, B Language and C Sport and culture. After 10 minutes or so, all the As got together to discuss what they'd read, all the Bs did the same, etc.

The E1 group had been set a slightly different exercise, where I'd written two simple sentences and indicated what the words were with pictures, for instance - 'Wales is a land of rugby, singing and beautiful scenery', with images of the flag for Wales, a rugby player, a choir and mountains. The other was 'Road signs and other signs are in both English and Welsh' with a 'Welcome to Wales' sign commonly seen here in Chepstow, and another road sign showing children, with the words School and Ysgol written underneath. What they had to do was first, copy the sentence in their own handwriting underneath, and then read the sentence out loud to me, one at a time. For a few even copying the words in the right order was difficult, as was differentiating between lower case and capital letters. I have known about the latter problem and work on it every week, and as this is the first week we have moved onto sentences as opposed to just words, I was expecting a few errors. Reading was a little better, although there were common pronunciation difficulties with the words 'sign' and 'sing' and 'other' and 'both',  so we drilled these. We have used the IPA to demonstrate the difference between the latter two sounds, so this is something to revisit.

Also, although I know this is differentiation, I'm not sure some are happy about doing a different exercise from the others, even though they benefit more from it, and I'm careful to make sure the others have their task first so they don't see what the E1 group are going to do.

Anyway, at the end of this, one person from each of the groups got together, including the E1 group, and told the rest of the group what they'd read about Wales, in their own words as much as possible, rather than reading from the text.

I think the final activity was of most interest to the students. I'd written some common Welsh phrases on my Powerpoint presentation, along with the meanings e.g. Bore da - good morning, and I said them (to the best of my ability!) and they repeated them. I also explained a little about the Welsh alphabet, which I remembered from my own Welsh lessons some years ago, about 'rh' and 'll' being considered letters of the alphabet, and how to pronounce 'dd' as in 'heddlu', how to pronounce words ending in 'u', again, as in 'heddlu' (this word was suggested by a student), that there is only a letter 'c' and no 'k' in Welsh, and that 'ff' is different from 'f', being our sounds 'ph' and 'v'. This seemed to make sense to them! We had a brief discussion about whether they thought Welsh would be an easy language to learn, and then they talked to the person next to them about the number of languages spoken in their own countries. Finally, as a group they took turns to tell the others this information, so we learnt that there although there are 56 nations in China, there are two main languages, Mandarin and Cantonese (in the south); three languages in East Timor (Portuguese, 'East Timor language' and 'Indonesian language') and that most European countries only have one language, but with many dialects, such as Spain, although they weren't sure if they had 3 languages or they were dialects e.g. Andalusian - but they did clear up the pronunciation of the word 'chorizo'!