I gotta use words
A little light tidying at work to finish the day. Our team has run an annual course for our students before they go abroad, and over many years, a lot of teaching textbooks have built up.
As it’s now been decided we won’t be running the course any more, in order for us to take on new work, those textbooks need a home. Thankfully we have a couple of colleagues just off to do TEFL courses (or CELTA as they are these days), who’ve been able to make use of some. And yes, I couldn’t resist keeping a few myself.
Some are collectors’ items in their own right, interesting now for what they reveal about life at the time they were created, as well as how people thought we should learn. Picture dictionaries are particularly revealing: what are the food items available on the nice picture of the market stall (and what aren’t), what clothes are the people wearing, what social patterns are revealed by who’s doing the shopping, and so on. Even a more recent book refers to ‘micro-computers’ and ‘diskettes’ - your average school child would certainly think the computers used even ten years ago were micro indeed.
Been reading one of them on the way home, on teaching vocabulary, and how much it relates to personal responses to words, exploiting different ways of learning etc. One of the authors, Mario Rinvolucri, comes up with some great exercises, some borrowed from psychotherapy techniques, such as having conversations in numbers so that you can express e.g. anger (or in fact other emotions) in another language without coupling it to words, and having to deal with meaning too. It’s the reverse of counting to 10 to calm yourself down, I guess.
It reminded me how closely linked are some of the things I love about language: teaching it, writing it, using it as a vehicle to explore who we are, our personal stories, and how we live and learn. I’m hanging on to the vocabulary book as much as anything to give me writing ideas, pre-set exercises that I can just try out, as a way of getting into writing without having to derive everything myself from scratch.
Some of the sentences in the book - that a whole world is within a word, through the meanings it conjours up - could apply just as much to teaching, as to counselling, as to writing. It’s that worlds within worlds that I love. A Roald Dahl short story also had a brilliant notion of words as a series of cogs, interlinking. The narrator of the story talks of the effect of putting a small word next to a really big one, and, in effect, setting it spinning.
At any rate, here’s some ways to get some words, and ideas, spinning, wherever they turn out to be useful.
You know me. I gotta use words, whatever I’m up to.
(PS the title comes from a poem, which the editor cites, but doesn’t say who wrote it. Anyone know?)
Add comment November 13th, 2007