In July 2024 JUMP hosted a group of Czech and French teachers in Soverato improving their English with the JOYFUL ENGLISH summer edition course.
The teachers were from Czechia and France. Some were teachers and others had non-teaching roles in their schools. The two teachers from France were working in a vocational college.
I chose warm-up exercises designed to open the linguistic barrier and encourage everyone to speak in English. Based on some of those exercises I introduced some activities based on food videos, which were a point of interest and overlap. I find that food, even simply talking about it brings people together in a way that nothing else does and we talked about the family meals that have the most memories for us, or that we would prepare for friends. This led into an activity called ‘Fusion food’, where the class is split into two groups and they design a restaurant menu by combining the most popular dishes of their nations into one menu. Later they swapped menus and began a role play session. One group played the part of customers and the other groups played the part of waitresses. Participants were encouraged to ask and respond to difficult questions as happens in real life situations but it was also a fun activity.
Wednesdays lessons were planned for outside but with changing weather, flexibility was required and the lessons had to take place inside. I introduced a game that is popular in the world of Improv Theatre. It’s an activity that was originally invented by the French surrealists so it is meant to be silly and humorous. But it has another aspect in that it follows a strict grammatical formula meaning that participants are practising grammar through play. A few more traditional board games were also involved in lessons as they are a quick way to learn about each other. Some non-traditional methods can make people feel out of their comfort zones, but even if it feels embarrassing it is good to participate because who knows where you’ll find yourself in the future!
On Thursday we started the morning with a mixed class learning about EU targets, which was a great way to practise speaking, listening and learning words connected to current affairs and politics. After the first session I introduced a short but creative activity based on a British TV show called Dragons Den. It is a show where entrepreneurs have the opportunity to present a product they created to wealthy investors. Class participants were asked to divide into two groups and invent a product to meet a social or personal need. They played the roles of engineer, inventor and marketing representative. They were asked to think about many aspects of their invention, such as materials, place of production and the possibility of making smaller products for pets. They were encouraged to let their imaginations run wild. It was a very fun activity and the second part involved an Elevator Pitch. An elevator pitch is a business concept to help with presentations, the idea being that you suddenly find yourself in an elevator with a business investor and you have 30 seconds or less to convince them that your product has value.
This was a fun way of helping participants do concise and dynamic presentations in English and they all did really well. This also helped them open up and use body language too.
The last session was only for the French participants and I chose an artistic project that connects emotions and memories to visual and word based information. This session was called ‘Making Zines’-zines is short for magazines and refers to hand drawn booklets created with easily available student stationery supplies like printer paper, highlighter pens and biros. You can be an artist without the expensive paints! These tiny handmade booklets can contain any information you desire to fill them with, but we focused on travel and the five senses. The finished booklets contained moving stories about healing on holidays and visiting a safari park. We also did a small presentation of these zines and talked about our experiences travelling.
Author: Anna Rose Heath, JUMP Trainer
