classes considering different textual genres and the text

paginas.ufrgs.br/revistabemlegal REVISTA BEM LEGAL • Porto Alegre • v. 6• nº 2 • 2016 46

Heroes and Villains: a report of a project to teach English for teenagers

Fernando Vanzin de Gasperi

Introduction

This article reports the experience I had when teaching English for an

Elementary group as part of my first English teaching internship. The internship is part

of a discipline taught at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) within the

teaching course curriculum1. Before explaining important moments of the project and

its development, I present very briefly some theoretical ideas that were very important

to set the path to this project.

Discourse genres as social practices

According to Schlatter (2009), the aim of teaching languages at school is to

promote literacy, that is, to make it possible for students to engage in different social

practices that require reading and writing. Within this perspective, learning an

additional language at school goes further than decoding linguistic signs and

memorizing grammar rules. It means comprehending different texts and learning how

to read them and, most importantly, how to react to them.

In order to offer this variety of texts to the students, teachers have to plan their

classes considering different textual genres and the text’s place and function in the

world. More than translating a text, students should learn to read it considering the

place where it was published, to whom it was intended, who wrote it, what its aims

were, etc.

Heroes and Villains: the project

The project was named Heroes and Villains and it was taught to two 7th grade

groups at a public Elementary school, in a central lower/middle class neighborhood in

Porto Alegre. The project was developed in 12 classes and each group had two English

1 The discipline’s name in Portuguese is Estágio de Língua Inglesa I.


classes per week. The aim of this project was to prepare students to read, react to and

write texts that are part of a particular kind of websites called wikis. Wikis are websites

collaboratively written that gather information about a specific topic. In order to have

students interested in the classes, the topic selected was heroes and villains, and

because of that the wikis selected were those which dealt with famous characters

(Game of Thrones, Once Upon a Time, Naruto and Marvel2).

I handed in an image with print screens of those websites for the students to

analyze (image 1) and then asked them to answer questions that would highlight the

structures presented on those websites (image 2).

Image 1- print screens (author's material)

2 The websites are <http://gameofthrones.wikia.com/wiki/Game_of_Thrones_Wiki> (for Game of

Thrones), <http://onceuponatime.wikia.com/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_Wiki> (for Once Upon a Time),

<http://naruto.wikia.com/wiki/Narutopedia > (for Naruto) and

<http://marvel.wikia.com/wiki/Marvel_Database > (for Marvel)


Image 2 - wikia as a genre task (author's material)

As they completed the table and answered the questions, they realized that all

websites had pages for the characters, which was going to be the topic for the

following classes as well as their final product.

In the following class, I brought cards with characters from the TV series Once

Upon a Time for them to analyze (images 3 and 4). Some of the students knew the

series, but even those who did not know could relate to it because the show presents

famous characters from fairy tales, such as Snow White, Prince Charming and Red

Riding Hood. They were arranged in groups and each group received 2 cards to fill in

the chart. After they had completed it, they had to exchange cards with their

classmates until they had analyzed six different characters.


Image 3 - example of cards (author's material)

Image 4 - Cards as a genre task (author's material)


The exercise was successful in the sense that students realized that the cards

were not identical (they did not present exactly the same information) but they were

similar nonetheless. This is related to the Bakhtinian notion of speech genres as

relatively stable types of utterances (Bakhtin, 1992) and since the project was centered

in a specific genre, it made sense to study it with the students because they were going

to produce that kind of text themselves as a final product.

After we had studied the text and its characteristics, the students and I focused

on vocabulary and grammar. For vocabulary we studied mainly the adjectives used to

describe someone in the cards (female, human, green eyes, etc.). In order to do so I

asked them to look at their chart and tell me what words were used to describe

someone’s gender, species, hair color and so on. This structure helped them to guess

the meaning of unknown words, since they could presume to which semantic field a

word belonged based on what was being described.

We also had a class on personal and possessive pronouns to help them form

sentences about the characters that they were going to describe as their final product.

This was the first part of the project, where we focused on the cards. But for the final

product, students would draw a card similar to these ones and also write a few

sentences about the person that they were describing. It was time, then, to work with

the sentences.

For that, I selected an online text named 15 real life heroes who have changed

the world3. I had two classes to work with the text. In the first one, I worked with the

introduction to the text. In the second, I divided the class in small groups so each

group could read about one real life hero and tell the classmates about it.

I did not want them to translate the texts, so I prepared comprehension

activities that did not require full translation. Besides, they already had studied the

pronouns (which appeared a lot in the text) with me and I gave them a glossary with

key words translated. The comprehension task is reproduced below:

3 Available at: < http://whatculture.com/history/15-real-life-heroes-who-have-changed-the-world>.

Accessed July, 1st , at 20h28min.


Image 5 - Comprehension task (author's material)

The main objective of this class was for them to understand that the

introduction had a function which was to present the fifteen real life heroes. In the

following class, I brought the fifteen real heroes. As I had only one class left, I decided

to divide the group in fifteen pairs or trios and give each group one hero. I also gave

each group three small cards with sentences from the texts translated into Portuguese.

From each text I translated three important sentences, but I did not hand in the

correspondent cards for each text. The groups had to interact and find who had the

cards that matched their text. For example, the group with Stephen Hawking might

have received cards saying, in Portuguese, “she was the first feminist”, “she became a

symbol of resistance against racial segregation” and “he spent two years in Auschwitz”.

The first hint to know whether the card matched the text was paying attention to

personal pronouns and then paying attention to known, similar and important words

in English and Portuguese (such as first, feminist, racial, segregation, two, years,

Auschwitz). As these texts dealt a lot with actions in the past, I used the following class

to teach simple past, focusing mainly on its regular form. I explained the general rule

for forming the simple past and students did a few exercises related to the topic.


Final product

The last three classes were used to prepare the final product. In the first one I

gave them the guidelines: the final product was going to be made in pairs or trios and

each pair or trio was going to describe a famous person that they liked. Initially,

students were supposed to choose among famous characters (so we could later

discuss the notions of good and evil). However, some of them were already asking to

describe celebrities in general – like their favorite singer or player – and I consented to

this change. I explained the reasons of it in the last section of this article.

For the description of the celebrity, I established that each card would have to

present at least ten characteristics and three sentences about the described person.

Among these ten characteristics, four would be mandatory for all the groups and six

would be freely chosen by the pair or trio. These four mandatory characteristics were

chosen with the whole group. For 7A, they were name, occupation, zodiac sign and

hair color. For 7B they were name, occupation, hair color and age. When the students

were analyzing the cards from the wiki pages, they noted that some characteristics

were always presented while others were not. Voting for mandatory characteristics

was a way of exercising this, since students had to think of descriptors that could be

used for the description of a wide range of people (football players, singers, actors and

actresses, etc).

In the following two classes they prepared their cards and I walked among

them helping them, but I did not interfere much. Here are the results (images 6 and 7):


Image 6 - final product 7ª (author’s material)

Image 7 - final product 7B (author’s material)


Make-up test

Some students did not do the activity: one boy deliberately did not want to,

one girl missed half of the classes and was not prepared (she did not bring any

material, she was not in any group) and four other boys started their products in the

first class but they forgot to bring it and could not prepare it in only one class. I had

given them a make-up test. In the beginning I was a bit afraid to do it because tests are

usually not part of a formative evaluation, but then I prepared one imitating the

activities that we had had in class: text comprehension (reading a Wikipedia

description of a famous person), grammar rules in context (understanding verbs in the

simple past and deducing the grammar rules to form it) and text production

(describing someone). That is, the students did similar activities to make up for those

they did not do.

Final Considerations

This internship focused on project-based learning and, among many things that

it implies, I would like to highlight the dynamic status of a project. When my project

started I wanted the students to describe heroes and villains so we could have a

discussion on these notions (I believe that it has been changing lately and I wanted to

talk with them about it; about what makes someone a hero or a villain). When they

were asked to choose a character to describe, some of them chose characters (like

Harry Potter, Superman and Fofão) but some of them wanted to describe celebrities,

such as basketball players and singers. From the linguistic point of view, there was no

problem and from the project point of view it was good because it would give them a

sense of ownership over the project. But then I let go of the intended discussion of

good versus evil. I believe that this emphasizes that projects are built for and with the

students, according to their interests and needs and they should be molded as they are

being taught.


References

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Os gêneros do discurso. In:_______. Estética da criação verbal. São

Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1992.

SCHLATTER, Margarete. O ensino de leitura em língua estrangeira na escola: uma

proposta de letramento. Revista Calidoscópio, vol. 7, n 1, p. 11-23. São Leopoldo:

Unisinos, jan/ abr 2009.


Fernando Vanzin de Gasperi

Licenciado em Letras com ênfase em língua inglesa e

literaturas de língua inglesa pela UFRGS.

classes considering different textual genres and the text

Documents