Penny Ur came to the Cambridge office to have a chat with us on the release of Discussions and More Second edition, a fully updated and revised edition of Penny Ur’s classic handbook, Discussions that Work. This is the closing part of our discussion. You can read Part 1 of this interview here.
Of all the activities in the new book, do you have a particular favourite?
I have two. One that’s been in the book since the original edition, called Zoo Plan, where the students have to decide where they’re going to put different animals in a zoo. It’s just great fun to do – I enjoy doing it myself with the students and I’ve had a lot of good feedback from teachers.
The second one, called Say Things About a Picture, is new to this edition. Students have one minute in groups to say as many things about a picture as they can. I love this one because it never fails. You get a tick for every sentence or phrase that a student manages to contribute, and you count up the ticks later. It always produces an enormous amount of talk, because they want to get as many ticks as they can. They also almost never revert to mother tongue, because they’re not going to get a tick for it. And because it’s single sentences, even unconfident students feel they can contribute.
And once they’ve contributed a few sentences, their confidence builds?
Exactly. It’s also nice because it’s a team thing – we’re doing this together.
What advice do you have for teachers on error correction during class discussion activities? Is it ever desirable? Are there any particular ways you’d recommend approaching it?
One very important maxim in my own teaching life has been ‘never say never’. There’s no such thing as never stopping to correct, and it’s one of those teaching decisions you make on your feet fifty times a day – am I going to correct, or am I not? He’s talking and making mistakes – if I correct him, I might inhibit him; I’m going to slow him down; I’m going to harm the communicative value of the interaction. If I don’t correct him, he might fossilise that mistake and stay with it. His very making it is another step in making the error permanent in his own discourse.You have to make the decision anew every time, and whether or not you correct is going to be a mixture of considerations.
How far am I going to discourage this student and throw him off if I correct him, as opposed to how much am I going to help? A very shy student who at last is talking – I’m not going to stop him, I’m just going to smile and say that’s great that you’ve contributed. A more confident student who’s good at speech and making an elementary mistake that they shouldn’t make – I’m going to stop them and make them correct themselves. That’s the sort of consideration you have to bring in every time, but it’s not an easy question to answer: as you become more experienced, you become better at judging when it’s good to correct, and when it’s bad.
And it’s based on knowledge of the individual student?
Very often it’s based on a knowledge of the individual student, or on the main object of the particular course – if it’s a course in conversational English, then you’re less likely to correct than if it’s a course leading to an exam where they’re going to be penalised for mistakes, and so on. It’s a question of the character of the student, the goal of the course, the goal of the particular activity; how the activity is going. If it’s bouncing forward, and everyone’s really enjoying the interaction and wants to say things, then I’m less likely to interrupt than if it’s going more slowly and studiously.
For more from Penny Ur, watch her full webinar on the same topic here.
And for even more inspiration, here are two of our favourite activities from Discussions and More Second edition!
Alibi
Say Things About a Picture