Sometimes, the most striking images seem to capture an entire story in a single moment. The photographs we’ve shared in our Cambridge English Empower competition – a baby orangutan being washed in a sink, and a motorcyclist meeting a group of Vietnamese women – certainly fit that category.
From a teaching perspective, such pictures offer many benefits: not only do they engage students’ imaginations, but they also offer opportunities to practise the use of different tenses, as learners discuss what happened before the photo was taken, what’s happening now, and what will – or perhaps might – happen in the future.
This month’s picture – the photo of a pair of diners at an ice hotel in Sweden that you can see at the top of this post – certainly got competition entrants thinking about the past, present and future. Patrizia Bottene of Italy suggested beginning the lesson by asking students to describe the scene, and to guess who the people are and why they are in such an unusual hotel. This would allow them to revise using the present simple and present continuous. She then proposed dividing learners into groups, some sets discussing what had happened before the photo was taken – when the diners first met, what they thought when they saw each other, or how they decided to come to this hotel for a meal – and others exploring what might happen afterwards. Each group thus rehearses using either past or future tenses, before writing the beginning of a short story based upon their ideas, which can then be completed by another group.
Still on the theme of verbs, Maria Alekseytseva of Russia suggested using the picture to practise second conditional sentences, asking learners to describe what kinds of unusual hotels they’d make if they were in different places, and under different conditions. Miguel Angel Cortés Diaz of Spain also thought that this photograph offered opportunities to practise conditionals, but brought in an environmental context to tie in with the recent World Environment Day – learners could discuss what the future of this hotel would be if global warming continued and temperatures rose? Students could then follow up their discussion by writing a blogpost suggesting ways to combat global warming.
Images like the ones used in Cambridge English Empower certainly grab students’ imaginations, but sometimes it can be useful to find out the facts behind a photo too. This month’s competition winner, Ariana Basaric of Serbia, suggested building on students’ curiosity about the story behind the photograph to develop some of their twenty-first century skills – particularly, the ability to use their language skills to search effectively online. Ariana proposed beginning her class by telling students that they would have seven minutes to find answers to the following questions:
Who took this picture?
Where was it taken?
And, as a bonus question, When was it taken?
Once the teacher has shared some instructions on using search engines with images, learners then describe the picture using key words and phrases that they can then use to search for the image, refining their search words to find this image – or one as close to it as possible – online. They can then read about the image to find the answers to the teacher’s questions.