348 Part VI: The Part of Tens
Pointing to Charts and Posters
By charts and posters I mean both those designed for teaching English and
ordinary ones from your own culture.
Everyday posters advertising films, pop groups or whatever else are useful in
two ways. Firstly, they set the scene in the classroom. Students will definitely
get the feeling of full immersion into an ‘English’ world if the images around
them represent the language and culture. The vocabulary will seep in
subconsciously or consciously, if you make a poster the basis of your lesson.
There is a constant reminder of that teaching point on the wall which
reinforces the idea.
You can ask shopkeepers for out of date posters which would otherwise end
up in the rubbish, or write off to larger organisations you are interested in for
freebies. Most big companies and charities love the publicity.
Posters and charts designed for EFL can be useful and can save time in class.
For example, if you have a phonemic chart (a display of all the symbols
which represent the 44 sounds in the English language) and a verb table on
the wall, you can quickly point to the right sound or verb when a student
slips up. The class can refer to these displays by themselves, too, so they can
increase their independence.
Of course the question is, ‘How do I get hold of them?’ Well if you have not
yet attended any EFL seminars, conferences and events where these things
are freely available in conjunction with new book releases, write to publishers
of EFL books and ask them. Oxford University press at http://www.oup.co.uk,
Cambridge University Press at http://www.cambridge.org/elt , Longman at
http://www.pearsonlongman.com and Thomson ELT at http://www.elt.thomson.com
are very cooperative with requests like these.
Keep your posters fresh by putting up new ones every few months. Old ones
don’t generate interest after a while. If you are overseas, see if your friends
back home can send you a few and if they are in really short supply, rotate
them so you swap the posters with a teacher in another classroom.
