My session at the IATEFL- Hungary conference in Budapest on Saturday was on the  topic of ‘Using vocabulary inside and outside the classroom with Oxford Word Skills.’  Thanks to all those teachers who came along and got involved. (I’m not making all the slides available here, as the session contained a load of photographs of my students and scans of their work, and I don’t want to go public with all of them without their permission. )

One of the tasks I got my students to do involved working with newspaper headlines. Students had to look at a headline and imagine a story to go with it. They had to dream up descriptions of the people in the article and present a summary. I also asked them to find a way to match a bizarre and incongruous photograph that I gave them to one of four headlines, providing a caption to go with the photograph.

These were the four headlines that the students had to work with:

Which headline proved to be the most popular? No contest. There was a hands-down winner: ‘Man claims dog can talk’

I got an array of illustrated articles from my students with various imaginative takes on this (shaggy?) dog story. What was really interesting was that even when I gave them illustrations to work with which  had no obvious connection whatsoever to dogs (talking or otherwise) they still managed to make a connection.

There was clearly something about this topic of the talking dog that the students liked. I mean, look:

 

One of the enduring fascinations of teaching is its unpredictability. Students very often respond to input in marvellously unexpected ways. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned over the years is that rather than trying  to get my lessons ‘back on track’  when this happens I am usually better off just going with the flow. So next week I’ll be finding out a bit more about this talking dog – from my students. Watch this space 🙂