CATESOL Roundup, Part 4

Using Pictures for Language Routines

Julaine Rosner of Mission College demonstrates how she uses pictures as part of her classroom routines such as games, dialogs, and mixers, all designed for beginning and low-intermediate students to build vocabulary and fluency or practice grammar. Pictures are fun, and with fun in learning, the students come back, according to Julaine. Pictures also bring the outside world into the classroom since we can't take field trips. Pictures assist learners to search their mind for a structure, remember it, and use it.

Sources of pictures include:

• the famed Oxford Picture Dictionary and its "Classroom Presentation" tool
• books that have photocopy reproducible ancillary materials including art (Julaine mentions that black and white line drawings are the best if you want your photocopies to be very clear.)
• Top Notch Fundamentals (2006 edition)
• your own or your students' social photos

Games with pictures include concentration games which require a minimum of 4 words and 4 corresponding pictures. Julaine pre-teaches the vocabulary for the pictures. She also teaches the dialogue that she wants her students to use while playing the game. She uses a cleverly designed PowerPoint slide to demonstrate to her students how to play the concentration game in pairs.

Another game with pictures is Go Fish with 16 pairs of 32 cards, half picture cards and half corresponding word cards. After learning the intended dialogue and the directions to play Go Fish, students play in groups of 3.

Still another game with pictures is Bingo. You just need to have enough of the same pictures to ideally make eight versions of the cards so that students will not all have identical Bingo cards. Julaine lets her students be the caller. She typically plays this game at the end of the week's class.

Dialogs practice with pictures can be done in pairs, especially for kinship terms, occupations, clothing, personality, physical descriptions, age, etc. With one of the social pictures students bring in, you can model a conversation like this:

A: Tell me about...
B: Well, he/she is a...

As a follow-up to the dialogue practice, students can write about a picture. A final step in this fluency practice activity can be a gallery walk with all the photos on display.

Another use of dialogue practice with pictures is to present and practice prepositions of location. Ideal pictures are those with furniture items in them. Students can draw pictures. They can be engaged in an information-gap activity that uses two pictures that are identical except for five or six details. Students discuss (without peeking at their partner's paper) to find the items missing from their picture. They draw the items. At the end, the original picture and the drawn picture should look the same.

Mixers with pictures are good for practicing making requests. First, you make decks, which are pairs of duplicate cards, in order for students to look for the same card. Then, you model a dialog such as this one:

A: Can you please...?
B: Yes, I'd be happy to.
or B: No, I'm studying right now. (Tell them "I'm busy" is not an acceptable excuse.)

Julaine provides these links to online sources of pictures:

• http://www.eslactivities.com/picturebingo.php for picture bingo
• http://www.eslflashcards.com/ for flashcards with pix
• http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/ for free clip art & photos

(To be continued.)