Guest Post: “Going Going Gone” with Low-Literacy Learners By Clare O’Nolan

I’m pleased to introduce my first guest on this blog – Clare O’Nolan!

Clare is an ESL and ESOL teacher and teacher trainer based in London. Interested in teaching underprivileged and homeless. Spare time scuba diver and birdwatcher. Clare tweets at @Clareonolan

I was lucky enough to be able to share my excitement about the adaptibility of the disappearing text method for special needs students (I’ve been posting about my experiments with it recently!) with Clare. Although she works with an entirely different kind of population we found that the system works for her too!

So, here’s Clare’s post!

(Note: The original Going Going Gone” post is from Jason’s Renshaw’s blog.)

My class and I had great fun with this last Thursday!

I used the 5 sentences from the current ‘chapter’ of material we are using. The students (5 women, 2 men from Afghanistan, Yemen, Morocco, Somalia & Bulgaria) had read it with me and the pictures before hand. Each sentence was boarded alongside the picture (instead of the questions in Jason Renshaw’s version) and drilled with slightly exaggerated word stress. I thought remembering the rhythm might help later with the word order.

1st round: removed unstressed function words; dismay all round – replaced them on the board by eliciting from students. (More dismay – we did it!)
2nd round: removed same words again plus prepositions. (Less dismay this time.) I gave the students a copy of what was left on the board as a 1/2 page handout. They worked in pairs to restore both sets of words by writing in the gaps. We checked as a class using the board again, them reading aloud.
3rd round: removed all previous words plus verbs from the board. This  version was shown on the second 1/2 of the handout and the students filled the gaps again. They took longer but succeeded. (Proud dismay all round!)
4th round: fast worker only. On another handout provided I had taken out everything except initials for the names and the nouns in the story. She had to write back in all the missing words. (Success.)

I found it useful for little things like showing them collocations are waiting, for a bus, are going, to the zoo etc. They practised the connection between what they saw (familiar pictures), what they heard (reading aloud), and what the wrote to fill in the gaps.
I tried to avoid your problems with too much copying from the board (!) but fell into the trap of not allowing for large handwriting in the gaps. I needed to leave more space. Also whilst wanting to show how many words were missing, I confused them with dashes like this ——– (they assumed each dash was a letter) when I should have used a line _______ . I also like the way the task could be easily differentiated for the variety of abilities, even in this small class. I will definitely do it again with the next chapter of our material.

2 thoughts on “Guest Post: “Going Going Gone” with Low-Literacy Learners By Clare O’Nolan”

  1. Hi Naomi & Clare

    Thanks Clare for writing up your experience and adaptation of this activity. Does seem to be such a theme for this activity – total dismay followed by a real sense of achievement! Really fun to do something with learners that creates that feeling for them!

    I liked what you said about getting them to focus on the fixed phrases like for a bus etc… Also, the easy and natural way it allows for differentiation.

    I’m curious… what level are your learners?

    This is definitely an activity I want to try again as well… and it really helps to hear about other people’s experiments so thanks for sharing 🙂

  2. Anna!
    Isn’t it amazing how versatile this method is? Here’s Clare’s reply:

    Hi Anna,

    My learners are adults from social housing on estates in central London, mostly asylum seekers and immigrants. They are Beginners with little or no literacy skills and my lessons, part of the government ESOL scheme, are for reading and writing skills. Great to know you’re experimenting too!

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