mazes elt journal

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36 M. RinvolncriPA RK ING Card 1

You are a reasonable sort of person but you have a very difficultneighbour. This neighbour insists on parking his car in the streetacross the entrance to your driveway. This means you can't get yourcar into your own driveway. W hat are you going to do about it?11 You decide to do nothing, which means parking in the next streetmost of the time, as there is no room in your stree t2 You leave a note on his windscreen asking him not to park acrossthe entry to your driveway.4 You go up to him and ask him not to park across your driveway.10 You wait until he has driven away one morning and put largewooden boxes where his car was.13 You let the tyres of his car down.

The alternative courses of action are numbered, so that studentsknow which card to turn to once they have picked a course of action.Suppose a group of students opts for alternative number four onCard 1, they then have to turn to Card 4 of the m aze:

PAR KING Card 4You have approached your neighbour and asked him not to blockyour driveway. H e says he's a very busy person and has nowhere elseto park. H e has no driveway or garage of his own. W hat do you do?3 W arn him you'll have his car towed away.21 Threaten to call in the police.7 Ask him what he expects you to do if you can 't get into your owndriveway and can't park on the street?

Most students have to read and discuss ten to a dozen cards beforethey m anag e to get out of this m aze (a twenty-four card m aze). As theyread and discuss the teacher gets called over to help with languagepeople can 't w ork out for them selves in fact, a very great deal of peer-teaching also goes on .Let us return for a moment to the points made at the beginning of thearticle. The teacher's role in this reading exercise is not one ofquestioner-interrogators/he acts as a roving comprehension con-sultant called in when and where needed by the students. The studentshave a task to perform and decisions to make, which puts them in anunusual position of power. The teacher becomes a language technicianand counsellor, abandoning the boss-role. The students becomesubjects, instead of being objects.

Comprehension difficulties are dealt with card by card during thereading processthere is no question of asking students to re-focus onlanguage problems they may hav e had on Card 1 when they trium-

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Action Mazes 37phantly reach the maze exit card. They have to understand the few sen-tences on each card before they can possibly reach any decisions. Sincethey have to process the information on each card they are acutelyaware that they need to have grasped it correctly. Interesting differ-ences of opinion sometimes arise from different understandings of thetext, which then have to be sorted out There is clearly no need for theteacher to resort to linearly-sequenced, heavy-booted comprehensionquestions.

A maze provides lower intermediate students with extensive readingbut metes it out to them in assimilable bits broken up by a mixture ofthinking, listening, and speaking activities. In this way the learner is notdiscou raged by having to face an extensive text all in one long piece.Mazes as writing activitiesW hen students have done two or three mazes as reading-to-discussionwork they are ready to try writing their own as a discussion-to-composition exercise. The teacher asks them to look at the tree diagramof a ma ze they have re ad. H ere is the top half of the diagram tha tunderlies the Parking Maze:

A student then comes to the chalkboard and acts as secretary to thegroup. Students try to think of problem situations on which they mightwant to base a maze.After this brain-storming phase the students split into groups of threeor four and choose one of the problem situations. They write out a C ard1 which defines the situation and suggests three or four courses ofaction.Card 1 should be written out in full but th e rest of the tree should bedone in note-form only.As homework, one person in each group can be asked to turn the treediagram into a fully-written-up maze on cards. The cards then have tobe randomly numbered, and corrected mazes can be used by theteacher as reading material in other classes. In this way studentsactually produce material for each other of a sort appropriate to theirage and interests, be they 14-year-olds or fifth-year electronics studentsin a Grande fecole. If students produced more of their own learningmaterials we would be much closer to the sort of classroom that the lateCharles Curran envisioned when he created his Community LanguageLearning approach.

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