Lies, truths and fashions — how to get the kids talking

“What? You want us to tell lies about ourselves?” The students in the class were not sure they’d heard me right.

Yes, it was an exercise to encourage students to do a lot of speaking. The summer between my junior and senior year at Lewis-Clark State College I had gone to Budapest as an intern where I assisted a teacher at a large university in summer English courses. However, I was woefully underprepared. I was more comfortable writing essays than teaching fundamentals about dependent clauses, dangling participles or past perfect tenses. In fact, some of the students could have given me a lesson.

However, I did know that in English as a second language, or ESL, and English as a foreign language, or EFL, the goal is to have the teacher do very little talking and the students to do a lot of talking. Thus the game of Two Lies and a Truth. After the students had time to think up their two lies and decide what truth they would tell, each one reported to the class, and then their fellow students had to decide which of the three statements was the true one.

It turned out to be fun and I learned many interesting and true things about those young people. One girl was on the national swim team; several students had swum across the Danube River. It was like folks in this area daring to swim across the Salmon River (which I have done). Some were proficient at fencing and one Muslim student said he liked to wear his traditional robes at home. A student from Transylvania told of a trip home at Christmas where he rode for many of miles in the back of a truck and arrived nearly frozen to death. These were strong kids. My truth was that I have four children, yet few guessed it correctly since large families were quite rare there.

Those students were wonderful and one evening they took me on a lovely stroll to their favorite parts of Budapest. Our walk ended with us enjoying delicious sour cherry ice cream cones.

After I graduated from LCSC I wanted to become better prepared to teach ESL, so I enrolled at a specialized Cambridge school in San Francisco. It was a very intense course. To be accepted, we needed to have a college degree and to have studied a foreign language ourselves. It was a monthlong program, and they told applicants to not even apply if we had any health problems or emotional problems because we would eat, breathe, sleep and live ESL 24/7. I was accepted and after that month I came out a far better teacher.

Most of my fellow trainees found jobs right away in Asia, but I was intent on working in Europe. Fortunately I found a position in Holešov, Czech Republic, at a gymnázium, which is a school for university-bound students. I was lucky that I was the sole teacher for several classes so I became well acquainted with my students.

I did something special with the conversation classes of the older students. In those days everyone had a cassette tape recorder, so every weekend I had each of my students record five minutes telling me something about themselves. On Monday, I would listen and give my comments on what they’d said. Of course, one boy wanted to impress me with all the English swear words he knew. I answered him that anyone could say those things, so how about impressing me with something interesting about himself. He became one of my best students.

Sometimes there were surprises. One day I arrived in class to find that all the boys had gone on a field trip. Hmmm, a fun alternative lesson would be good, I thought. So we reviewed vocabulary about fashion and clothing styles, as well as adjectives describing them: stunning, elegant, sporty, etc. Pairs of girls wrote descriptions of each other’s clothing. Then we had a fabulous fashion show, with each girl modeling her apparel as her partner gave a glowing narration.

That spur-of-the-moment lesson turned out to be one of my very favorite classes, and the girls were absolutely delightful. I wish you could have seen them.

Johnson, of Grangeville, worked in three different European countries — Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovenia — in the 1990s and early 2000s. She can be reached at johnsondixie@hotmail.com.