Saturday, 12 November 2016

Mindfulness in the EFL classroom

As you may have already noticed from the title, the topic for this post is Mindfulness.
But what is mindfulness? I'm sure that many people nowadays are familiar with the concept or at least have heard about it. I'm very grateful that I had a course here in college in which we read several articles about it, and also another course in which we practised mindfulness and meditation frequently.  In those courses I learned that meditation is basically focusing on the present moment, turning off our auto-pilot, and perceiving the world less judgmentally.
The benefits of it are many but the most evident is that through mindfulness we can become less stressed. For that reason I thought it would be nice to find activities that promote mindfulness but that at the same time are useful in the EFL classroom in relation to language use.
So first of all, I found an amazing website called Mindful Teachers that has several resources we can use. Even though it is not specifically directed towards EFL teachers, we can certainly adapt some of the activities to suit our classrooms.
One of the activities that I really liked is called Human Cameraa non-competitive game that consists in one student guiding another (whose eyes are closed) and telling him/her to open his eyes at a specific moment and take a mental picture, this is done three times and then the students switch roles.
When I first read the instructions, the activity didn't strike me as particularly useful in terms of language use, but then I remembered the typical activity we do with beginners: describe this picture.
Sometimes in pairs, sometimes individually, sometimes orally, sometimes written, the activity is used a lot to practice vocabulary and simple grammatical structures (i.e. there is a pencil; I see a house; etc), but maybe it could be more meaningful if we combined the Human Camera game to have students describe the mental pictures they took.
What I like the most of this idea is that it is quite flexible; it can be used inside the classroom, in a playground, in a park, or potentially anywhere. Also, it is an activity that can have interesting follow-ups, for instance you can ask students to write stories based on one of their mental pictures, to draw each other's mental pictures while one of them describes it, to guess who draw which picture, etc.
I know it is a short activity,definitely not for a whole lesson, but I'd like to use it when I get to teach beginners because I would have them moving around (which they tend to need), doing an activity that is very game-like, doing something collaboratively instead of competitively, and paying attention to the world around them.
 

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