15th of July: LANGUAGE HUMOUR AND MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCE WORKSHOP. Marga Gelabert

DAY 15^TH JULY  - written by Margarita Gelabert.

1^st.Session: LANGUAGE  HUMOUR (Teacher: Johanna)

The first session was about language humour and at the beginning, the teacher wrote on the board questions to discuss in groups of three:

When did you last have a good laugh?

What about?

What really makes you giggle?

Do you ever tell jokes?

Is there really a difference between English and Spanish sense of humour?

We shared the ideas  all the class together and we  agreed that the  situations  that make us laugh are the  unexpected moments or unexpected answers. We also talked about the "punch line" which is the funniest moment in a situation or a joke.

Some other relevant ideas were that depending on different  people’s culture  we can have different sense of humour.

The teacher gave us some exercises to match phrases with their meaning about “laugh” such as…

-She’s got a really infectious laugh: she sounds like a witch

-She’s got a bit of a sick sense of humour: She cracks a lot of tasteless jokes about death and people having accidents.

-She’s  got a very dry sense of humour: She’s quite sarcastic and dread pan

Some other expressions came around:

-Rolling on the floor laughing

-To roll about laughing

-Burst out laughing

-An infectious laugh

-Make somebody laugh

-Have the last laugh

-He, who laughs least, laughs the most

-Burst out laughing

-Have a good laugh

-Laugh at somebody

-Laugh with somebody

-Laugh your head off

-Roll about laughing

Also, we said there are different kinds of humour, not just depending on your culture but also looking at every moment or each person’s personality:

-Black sense of humour

-Sarcastic

-Mischievous

-Schoolboy/puerile

-Sauce

-Irreverent

Also Johanna recommended us to read a book related to the subject: “Watching the English”     ( by Kate Fox)

The teacher also gave us some questions and answers in order to match them and get some jokes for children

The teacher also taught us how to play jokes with a child:

A: What’s …………………………………………….?

B: I don’t know, what’s ……………………………………………..?

A: Answer

We also practised some answers for a joke, like:

-Oh, stop it!

-Oh, that’s awful/terrible/really stupid/an old one!

-I don’t get it


In my opinion, all the activities were very useful. I think everything was interesting because we kept learning some structures and vocabulary about this subject that is so cultural/ colloquial and we, sometimes, don’t understand when arrive to another place. We need to teach our students that most of the time everything relates to the context we are in. That is why we need to learn not only the  language but also the different culture: If we don’t know about it we won’t be able to understand different situations or how to act in a different culture.

 

2^nd Session: WORK ON OUR PROJECTS

We need to prepare a project in groups about a subject in order to acquire the contents and methodology we have learned about teaching, so we had some time to work...

3^rd session: MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCES (Teacher: Malgosia)

In the third session there were some workshops to attend in order of your preferences. One of them was about the "Multiple intelligences" and  was taught by Malgoshia. It was developed this way:

First the teacher explained  that there is no prove of the existence of multiple intelligences. In order to find out if it was worth for boys to go to school, government in France asked some specialists to make up some IQ test. The first were taken in France at the end of last century. Some years lather specialists realised that even some boys who had had good results in an early age, were not able to rule businesses or work on specific things (and the other way round) as they grew up so people started wondering the reason why  that  happened and some psychologists introduced the theory that it was because there are different kinds of intelligence:

-Linguistic

-Visual-Spatial

-Bodily-Kinaesthetic

-Intrapersonal: Understanding self

-Logical-Mathematical

-Musical-rhythmic

-Interpersonal: Influencing others

-Naturalist: Knowledge of Natural World

In order to analyse ourselves and the intelligence we have more developed we took part in ten activities:

-Act 1: Stand up and talk to other people you don’t know about your plans for the week-end: Intrapersonal.

-Act 2: Stay quiet for 1 minute: Interpersonal.

-Act 3: Draw in the air an 8 with a thumb: Visual-spatial.

-Act 4: Touch knee-hand: L/R, R/L Visual-spatial.

-Act 5: How many seconds are there in 24 hours?:  Logical-mathematical.

-Act 6: Essay about a perfect minute: Linguistic.

-Act 7: Direct an orchestra: Closing your eyes, first one minute with music, one minute without music and another minute with music: Interpersonal, music and rhythm.

-Act 8: Draw a picture of a minute clock: Spatial.

-Act 9: Find similarities and differences in two people’s hands: Intrapersonal.

-Act 10: What did you prefer from the above and what didn’t you like at all? Why?

Everyone said their opinion and we could analyse the different situations.

After these exercises, the teacher gave us a sack with pebbles from where we had to catch one and without showing them to anyone we  wrote a description in a paper. We gave these descriptions to the teacher and then, getting somebody else’s, we had to look for the right one to match.

After getting our pebble, we did another exercise trying to find a word to describe it and write a poem out of it.

People felt differently about the diverse activities so I would say  that  means that each person  has developed different kinds of intelligence.

This was the end of the workshop which, in my opinión was very useful. I could see that we need to find out each student's  aptitudes to see what is the best way for them  to learn and what activities they need to be involved in so they acquire contents. Sometimes the more comfortable you feel the more you learn.