DO you get annoyed when your students concentrate on using their mobile phones to send text messages rather than focusing on the lesson? How could teachers harness this enthusiasm for the purpose of English study? Jim Scrivener, the Director of Education at International House, a language school in Hungary, offers some tips on exploiting text messaging in class.
First, mini sagas. The standard text has a limit of 160 characters (letters and spaces). This can be used to set an interesting challenge, especially for higher level students, e.g. "Write a complete story that has a beginning, middle and end in less than 160 characters". Try other ideas, such as"Write a complaint to a shop"and"Write a poem". Make the writing more challenging by requiring the text to be exactly 160 characters.
Second, SMS (Short Message Service) translation. Download and make copies of an SMS dictionary from the Internet. This will tell teachers lots of abbreviations such as "LOL" (Laugh out loud) and "T2GO" (Time to Go). Distribute a short message to groups and get them to use the SMS dictionary to translate it into using abbreviations. Then do the reverse hand out a short printed message that uses some abbreviations and ask groups to prepare a translation into "real" English.
Third, SMS consequences. Each group of students discusses and writes the first line of a story (max. 50 characters) then sends it to the next group. Each group then continues the story they receive (again max. 50) and sends it on again. There will be some fun reading the results.
Fourth, predictive text. Many phones have predictive text. The phone guesses the most likely word you want based on which keys you press. But this can lead to some errors too. For example, typing the word "home" uses the same keystrokes as "good" ("ghi" share the same key) and the phone may choose the wrong word. Write a short text including some of these errors e.g. "Last might I arrived good at 6 o'block" and see if students can work out the correct words by studying their phone keyboards for letters that share keys.
