English Language Fair (Happy English)

India is famous for its different kinds of festivals and fairs. Most of the fairs held in India last long to 2/3 days and some fairs up to afternoon only. Fairs have very important recognition in villages. People, especially children are raringly awaits for this occasion. They enjoy every moment in the fair. They have lot of kind of food items. Lots of entertainment sources here e.g. roundabouts, merry go around, archery, shooting balloons, magician, card games etc. Children are totally relaxed here free from any tension.

            If this religious fairs brings plenty of joy in children’s life, so why can’t a language fair? It is a foreign language so there are many misconceptions and fear about this language in school children. Officially English has a status of assistant language, but in fact it is the most important language in India. So, in order to reduce this fear and increasing their confidence in learning this language, a language fair can play an important role here.  Our three schools came together and decided collaboratively to arrange this kind of fair, where students may be very happy, free from any tension. Here there would be lots of entertainment for them, full of activities and games and some enjoyable happenings. And every happening will develop their language skills and confidence of using English.

            The theme of this English Language Fair is “Happy English”. Learning a foreign language is always a boredom to the students. Teaching and learning of English in Indian context has always been a daunting and challenging task for the simple reason that English is not the first language in this context. As we learn our native language naturally and automatically, this doesn’t happen in the case of a foreign language e.g. English Language. If, we can present or create a natural atmosphere for the students to learn this language, we believe that students can learn language enjoyably and interestingly. Also, it saves too much time of teachers. And when 2/3 schools join in this programme, so collaborative learning can take place. In this real sense, we can call English Language-Happy English. A short stanza of a poem clearly tells us the situation. When children are happy they can learn the language quickly not when they are tensed and fearful.

Don’t worry, be happy. Don’t worry, be happy.

In every life we have some trouble,

But when you worry you make it double.

Here three schools and their English language teachers came together and planned accordingly. Students and teachers also get benefitted in many ways from this fair. First and foremost it provided an opportunity for students to have an experience using the language skills they are struggling to acquire. As they interacted with their peers from other schools in their vicinity, they could gain confidence and motivation to continue with renewed efforts in language study. The English Language Fair ( Happy English) presented a wide variety of different activities where the students could interact individually with other students of different schools. As for teachers, this was a nice programme of continuing professional development. All teachers worked collaboratively, taking help of one another. They worked on this project, discussed various ideas, interacted with each other and worked with their areas of strength and areas of development. They set up plenty of   activities and provided constructive feedback for one another.

This fair provided a variety of contents and events which allowed students to be creative with their language, to interact and to compete with their peers from different schools in the vicinity. There were a number of activities provided for students to interact with their schoolmates and different school students.

In this fair, students of 9 & 10 standards participated. There were 20 students of school. On the first day, all students registered their names with their teachers. All 60 students were assembled on the ground and enjoyed some warmers and icebreakers (Fire on a Mountain, adjective card ). Also, enjoyed the ball game by throwing happily to one another. After this small session, all students assembled in the ‘Activity Hall’. Here some instructions were given them. We told them that there so many malls here. You can anywhere you want to go. When you enter in any mall, you will get exciting opportunities to win different gifts, but of course you need to win. Every mall was facilitated by an expert teacher with some students. The following are the malls and they enjoyed a lot there.

Activity Mall-

            Teenagers love to play and use their imaginations. Children learn better when they are having fun. They relax and lost some of the anxiety that often comes with learning a foreign language. Children learn with amusing language activities. We created an atmosphere where they learnt comfortably the language. We deliberately chose some activities in the classroom and outside the classroom to feel them happy.

            They actively participated in lots of language learning activities. The activities were full of fun and interest and settlers and stirrers. They did some activities in group, in pair and on their own. The activities they faced here were-

Grammar auction                               Spelling bee

Carousel                                              Wall Crawl

Gallery Walk                                       Mingle

Tic-Tac-Toe                                         Back to Back

Information Gap                                 Hot Potato

Onion Ring                                          Running Dictation

Thumb War                                         Concentration Drill

Line Ordering Race                             Brain Gym

Game Mall (Fun & Learn) –

            Games can serve an useful function in the language classroom. They provide an enjoyable change of pace and they subtly reinforce language while focusing on an activity. They play a range of roles in the language curriculum. Children are very enthusiastic about games. Games have long been advocated for assisting language learning.

            In this language fair, students participated in so many games, they had not participated here before. These are the games where they enthusiastically participated:

Hot seat                                               Compliments                           How Many?

Jump                                                    Who am I?                               Slap the Board

Hangman                                            Nought & Crosses                   Ladder Race

Simon says                                          Back to the Board                   Board Rush Game

Opposite of the Action                        Slowly reveal the picture

Question stories                                  Act out a story                         Draw bank robber

Wall dictionary                                   A shopping role play               Adopt a word

Broken telephone                               Jigsaw

Theatre Mall –

            Students watched an video clip or two. Volunteers were chosen to interview the participants with brief questions about what transpired during the film clip. Those students who gave correct answers received candy prizes. Those who worked as volunteers acted as an assistant interrogates received double candy prizes.

Chopati Vendor & A Balloon Seller –

            A variety of wonderful, delicious bhel was sold. The vendor asked some questions and students responded in English. Those who responded correctly, received bhel from the vendor. It was free for them. So, many students were gathered around the vendor, because the bhel was delicious.

            At the same time, the balloons were also free for them. Only one was condition was put that they have to communicate in English.

In Prison –

            In order to remain in the English language atmosphere for the whole day, an artificial prison was made. When the students registered their names, they were told about prison activity. There were some ‘spies’ and ‘policemen’ moving here and there in the fair and those who spoke in Marathi and Hindi were caught by them and put in jail for ten minutes. After ten minutes, they were released when they responded correctly to the questions asked by the volunteer spices and policemen.

Audio Mall –

            Language learning depends on listening. Listening provides the aural input that serves as the basis for language acquisition and enables learners to interact in spoken communication.

            Here students were given listening practice and they filled in their responses in the sheets given them. Some questions were multiple choice questions and some were writing in one or two words. Here they listened some beautiful poems, some lyrics, a short speech, and so on. This practice developed their listening skills because it was purely based on scientific approach to teach listening skills.

Interaction Mall –

                        The teacher asked to make simple conversations in English with teacher and also to their peers. Teacher wrote some situations on chits (e.g. at the railway station, in a temple with your father, at the cinema hall with your buddy, meeting with your ex. headmaster on the bus stand) and distributed some chits of papers to the students. After getting those chits they presented their roles according to the situations.  They were very excited while playing their respective roles.

                        After their role play, there was elocution competition. The students got some quick topics by picking up some chits. For a while, it was little bit difficult to speak on a sudden topic, but they managed really well and expressed their thoughts with great confidence.

Reading Mall –

                        Reading skill is an important skills of language. So, in order to develop their reading skill, we established a reading mall. When students entered in the mall, they find some passages. Some instructions were given them that after reading, you have to give answer the questions. If your answers are correct, you will get some prizes.

                        Here, we deliberately used some techniques like skimming, scanning, paraphrasing, and guessing from the context. Students were interested in this activity and happily did this.

Writing Mall-

                        In order to develop their writing skill, a competition was set. The students were asked to write letters, stories, dialogues, notice, posters and expansion of ideas like essay writing. Here students used their previous knowledge and wrote down some nice pieces.

Poster Mall –

                        When the 3 schools were asked to participate in the language fair, they were asked to make posters on English language. The posters were about sentence structures, grammar points, vocabulary, web & diagrams. These schools made 22 big posters and 17 posters were small. The posters were really attractive and full of information.

                        All these posters were hung on the walls in the poster mall. The students were really happy to see their creation on the walls & telling happily to others that they made it.   

Domestic English Room –

                        Vocabulary is an important aspect of any language. So, in order to develop the vocabulary of English, we set a competition for them. There are many words we don’t know but need to use them in our day to day communication and writing. Here in this mall, we conducted a small competition in groups. We distributed some papers to groups and asked them to write as many words as they can related to their topic and we distributed them their topics with the help of realia. They were also asked to identify the names of real spices, food items, utensils, grains, clothing etc. which were put around the room.