Mazes ELT Journal

Action Mazes
M. F.G.RINVOLUCRI
Downloaded from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Roehampton University on December 19, 2012
Mazes -as reading activities WHO ARE the people in our society who have a right to ask other people long strings of questions? Policemen, teachers, doctors, torturers, insurance brokers, toddlers . . . the list is a long one but one thing that all the above categories of people have in common is that they have power over the person being questioned. The continual asking of questions is one of the main verbal ways in which teachers show their status superiority to their students. Of course, many colleagues would justify their interrogations on the ground that they must find out how much the students have understood, especially after reading a passage of difficult English. Below I will suggest that there are better, simpler ways of checking. When students have finished reading a passage their minds are at the end of the passage. They are then frequently confronted with a string of questions that ignores this fact and asks them to switch back to the start of the passage, thus ignoring their temporal reality. So another objection to the question or true/false statement methods of checking comprehension is that it takes no account of the students' standpoint in time vis-d-vis the passage just read. When you are at lower intermediate level, say, reading any great length of text in the foreign language is a strain, and so it is vital that extensive reading should be broken up by other activities, which is exactly what happens in the action maze below. A maze is a series of reading cardsthe number of cards may vary from 15 to 40. Card 1 outlines a problem situation and offers readers four or five possible courses of action. Students tackle the maze in groups of three or four and they have to reach agreement in their groups on what action to take. (Four is a better group number than three because three often leads to a majority-minority situation, which tends to discourage real discussion, the individual in the minority feeling s/he should simply give way.) Once a small group has agreed on a course of action they turn to the appropriate card and read the result of their choice. The new situation opens up a new set of choices, and so on. Here is Card I of the Parking. Maze1:
'The Parking Maze is from Mazes 1 by Rinvolucri and Berer, obtainable from Pilgrims, 8 Vernon Place, Canterbury, Kent.
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M. Rinvolncri
PARKING Card 1
You are a reasonable sort of person but you have a very difficult neighbour. This neighbour insists on parking his car in the street across the entrance to your driveway. This means you can't get your car into your own driveway. What are you going to do about it? 11 You decide to do nothing, which means parking in the next street most of the time, as there is no room in your street 2 You leave a note on his windscreen asking him not to park across the entry to your driveway. 4 You go up to him and ask him not to park across your driveway. 10 You wait until he has driven away one morning and put large wooden boxes where his car was. 13 You let the tyres of his car down. The alternative courses of action are numbered, so that students know which card to turn to once they have picked a course of action. Suppose a group of students opts for alternative number four on Card 1, they then have to turn to Card 4 of the maze:
PARKING Card 4
You have approached your neighbour and asked him not to block your driveway. He says he's a very busy person and has nowhere else to park. He has no driveway or garage of his own. What do you do? 3 Warn him you'll have his car towed away. 21 Threaten to call in the police. 7 Ask him what he expects you to do if you can't get into your own driveway and can't park on the street? Most students have to read and discuss ten to a dozen cards before they manage to get out of this maze (a twenty-four card maze). As they read and discuss the teacher gets called over to help with language people can't work out for themselvesin fact, a very great deal of peerteaching also goes on. Let us return for a moment to the points made at the beginning of the article. The teacher's role in this reading exercise is not one of questioner-interrogators/he acts as a roving comprehension consultant called in when and where needed by the students. The students have a task to perform and decisions to make, which puts them in an unusual position of power. The teacher becomes a language technician and counsellor, abandoning the boss-role. The students become subjects, instead of being objects. Comprehension difficulties are dealt with card by card during the reading processthere is no question of asking students to re-focus on language problems they may have had on Card 1 when they trium-
Action Mazes
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phantly reach the maze exit card. They have to understand the few sentences on each card before they can possibly reach any decisions. Since they have to process the information on each card they are acutely aware that they need to have grasped it correctly. Interesting differences of opinion sometimes arise from different understandings of the text, which then have to be sorted out There is clearly no need for the teacher to resort to linearly-sequenced, heavy-booted comprehension questions. A maze provides lower intermediate students with extensive reading but metes it out to them in assimilable bits broken up by a mixture of thinking, listening, and speaking activities. In this way the learner is not discouraged by having to face an extensive text all in one long piece. Mazes as writing activities When students have done two or three mazes as reading-to-discussion work they are ready to try writing their own as a discussion-tocomposition exercise. The teacher asks them to look at the tree diagram of a maze they have read. Here is the top half of the diagram that underlies the Parking Maze:
A student then comes to the chalkboard and acts as secretary to the group. Students try to think of problem situations on which they might want to base a maze. After this brain-storming phase the students split into groups of three or four and choose one of the problem situations. They write out a Card 1 which defines the situation and suggests three or four courses of action. Card 1 should be written out in full but the rest of the tree should be done in note-form only. As homework, one person in each group can be asked to turn the tree diagram into a fully-written-up maze on cards. The cards then have to be randomly numbered, and corrected mazes can be used by the teacher as reading material in other classes. In this way students actually produce material for each other of a sort appropriate to their age and interests, be they 14-year-olds or fifth-year electronics students in a Grande fecole. If students produced more of their own learning materials we would be much closer to the sort of classroom that the late Charles Curran envisioned when he created his Community Language Learning approach.

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What is an action maze and how is it used as a reading activity?

What is the teacher's role in an action maze activity?

Action Mazes

Downloaded from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Roehampton University on December 19, 2012

Downloaded from http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/ at Roehampton University on December 19, 2012

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