Have you ever tried a silent lesson — an alternative way to practise writing? This could well turn out to be one of the most popular lessons you've ever run. It's suitable for all ages, but works best with teens and young adults. There's only one rule: you cannot speak. Not a word. Complete silence, please! This way, you, the teacher, can relax and simply enjoy conducting an engaging writing lesson.
Introduction
There are plenty of great ideas for using mobile phones in the classroom — WhatsApp group chats, for instance, can work well in an English lesson. However, many schools in Italy ban mobile phones from their premises altogether. WhatsApp also exposes the teacher rather too much: you might receive messages at inappropriate times, and you'd need to set very strict rules to keep things professional, or comments and pictures could easily get out of hand.
Most schools in Italy have a computer room with working PCs connected to the internet. You'll need to liaise with the corridor supervisor or the IT technician, but it usually works out (even in the South). If you teach your course online, of course, the problem is solved from the outset.
Procedure
Set up a video chat for your students. Decide together what to use: are they registered on Skype? That's ideal, since Skype keeps a record of the chat, which you can use later for error correction or other activities. In Zoom, you can download the chat content to your PC and do the same. Alternatively, you could simply use Meet to set up a video chat just for this lesson, with no record kept afterwards — it's also a good option for students who'd rather not download any new programme or app to their devices.
Once everyone has joined the chat, explain the one and only rule: all communication must be in written form. Everyone can therefore switch off their microphone (and camera too).
From here, there's a range of things you can do:
- Conduct a normal lesson entirely in writing, giving instructions and asking questions in written form, to which students respond in kind.
- Share a picture and ask students to describe it, or write what the person in the picture might be thinking.
- Introduce a topic and simulate a written conversation or debate around it.
- Give students a story starter and ask them to continue it sentence by sentence — naming which student should write the next line each time. If more than one sentence is submitted, vote on the best one and continue from there.
- Write a short email and ask students to reply to it.
- Describe a famous person, giving clues one at a time, and have students guess who you're thinking of.
- Type infinitive forms of verbs and have students race to write the past simple and past participle forms — first correct answer gets a point, and the overall winner gets a small prize.
- Discuss common text-message and social-media abbreviations, and clarify what they mean (e.g. How R U?).
- Set out a short scenario (e.g. you borrowed my tablet and dropped it — the screen is broken) and ask students to write a message of no more than 35 words apologising for it.
- Ask "What would you do…?" questions, then vote for the most imaginative answer.
- And so on.
NOTA BENE
- Make sure all of your students are actively involved and taking part.
- Decide whether to give individual or open feedback, and handle it tactfully.
- Set clear rules — not just "writing only, no speaking", but also who can write and when, how many seconds or minutes they have to complete each task, and who corrects whom.
Final tip: A2-B1 Writing: Story prompts and connectors
