Radiohead: Just

script-and-lesson-plan.pdf

I’ve known about this video for a while and I’ve thought about ways in which it could be used in the classroom. My original idea was to use the subtitled encounter bewteen the people in the street to get my students to guess or hypothesise what the man says at the end of the video.

But there is a problem here: I have absolutely no idea what he says when the camera zooms up to his mouth and the subtitles stop. I don’t think we are meant to know. So perhaps this is a linguistic dead end.

Despite this, the story is great and there are other possibilities. I tried using the scene with a small group of elementary/pre-intermediate students last week. I made copies of the subtitled script (which can be downloaded on pdf above), identified potentially problematic language to pre-teach, and set up my lap top so that we would be able to watch the clip.

(NB In the music video, a crowd gathers around the man on the pavement. However, in order to keep things simple and allow for a class re-enactment of the scene, it has been scripted for 4 people: The person on the pavement, pedestrian 1, pedestrian 2, and the police officer.)

The horizontal man

I knew that we would be using the script to act out the scene but there was a problem. It wouldn’t very pleasant for someone to actually lie down on the floor and act out the part of the horizontal man - a bit degrading perhaps. I remembered something that I once saw a trainee teacher doing. In preparation for a murder mystery role play game, she had drawn the outline of the dead victim on the classroom floor before her students arrived. This worked really well - it became a central part of her activity and I thought it would be good to copy her idea.

I had to ask a colleague to lie down while I drew around him (thanks for that Matthew). The outline didn’t look quite like I had hoped - can you see the big bulbous hands? Also, I drew the outline with a black crayon and later got into trouble because it wouldn’t come off. Perhaps chalk would be better.

As had happened in the murder mystery game, the prop became the focus of the classroom. The activity developed around it and we didn’t even watch the video until the very end of the class.

What follows is an outline of what happened.

Part 1: Issues

1. As students entered the classroom, their attention was drawn to the outline of the person on the pavement. I asked my students to offer explanations for his state. Someone said that perhaps he was dead. I said that he was alive and conscious.

2. The following questions were put to my students and class discussion was drawn from them.

• What do you know about the story of the Good Samaritan?
• Has anyone ever found someone lying in the street like this? Where, when, what did you do?
• If you found a person lying in the street in Cádiz (the students’ town) what would you do? [Everyone said that they would help the person.]
• If you found a person lying in the street in London, what would you do and why? [Most students said they wouldn’t help. Some said that it would depend on whether the person was male or female.]
• What if the person was smartly dressed? [Most students decided that if it was a man wearing a suit and tie, then they might be more likely to help him.]

Part 2: Elicited language

Students were put into pairs/small groups and asked to do the following task:

• Imagine you decide to approach the person lying on the pavement. What do you say? Think of 6 possible questions you could ask.
• Why do you think the person is lying on the pavement? Think of 6 possible answers that he or she could give.

I helped my students with the language (question forms, etc) and then wrote a selection of their questions and answers on the board. This was an opportunity to bring some of the language from the script into play. All of the following are taken from the text and can be elicited or added to the list on the board:

Questions

• Are you okay?
• What happened?
• Did you fall?
• Have you been drinking?
• Why are you lying in the middle of the pavement?
• What’s wrong?
• What’s the matter (with you)?
• Have you fallen?
• Are you hurt?
• Are you alright?

Answers

• I’m fine, thanks
• Please leave me alone.
• Don’t touch me!
• Please will you just let me lie here.
• Life is pointless.

Part 3: Going over the script

(NB The script can be downloaded on pdf at the beginning of this posting.)

Students were told that they were going to see a short script in which a pedestrian finds a person lying on the pavement. I wrote the following words on the board:

• Apologetic
• Concerned
• Curious
• Angry
• Impatient
• Hysterical
• Calm

Copies of the script were then given out and we went over it together. This allowed us to:

1. Go over any unknown vocabulary and language.
2. Consider how individual lines should be delivered with regard to emotion (the words on the blackboard were used for this).
3. Practice pronunciation and delivery of the lines.

Part 4: Acting out the script

Since the class was small, we were able to act out the scene twice and everybody was able to get involved at least once. In each case, the actor who played the person on the pavement sat on a chair beside the outline on the classroom floor. Pedestrian 2 and the police officer stayed in their seats until they were called up.

Perhaps if I do this activity again, I will get students to act out the script from memory. It wouldn’t have to be word for word of course. It could be partially improvised. It would probably be important to give students a couple of minutes to prepare for this.

Part 5: Watching the clip

After coming up with some reasons for the pavement person’s strange behaviour, we watched the video. Before this, students didn’t know where the script had come from.

Later I emailed the YouTube clip to everyone. The idea is that if they enjoyed the lesson they will watch the clip again in their own time and reactivate the language while doing so. With hindsight, I think it might have been nicer to let the students go away without seeing the clip. The email would have been a surprise and we would have had a talking point at the start of the next lesson.

It’s at times like these where you realise how valuable a projector would be.

Part 6: Language study

There are a few pieces of grammar that make multiple appearances in the script. For example:

Negative auxiliaries (auxiliar + n’t)

I didn’t see you there.
I haven’t been drinking.
Don’t touch me!
He hasn’t fallen.
Why won’t you tell me what’s wrong?
I can’t tell you. It wouldn’t be right.

Extracts like these can be exploited for language study. Although you could use them to make blank fills, my favourite way of doing things is to dictate the extracts to your students, let them compare what they have written with each other and then refer them back to the text to check their answers.

(NB More possibilities for language study are included in the pdf file).

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I knew that Mark Ronson had done a cover of the song but I just came across the video by chance the other day. Quite funny. Click here to see it.

Posted by admin on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm.