Teaching English Through English Made Easy: Empowering Students to Challenge Gender Stereotypes

How can we effectively introduce passive voice and discuss gender stereotypes with 9th graders only in English? Don't worry! With engaging activity ideas, handy visual aids, and a well-prepared script for each activity, you'll be all set in no time.

 

English instruction isn't simply delivering lengthy grammar lectures or diving into extensive readings for the entire class. A more effective approach involves English teachers crafting meaningful contexts and providing scaffolding tasks to encourage active USE of the language by their students. Featuring compelling activity ideas, Kang Shuan's B5 L3 serves as an exemplary model where students not only grasp the target sentence pattern and improve reading comprehension but also delve into reflections on gender equality and review movies using simple English.

 

1.    Uncover the author's intent with P.I.E.: Persuade, Inform, or Entertain.

Explore why the author crafted the content, identify each element with relatable examples, and encourage students to brainstorm additional instances for each category.

 

2.    Exploring Passive Voice through a Day in My Life

This lesson guides students in rewriting sentences using the passive voice. Additionally, the reading material introduces portrayals of weak, helpless female characters in movies. Students then apply this by rewriting a story about a strong mom and using passive voice to talk about a special day.

 

3.    Challenging Gender Stereotypes

While the lesson aims to enlighten students on the topic, I encourage them to question what they read. Using examples from Frozen and Spider-Man, we'll explore how things may not be as they initially appear. For example, is Mary Jane in Spider-Man really is a weak character by only being a shallow and screaming girlfriend?

 

4.    Using character traits to create a new female superhero

Character traits define how characters believe, act, and feel. With the character traits of Elsa and Anna, students will build up this task to create a new hero. My idea is to get them to see that heroes are around us. They possess different traits to make difficult choices and make the world a better place.

 

5. From Passive Voice to Critical Thinking and A.I. Integration

At the request of Kang Hsuan's editor, Lukas, I undertook the challenge with the aim of providing practical assistance to fellow English teachers rather than mere wishful thinking. This time, my focus extended beyond the application of the assigned grammar point, passive voice, to include the development of critical thinking skills in gender identification. To achieve this goal, I found the superhero movie theme particularly useful, providing excellent examples to establish and prompt students to reconsider their perspectives.

On top of incorporating critical thinking, I integrated another notable feature into this project: the use of A.I. Movie reviews and multiple-choice comprehension questions have been generated by artificial intelligence. Tasks that once consumed hours of manual effort can now be accomplished in seconds, with the added benefit of refining the language to sound more natural, thanks to A.I. ChatGPT, Bard, and Canva have become my trustworthy tools for sourcing activity ideas, generating text, and creating visually appealing aids.

EMI