Example of Practice

Macbeth Vignette

Subject and topic

Macbeth

Key Stage

KS 2 Years 5/6

Focus pupils and school

The work took place in a city primary school where 80% of the pupils are from minority ethnic communities. Most of these pupils are bilingual. The most common language is Gujarati. About half of the Gujarati speakers are Hindus and the other half are Muslims. Panjabi, Kutchi, Urdu and Somali are also used by some children in the school. In this year 5/6 class about 40% of the pupils were predicted to attain Level 4+ when they reached the end of Year 6. One boy (a Gujarati speaker) had started at the school in September with no experience of formal education either in England or in India. A Year 6 girl (also a Gujarati speaker) had joined the school in Year 5 and had not been to school in India. Two boys, one a Somali speaker, the other an Urdu speaker from Dubai had started at the school in Year 5 with a little experience of spoken English. Other pupils in the class had a range of experience of English –some had been at the school since the nursery - others had started at the school in Years 1, 2 or 3.

Context

Literacy lesson. Macbeth

Prior to this lesson the children had watched the ‘Animated Tales’ version of Macbeth which lasts about 25 minutes and uses dialogue taken from the Shakespeare play. The intention was to give the pupils an overview of the characters and plot before they began reading the book version (based on Shakespeare) that was to be their main text. However, we felt that just watching the video was not enough and that the children needed to ‘process’ the video in some way in order to have a real knowledge of the characters and understanding of the plot.

We thought that it was vital for the pupils to have this overview firmly established so that they could engage with difficult text in future lessons.

The aims were for the pupils to:


• become familiar with the characters in the story
• understand the relationships that existed between the characters (son of, friend of, cousin of etc.)
• have an understanding of the plot and the part characters played in it.

The language aims were for the pupils at early stages of acquiring English to:
• be able to understand and express relationships e.g. father of, friend of etc.
• be able to understand and express some main actions in the past e.g. Who killed Duncan? Macbeth killed Duncan.

The general language aims for the class were to be able to understand and express two forms of reported speech:
• reported commands and requests, eg. Macbeth told his men to murder Banquo.
• reported information e.g. The witches told Macbeth that he would become King. Lady Macbeth thought that Macbeth wasn’t brave enough to kill Duncan.

The lesson – How the activity related to the teaching and learning objectives

The activity was based around the use of a key visual. This comprised of a baseboard with the names and pictures of the main characters. Lines and blank boxes connect the characters in a kind of web.

Dotted lines indicate that the connection is a relationship (friend of, father of etc.) whilst the full lines indicate an action (murdered him while he was asleep, persuaded him to murder Duncan etc.). The pupils’ task (in groups of four) was to place a set of cards in the appropriate places on the baseboard.

 

In doing this we wanted the pupils to think back to the video and use it to inform their decisions. In this respect the activity was serving three purposes.

• To act as a catalyst and a focus for obliging the pupils to talk about the characters and plot
• As a graphic organiser which helped the pupils to organise the information from the video in a systematic way.
• As a means of introducing and modelling some of the key vocabulary and structures involved in summarising the plot.

In this way the aim was to integrate the content knowledge and language learning through using small group talk as a means of exploring the content and negotiating the meaning of vocabulary and structures.

In the lesson bilingual support from a Teaching Assistant was available. This enabled the children who were fairly new to English to:
• Have an understanding of the nature and purpose of the activity
• To process the information through Gujarati

In terms of summarising their understanding in English and learning English the Teaching Assistant concentrated on the relationships
• Duncan was the father of Malcolm.
• Banquo was the friend of Macbeth.

And some of the simpler actions
• ‘Macbeth killed Duncan.’
• ‘Macduff killed Macbeth.’

For the other pupils the concentration was on structures which expressed reported speech
• ‘The witches told him that he would become king.’
• ‘Macbeth ordered his men to kill Banquo.’

The first of these structures are often particularly problematic for many learners of English as the tendency is to say
• ‘The witches tell him he will become king.’
• ‘The witches told him he will become king.’

We were concerned to be systematic with the language forms we were using and avoid slipping into a kind of ‘historic present tense which people often use when talking about the plot of a story or play e.g. Macbeth goes back to the castle and tells Lady Macbeth about the witches.

We felt that switching between the present and simple past tense was potentially confusing for our pupils and that this was particularly so when dealing with reported speech.

The collaborative activity did in fact produce the kind of exploratory talk that we hoped it would:

“No it wasn’t Malcolm who killed Macbeth, it was the other one.”

“Macbeth said to kill Banquo. He told his guards to do it.”

This also allowed the teachers to listen in to the group conversations and intervene when necessary usually with a question. It was also possible to use teacher questioning to extend some pupils into deeper consideration of the plot.

“Why do you think Macbeth ordered his men to kill his friend?”

After the pupils had arranged the cards and had them checked we gave each pupil a paper version of the baseboard and asked them to fill in the boxes. We rearranged the groups at this point into ‘ability’ groups. .This was because with some of the more able groups we took away their cards and baseboard so that they would have to try and reconstruct the content of the boxes. With other groups we took away only some of their cards so that they did not have so many to remember.

At the end of the session all of the children had completed their own version of the key visual. This was useful as they could then refer back to it in the following weeks they could refer back to it as they were reading the text of the book. Indeed the work that took place with the text indicated that the activity had proved to be very useful in orientating the pupils and helping them to engage with the text.

Strategies for teaching / learning EAL used in the lesson