“Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks yuor sdutens to”: Discovering the richness of using sketches, images, and icons to direct and embolden students to speak accurately and correctly

Abstract

Most dictionaries have sketches of what are usually called content words, especially nouns. In
classrooms around the world you can see posters showing vegetables, animals, fish, fruits—ditto
for flash cards. For recognizing words in isolation and associating the meanings with the pictures,
such pictures can be useful. But seeing the word elephant under a sketch of an elephant in a
dictionary or the word apple—or even less concrete words like stop or open—is not only no help
to how to use these words but present incomplete or, one might even say, incorrect information.
The word apple, for example, has to occur with an or the or in the plural form: apples. We give all
sorts of reasons for students having trouble with articles; a rarely heard one is that the first time
they see count nouns they see them without articles and never in a position in a sentence.
I asked students to draw a sketch to represent an on a flash card showing an apple and the word
the in The apple on the card is beautiful. They drew sketches so quickly that I started to ask them
to represent all the words in a few sentences with sketches or symbols. From this small
beginning, students began to comment that “writing” with sketches was similar to the Egyptians’
use of hieroglyphics and the Chinese and Japanese use of characters.
I illustrate how sketching all words—content words plus function words—the, are, to, do, etc.—as
well as different forms of words—does, do, like, likes—can be a useful activity for practicing any
grammatical pattern in a way that integrates structural words and sentence patterns with
vocabulary and decreases the need to explain grammar.