Whodunnit

I'm working on crime at the moment with my students.

In the first lesson, they came up with crime vocabulary in French and looked up the English words in the dictionary. Experience must have spoken because the first words they said were "rape" and "pedophile". What a start. Unfortunately, these are real problems here.

They studied "newspaper articles" about hypothetical burglaries at "10, Upping Street, London" and filled in the above "Help Catch A Thief" page describing the guy from the article. We tried talking about burglaries in Mayotte, but that didn't work too well as they don't see burglaries as crimes, just as a means of survival, because anything stolen is immediately sold and/or shipped to one of the neighbouring Comoros islands.

They observed the "murder scene" in the photos and described everything they saw, then established hypotheses about what could have happened. They didn't touch anything because you see, Miss, we can't possibly risk leaving fingerprints, otherwise we'll be suspects.

They role-played the murder of an unknown student, each taking a role-card which set them up as detectives, innocent suspects or guilty suspects. The detectives interviewed everybody, the innocent suspects told the truth and the guilty suspects invented alibis about flying carpets, Hollywood and the Queen of England when asked what they were doing yesterday at 6 p.m. They asked me what I had been doing, too. Just in case.

They separated into detectives and suspects, each sitting on opposite sides of the room. The detectives decided which suspects they wanted to interview more closely and quizzed them two at a time in French and English. The suspects' stories were pretty incoherent, they had said different things to different detectives, so the detectives compared notes and decided who they thought was guilty. Meanwhile, I was alternately fielding comments in French, making sure different suspects came up for questioning and didn't stay up too long, and requesting "silence in court".

Except the court scene, which turned out to be pretty complicated, this was all in English. Using the past continuous... which they now know how to use without even realising it. Good news for me, because I want them to know how to speak in the past. Good news for them, because they have had a few fun lessons and enjoy their English classes. I've found out that if I give them some fun lessons, they are generally more willing when we have to do the boring stuff.

Now all I need is some police tape and a British policeman's hat. I wonder if that'll fit in my luggage this Christmas.