Video transcriptI’ve got a bit of sad news to share today. This week, I found out that Mario Rinvolucri passed away at the age of 84. Now, if you’ve been teaching for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve come across his name. But if you haven’t, well, Mario was a total legend in our field and his work made a huge impression on me when I was a younger teacher.
I never met him personally, but I saw him speak at IATEFL a couple of times, and he was really inspiring. His interests were in the humanistic side of language teaching- always focusing on the learner as a whole person, not just a vessel for grammar and vocabulary- and he radiated that in his talks. He was one of these extraordinary educators that just don’t come along very often.
If you’re used to materials online and made with AI, the focus is a bit different, and even way back when I was young and willing to try anything out, some of his activities just seemed a bit too out of the box even for me. But so much of his material has great value and it’s often helped to remind me that the beating heart of learning a language is communication and this is fuelled by having something, a topic, that you really want to communicate.
When I heard the news, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole revisiting his work and ended up with this from an article in the Humanising Language Teaching Magazine. It’s simple, creative, and it sparks imagination and conversation.
So, let me show you how it works.
The basic idea is this: You take a simple text and you use it as a springboard for creativity. In his example, Mario used the classic nursery rhyme
Baa-Baa Black Sheep.
Before you roll your eyes at the nursery rhyme, the point here isn’t about the text itself. It’s about how we interact with it. Mario suggests asking learners some mind-expanding questions. Things like:
- Is the baa-ing sound near or far away in your mind?
- Does the scene take place in your country or somewhere else?
- What’s behind the speakers?
- Is the little boy happy, lonely, mischievous?
- And why isn’t there a shepherd in the rhyme?
It’s all about imagination: letting students create their own mental images and interpretations.
He suggests that in class, you read the text aloud- slowly at first, then faster- and have the students read it silently a couple of times. Answer any language questions they have.
The next thing he says to do- and this is one of those activities that I don’t think I could do with a straight face and would never try in class- you get students to read the rhyme aloud in different moods: softly, angrily, sweetly, seductively, even seeming tired. This isn’t for me…but the next bit is great.
Group the students and give them those imagination-expanding questions. The key here is that there are no right answers. It’s all about what they picture and feel.
Finally, bring everyone back together and have them share their favourite answers from their groups. It’s a simple, way to get students thinking, sharing and, most importantly,
using the language.
Mario’s conclusion to this was that whenever we read anything, we’re constantly building pictures and stories in our minds. This activity helps students notice that. And once they do, they can start having fun with it. It makes the language feel warmer, more personal and less like some cold, distant code they’re trying to crack.
So, that’s my little tribute to Mario Rinvolucri: an educator who really believed in the human side of language learning. And this activity? It’s a perfect example of his approach: simple, imaginative, and deeply learner-centered.
If you give it a try, let me know how it goes in the comments! And if you’ve got any favourite memories or activities inspired by Mario, I’d love to hear about them.
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You can find the article I took this activity from
here.
and lots more useful and interesting material at the
Humanising Language Teaching Magazine here- it's free.
