What to do with morphases.com

By Alex Case

Morphases is a face photo manipulation programme that is easy to use and was the biggest hit of the month with my 8 to 11 year olds, with them fighting to speak English to tell me how to change the faces, asking for the address so that they could do it at home, and some of them even in tears with laughter at the result of changing a normal-looking man into a monster. It was a little tricky getting the right level of language out of it, so here is what I would do if I did it again.

Incidental language

The most important thing is the language you ask them to use as they do it. As well as the body part and appearance vocabulary (in approximate order of level- nose, ears, mouth, eyes, hair, sunglasses, chin, beard, moustache, eyebrows, forehead, plus various clothes), the language of how to manipulate it is great and memorable. Possibilities for each button (again approximately graded):

Left/ right, a little left/ right, two centimetres left/ right, more, stop, don’t stop, less, (much) further, a tiny bit, quite a lot, back, too far, keep going

(Ditto with up and down)

Bigger, smaller, much, a little, quite a lot, much much

Fattter, thinner, wider, narrower, broader, the same size as…, as … as…

Longer/ shorter (plus adverbs)

Read the rest of article at http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/tesol/what-to-do-with-morphases/

Alex Case has been a teacher, teacher trainer, Director of Studies, ELT writer and editor in Turkey, Thailand, Spain, Greece, Italy, Japan, UK and now Korea, and writes TEFLtastic blog (www.tefl.net/alexcase)

*ELTWeekly would like to thankAlex Case for contributing this article.

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