ESL Teachers Nose Best!
Helping Students Understand With their Sense of Smell!
Our sense of smell plays a far more powerful role in our lives than we give it credit for. It is part of our humour; it aids us in choosing a mate and much more!
Whether it’s the time honoured tradition of Batman and Robin’s Christmas Jingle (from Jingle Bells) to Outkast’s single ‘Roses’ (smell like poo, poo, poo) the use of our nose in helping us relate an object, be it pleasant or otherwise or even a person is a powerful sense that we unconsciously apply to our every day lives.
It may be as simple as our sense of smell activating the information in our brains about the things we like and don’t like directly affects our decision making. Just take for example the smell of raw onions versus cooked onions. Being repulsed by the first I find myself wanting to dabble in the latter whilst cooking.
Smell also determines how we interact with a fellow human being. How we interact with a ma n or woman depends to a large degree on what odour he or she is producing. Negative body odour is likely to want us to make B-line away from an individual whereas a pleasant one is likely to leave us wanting more of that person’s time and attention.
Thus the same can be said to apply to teaching English to foreign students. By helping students associate the English words they are learning to every day items, be it food, plants, flowers and each other (as humans all have their own individual scent despite being masked by deodorants’, perfumes’ and colognes!) your students are actually gaining further insight into a foreign world. A world that becomes less so with every chance taken by them to relate western concepts to their own.
Possible Activities
Have your students bring in one item each representing a scent of their choice that they like best. It could be anything they want from a type of flower to their favourite desert. It should be something different to what their peers are bringing in and should involve a little more than just an item. They can write a few sentences down describing how their item smells to them and why they like it so much for instance.
If you can think of another example of how to use ‘smell’ as a way of learning let us know by starting a discussion on this topic!
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