ESL Lessons: Using Food Chains, Webs and Pyramids in Language Teaching

By drawing a simple food chain on the board, you can encourage the students to make basic sentences about what they see, e.g. a spider eats a fly. It doesn't get any easier than this, if you and your class struggle with this then maybe you should consider an alternative career. You can get students to practice with the diagrams that you draw on the board and then they can make a display for the wall by drawing their own diagrams and writing about them.

Don't forget to label the wall display with the students' names and your name so that your boss knows which fantastic teacher was responsible for this masterclass of language tuition. If you work in a school that doesn't allow you to display students' work on the wall, I sympathize; get another job with a school that understands the benefit of allowing children to take pride in displaying their work.

Acknowledgements: Image from http://library.thinkquest.org.

An example of simple speaking/writing with a food chain.

1. The sun makes energy.
2. The plants grow.
3. The slug eats the plants.
4. The frog eats the slug.
5. The heron eats the frog.

Depending on the country and culture you are teaching in you will want to choose creatures that are familiar to your students.

Acknowledgements: The food chain picture comes from The Gwent Wildlife Trust.
food chain

This can be done by starting with the same simple diagram as in the last stage. The easiest way to introduce new vocabulary is by substituting more unusual beasts into the diagram. One of the most popular animals I included was a secretary bird, which stamps snakes to death before eating them; this really seemed to please my students. Other more unusual creatures students particularly liked were plankton, coral and duck-billed platypus. One advantage of such peculiar animals is that it takes the children ages to draw them; an obvious bonus for the teacher there!

A more interesting way of introducing new vocabulary is to pre-teach different words as substitutes for the verb to eat. Verbs such as catch, kill, trap, consume, swallow or even disembowel are useful here. By combining using unusual animals and strange verbs the students will produce some surprisingly imaginative and graphic work.

To teach plurals or collective nouns for groups of animals a food pyramid is particularly useful. A simple pyramid with five plants on the bottom, three mice on the next level and one fox at the top encourages students to speak and write about the relative numbers of animals involved. This is particularly useful in drilling plurals in countries where the native language doesn't include them. It is also rather entertaining to teach some unusual collective nouns such as flock of birds, pride of lions or herd of cows. I don't advise teaching words such as murder of crows or exaltation of larks unless you really want to confuse your students.

Once again, students can be encouraged to produce their own food pyramids and write about them. Remember, the more levels they draw, the longer it will take them!

A Shrewdness of Apes

A Siege of Bitterns

A Storytelling of Crows

A Piteousness of Doves

A Business of Ferrets

A Tower of Giraffes

A Prickle of Hedgehogs

A Sneak of Weasels

A Murmuration of Starlings

A Rhumba of Rattlesnakes

An Ostentation of Peacocks

A Mischief of Mice

Many more can be found here - Fun With Words Collective Nouns.

This can be a really awful thing to teach, especially to children. However, by using their interest in animals and the three types of food diagrams it can be practiced rather simply. Instead of saying "a shark eats a fish", demonstrate that by starting with the fish, a different sentence can be made; "a fish is eaten by a shark".

With a few examples and the grammar structure explained, most students are able to get at least a rough grasp of what the passive is all about; more than a few teachers might also get to grips with it this way.

From a language point of view there isn't a lot of difference between which type of diagram to use, only that the food web gets very complex very quickly. For those of you who like to teach some conceptual aspects with your language lessons, it might prove useful to know the strengths and weaknesses of the different diagram types.

Food chains are obviously useful for their simplicity. They are also good for showing the role of plants and small organisms in providing food for a community. However, they don't show any aspect of omnivorosity or alternative food sources for each animal. In language teaching they are good for introducing new vocabulary because it is easy to substitute new words without affecting the rest of the diagram.

The strength of a food web is that they show a more realistic community and the complexity of its nature. It shows the various food sources for each animal, but it can be confusing for students to understand, not to mention rather difficult for the teacher to construct on the board. For those who fancy themselves as real scientists, the other shortcomings of food webs are that they don't show the proportions of different types of prey in the diet, and nor do they demonstrate seasonality of prey. This of course won't be of concern if you are teaching young children. If your students can deal with this type of thing, I suggest letting one of them teach the lesson while you sit back and relax.

            
                                    Image from The Peregrine in Barcelona

Food pyramids, such as the one above, can be used to demonstrate the numbers of animals involved in the community. This is quite difficult to do accurately, but for language teaching it gives students an idea of how the number of individuals decreases as you go up the pyramid. For those of you that have super-students then food pyramids can be used to show the biomass at different levels in the pyramid. As this is a rather complex issue, that is all I have to say about that! However, these diagrams don't show different food sources for each animal in the pyramid, only one food source per animal. At their simplest, food pyramids are easy for even young children to understand, I've successfully used them with 6 year-olds whose mastery of English was poor to say the least. Food pyramids also look rather wonderful when coloured in and displayed on the wall of a classroom!

Hopefully this might encourage you to use some science in your English classes. Even if you don't understand it perfectly, you will probably be quite surprised how quickly and enthusiastically your students produce excellent food chains, webs and pyramids together with coherent annotations.

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