Today I would like to share a couple of ideas on one of the most overlooked -and useful- things we can do in the classroom: working with listening transcripts. They tend to be considered as reference material for the students to check -if anything- at home to, perhaps, look up words they may not know from it. However, they are very useful not just as … Continue reading working with listening transcripts 1
This is one of my favourite song activities ever. It focuses on having a look at relevant vocabulary from a song by means of a dictation (again, with a twist), on having the students mingle and help each other with meaning and then doing your typical fill-in-gaps. Finally you may decide to allow time for some speaking interaction with the target vocabulary. Select 10-15 key … Continue reading songs: fill-in-gaps with a twist
About a year ago I discovered a nice collection of one minute videos recorded by Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkley. Each video recording features an English expression which is clearly explained and presented with examples from real life conversations. You can find this collection housed in their Youtube Channel Lexical Lab. I shared a generic way of exploiting these videos for all language levels in … Continue reading one-minute videos 2
This week I am showcasing three listening activities from this site which have gathered a lot of interest. In fact, the listening realm together with vocabulary activities seem to raise the most interest on this site. Click on the links for the full posts. In one minute videos I take a look at Hugh Dellar’s collection of one minute videos on the Lexical Lab channel … Continue reading summer series: three listening activities
Songs are a double-edged weapon: on the one hand they are abundant and they are motivating language products so they are very inviting as classroom material. On the other hand, I personally feel most times they are used as fillers and they take up precious time that could be more wisely and productively spent on something else. A major issue is length. The average duration … Continue reading song: correct the lyrics
Here is a listening game that you will fall in love with and, most importantly, your A1- A2 students will too. You may also try this with higher levels with the suggested items below or with more specific searches. You need Google assistant on your computer or a phone and a set of speakers. Arrange your students in groups of three or four and decide … Continue reading the ultimate listening game: ask Google assistant
I typically kick off my lessons with a vocabulary review activity followed by a communicative goal to put the revised language into practice. As a big fan of dictations, I decided to try this activity out with my class of Upper-Intermediate students. A couple of days before they had completed an activity from the textbook (expressions with take). There was a list of 6 expressions … Continue reading phrasal verbs 4
