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
We are all familiar with “Find someone who…” speaking activity. Traditionally the teacher provides a series of tasks -written/displayed on the board or on printed handouts- for the students to mill around and ask each other in order to exchange personal information. The aim might be to practice a given grammatical structure, such as the modal verb “can”, as in “find someone who can play … Continue reading find someone who (with a twist)
Are you familiar with whispering dictations, also known as Chinese whispers? In this type of dictations, students are arranged in a line one behind another or they are sitting in rows. Then the teacher shows a sentence to the student in front. This person has to whisper it to the student sitting or standing next to him/her, who, in turn, will have to whisper it … Continue reading whispering lyrics dictation
What do you think the featured image above is? What do you think this gadget was used for? Do you like the design? How old might it be? Do you think it was a failure or a flop back then? Display the image on a screen or else print a handful of copies with the image for the students to share and see and let … Continue reading museum of failure
Syntactic priming is the process that takes place when we make predictions upon hearing certain grammatical patterns which guide us to guess the string of words that are more likely to be uttered next based on our previous encounters with those patterns. Basically we are constantly building sentences based on what we hear, which are next confirmed or then reformulated. We hypothesise. We fill gaps. … Continue reading syntactic priming
