I have been listening to Sting’s last album 44/876 quite a lot recently and there are two songs that have particularly called my attention as an English teacher/teacher trainer/materials writer. The first one is Crooked Tree, for which I wrote a blog post last week dealing with co-hyponyms and how that song presents itself well for exploiting them and exploring the topic area of crime … Continue reading connotation in songs
This speaking activity gets students to make choices, take sides and use arguments and counter arguments to support their ideas. This is how it goes: Think of controvesial issues for debate in the classroom. For instance, “eating meat is wrong”. Do not disclose this topic but write “eating meat is …” on the board instead. Ask the students to come up to the board and … Continue reading taking sides
In this short blog post I will share with you another alternative way to exploit reading passages. This time the students create questions for the text. Write on the board: what which where why when who how Then tell the students to look at the reading passage and try to write questions about the text on a piece of paper using those question words. Give … Continue reading reading frenzy 2
Reading passages in the language classroom are primarily used to have students understand the texts as a whole, to have them look for specific pieces of information or to introduce new language in context. I also like to take advantage of reading passages to let students discover facts and reasons and share them with peers by means of splitting the text into two halves and … Continue reading reading frenzy 1
Today I would like to share a zero preparation activity that you can use as a warmer or to introduce a new discussion topic or a new unit from your adopted textbook series. Let’s take a look at this unit as an example. The focal vocabulary area in the first section (6.1. Have you ever been to Florida) centers around leisure time and activities. English … Continue reading 5 reasons
This activity gets your students engaged in building collective stories around focal vocabulary from a reading passage. I will be using this text, which presents itself rather well for this type of activity as an example. Out and About level 1, Cambridge University Press. Free sample from publisher here. The students are asked to read and listen to the lyrics. The highlighted words are in … Continue reading the dream
Delexical verbs are verbs that need nouns to take true meaning. Verbs like run, study or know can carry meaning on their own… He runs very fast. It’s time to study. – Hurry up! It’s late. – I know. … or they can accompany a noun or noun phrase. to run a race to study a lesson to know the answer In most cases verbs … Continue reading delexical verbs 1
