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
When engaging our students in speaking activities we can move from general to specific or from specific to general. Ideally, the latter is a much more productive strategy. For instance, we can ask the students: What’s your favourite food? (from general to specific) …or… Have a look at these photos (an orange, a hamburger, a chili pepper, an ice cream). Tell any five people in … Continue reading speaking: from specific to general
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
Today I want to share one of my favourite vocabulary consolidation leading to speaking practice routines because of basically three primary reasons: firstly, it really is a zero-preparation activity. Secondly, it is dead simple to perform. Thirdly, the pay-offs are fantastic, as it gets the students on task right away and addresses a key element in language teaching, which is getting learners to do things … Continue reading give me three reasons
I am sure you are familiar with the card game Taboo. You may have the game at home or you may have even brought it to your classroom for the students to play. As we all know, the goal in a game of Taboo is to get your teammates to guess the word you are describing, but there is a list of taboo words you … Continue reading taboo cards
This second post on delexical verbs observes use of the students’ mother tongue in monolingual classes, as it is very much the case in most teaching situations. As Scott Thornbury puts wisely in his article T is for Translation, “with some structures (such as the future perfect) translation could be the most economical way of presenting them”. The students will be translating sentences into their … Continue reading delexical verbs 2
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
