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
We have reached the end of the school year in many countries, including mine, and I shall be taking a break from blogging and sharing brand new content until September. That doesn’t mean that I won´t be writing. Far from that, in the next couple of months I will be busy enough developing ideas that have been sitting on the back burner for a while … Continue reading summer series: three writing activities
I am not quite sure how I stumbled upon this site but it was a pleasant encounter. The site also provides many ideas to use the content in creative out of the box ways based on Edward de Bono’s book How to Have Creative Ideas. Even though it isn’t an ESL site as such, we can of course use it to our teaching advantage. Click … Continue reading random word generator
In the book Teaching Lexically, Hugh Dellar and Andrew Walkey refer to horizontal and vertical development exercises and the pay-offs they bring. By developping a sentence horizontally we are adding something that the writer or speaker might say next. By developping a sentence vertically we are adding something that someone else might say next. I’m quoting from their excellent book now. “These kinds of exercises … Continue reading vertical and horizontal development
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
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
This is the third and last post on the series of phrasal verbs. In this final activity the focus is on writing. The students will be consolidating the newly acquired vocabulary through writing short news stories. This activity can take place in the classroom but if you have already done any of the suggested classroom activities under the headings phrasal verbs 1, phrasal verbs 2, … Continue reading phrasal verbs 3
