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
For today’s activity I would like to acknowledge the work of Gianfranco Conti on devising ways of providing drilling and repetition in various ways through games, dictations and translation exercises and, most notably, Richard Cauldwell’s groundbreaking work on phonology and on trying to make the incomprehensible comprehensible. Richard Cauldwell has done outstanding work on sound decoding and he is particularly well known in ELT for … Continue reading jungle speech and sentence stealer game
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
Pelmanism: a card game in which matching pairs must be selected from memory from cards laid face down. Here is my tweaked version of it. Give your students some scrap paper and ask them to cut out cards. On each card they must write down a word or an expression that they have seen in class that is both challenging and interesting to know and … Continue reading pelmanism (with a twist)
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)
