Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (17 page)

freezer

microwave

dishwasher

kettle

cooker

toaster

fridge

food processor

Filling an information gap

Use activities in which students talk to each other in order to access information. The idea is to give them different information about the same topic.

Instead of just looking at the other person’s worksheet, they have to ask for what they need to know.

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Have students living in the UK practise saying ‘What’s the weather like in . . . ?’

along with weather words and place names, and having given each pair the following worksheets. (The pronunciation of place names is tricky so I regularly find an excuse to slip the ones they know into a lesson.)

Complete your weather report by asking your partner, ‘What’s the weather like in . . .?’

Weather Report A

Aberdeen: warm and cloudy

Carlisle:

Dundee: hot all day

Edinburgh: rain in the morning

Glasgow:

Ipswich:

Kidderminster: cold and windy

Liverpool: foggy in the morning

Manchester:

Norwich:

Weather Report B

Aberdeen:

Carlisle: warm and sunny

Dundee:

Edinburgh:

Glasgow: mild and grey

Ipswich: rain in the afternoon

Kidderminster :

Liverpool:

Manchester: hot and dry

Norwich: foggy then bright

You can get some more ideas for speaking activities in Chapter 13.

Role playing from a script

If you use a course book in class, it probably has the tape script for recorded dialogues at the back. The way students use intonation when reading out a dialogue is a strong indicator of their comprehension.

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Practising in groups

You can use larger groups of students or the whole class again for the Practice stage. Sometimes it’s fun to have a competitive element or just the camaraderie of working side by side.

Here are a couple of ideas:

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Using a blindfold:
One student in a group covers her eyes and then has to listen to the directions of her classmates in order to find a particular location of an object.

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Running dictations:
Organise two teams and two copies of a written text full of the target language for the lesson. You place the texts at one end of the room while the students remain at the other end. Each team has a blank sheet of paper and a pen. One by one, students come up and look at the text. They each memorise a chunk of the text, as much as they can manage, and reproduce it on the blank sheet. By the end of the activity the teams should have their own handwritten versions of the text. They practise accuracy and remembering chunks of language.

Moving to the Production Stage

In this third stage of the lesson, called Production or Freer Practice, the focus is on fluency. Students have a chance to experiment a bit and add the new language to everything else they know by, for example, having extended discussions, describing things in detail and telling stories. The aim is to set the students a task that gets them speaking, or writing, in their own words but that’s a suitable context for including the target language. Having concentrated on being accurate in the Practice stage, students can now try to sound natural when they incorporate the new language.

The Production stage tests the students subtly. They should be able to show off what they can do without you holding their hands or guiding them.

A Production activity involves speaking or writing primarily and encourages creativity.

Writing and speaking

Writing activities are usually solitary affairs. It’s pretty straight forward to set students an essay task, for example, and ask them to include particular words or phrases. If you do this, you should have some involvement in planning the written piece with the students so that they have sufficient structure. Use the 94
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board to show what kind of information or expressions can be used to go in each paragraph before they start writing by themselves. See Chapter 11 for tips on organising writing lessons.

In the next section I talk about ways to engage students in writing and presenting.

Miming a story

A fun way to set a writing activity is by miming it. Students love to watch you doing all the actions while they make notes and later write the entire story in the tense(s) you set for them. Of course, you need to make it an amusing story full of actions and without too many characters.

Making speeches and presentations

An example of an individual freer practice activity for speaking is to have students do a speech or presentation. This is particularly applicable for business English students who may need to do similar activities at work.

However, if there’s an election running, students can try delivering a mani-festo speech.

Students need to do this kind of activity from time to time because it allows stronger ones to show off without compromising for the sake of their classmates.

It also reveals students’ true speaking levels without the support of a group.

Role-playing in pairs

Role-playing is an effective way of speaking freely in pairs. In the Practice stage the students can just act out a role-play from a script. However, in Production you can get them writing the script themselves and then perhaps performing for the rest of the class.

What’s the question?

An exercise in using creative language is to give students just the answers to an interview and asking them to come up with the most interesting questions they can think of to match.

Write a question in the Past Simple to match each answer.

Answer: Vanilla ice cream.

Question: What did you want for breakfast when you were a child?

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Interviews

Very often students interview each other on particular topics. So in a lesson on vocabulary for clothing try setting tasks like this:

Ask your partner about the newest item in her wardrobe. Find out why, where and when she bought it. Ask her whether it matches anything else.

Getting dramatic in groups

You can have great fun with freer group activities.

Doing drama and improvisation

I’ve met many a trained actor working in TEFL as a day job so it’s no wonder that drama has established itself as a Production activity. Drama has real advantages in the language classroom:

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You repeat the same dialogue many times. This is very reassuring for students as they get better each time and this helps them build up their confidence.

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The context for the language is very strong because a story is involved.

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You can record and play back the piece for analysis and self correction if you have the equipment.

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Drama tends to teach language and culture together.

A short extract lasting five or six minutes is sufficient and it’s interesting for the students if you can show a film clip of the same scene afterwards.

In real life, language is generally spontaneous so you can mimic this by using improvisation.

Give students a card with a secret role on it. Perhaps it’s a hospital situation and each person has a complaint that influences what they say. Or maybe it’s a quirky dinner party with a string of guests who need to get their own secret words into the conversation. The students can all work out what the others are up to.

Retelling the story

Paraphrasing, summarising and even embellishing are everyday skills, so asking students to tell each other about something they’ve read, watched or experienced is a valuable activity. For example, have partners read separate 96
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texts, then tell each other about what they read and add any other information they know about the topic.

Integrating different skills into one activity allows for the students’ different learning styles and adds variety.

Fostering discussions and debates

Sometimes debates kick off spontaneously and that’s great. It’s exactly what you want to use language for and you shouldn’t feel that your lesson plan is compromised if you occasionally go off the beaten track.

If you want to orchestrate a discussion or debate yourself, you need to teach all the appropriate vocabulary (or at least give students access to a glossary if there’s too much or some is less relevant) and occasionally add fuel to the fire.

Giving Instructions

One of the keys to a successful activity in the classroom is the way you give instructions to set up the task. It may seem simple to say ‘Talk about X in pairs!’ but there’s a little more to it than that.

Consider these presentation tips:

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Speak well:
Talk slowly even if the students are at a higher level. It encourages them to pay attention. Be clear! Don’t mutter or ramble. Use short sentences and imperatives (commands). Grade what you say so it’s at the right level.

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Use visuals:
Use pictures and diagrams to show what you want the students to do. Give examples of what you want. Use lots of gestures.

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Plan your instructions:
Write the instructions for the exercises into your lesson plan. This helps you present them clearly and succinctly.

Don’t start giving instructions until everyone’s listening and be sure to allot enough time for the instructions – give them out step by step and not all at once. Very often students get confused when you tell them too much. Be sure to repeat the instructions and write them on the board, giving students time to write them down if necessary.

Ask open questions to see if the students understand the instructions. You can even get them to repeat the instructions back to you.

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Putting Students into Pairs and Groups

When it comes to organising your students for pair and group work, avoid simply telling them to pair up themselves. It’s your responsibility to say who works with whom and you ought to have a strategy for doing so.

Why? First, you’re likely to have mixed abilities in the class and you definitely don’t want two weak students working together. On the other hand, if you have two very strong students it may be motivating for them to be put together sometimes so that they can express themselves to their full potential. Unfortunately you sometimes have an annoying class member too (the joker perhaps) and it would be unfair for the same student to be stuck with that person in every activity. Share the load.

If you can, change the seating order in your classroom regularly. Ask the class to sit in alphabetical order, in order of their front door numbers in their addresses or according to their dates of birth. Use anything that moves them around.

For pairs, use your left hand to point to the first student (an open hand is friendlier than a single finger) and then the right hand for the second student.

Show that they’re now a pair by bringing your palms together.

Of course, you can just say ‘you’re A and you’re B’ if the students understand but you can also inject a bit of fun by using other vocabulary. You’ll get a smile with: ‘You’re an apple and you’re a banana!

When you’re working with groups, it‘s great to switch them around after a time so they can pool ideas. First you label each student A, B, C, or D and put them together in a group of four. After they’ve had time to generate ideas you can now group all the As, all the Bs and so on.

Encourage students to move their chairs so that they face each other if possible. Communication involves body language too.

Trying Out Practice and

Production Activities

Practice and Production activities come in many different forms but they should be interesting, varied and challenging according to the level of the 98
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students. Here are some examples of activities that carry the same theme throughout each of the three stages of the lesson.

Writing a blurb

The
blurb
is the text at the back of a book or film that tells you why you should buy it. It usually contains a synopsis of the plot and some information about the cast or author. Over the years I’ve noticed that very often the language used is quite sophisticated even when the entertainment is aimed at children.

So rewriting an existing blurb and creating new ones are great ways of exercising language skills with students who are intermediate level and above.

After an initial Presentation stage focusing on vocabulary for describing films, for example, students can tell each other specific details about a recent film they’ve seen – plot, stars, genre, format and so on.

Next introduce the film(s) using the title and pictures from the cover. You can use different films for different groups or just one for the whole class. The students can use this initial information to make predictions about the film.

For this you may decide to use a less well-known movie so that the students really have to discover the information.

Now you can distribute the blurb(s) for students to examine.

Pair students and ask them to skim the blurb for particular details about the new film(s).

Next the students should analyse the language content of the blurb and, using dictionaries and/or a glossary, ask students, in pairs, to simplify the blurb using synonyms for the tricky words.

Form the students into new groups based on a film they’ve all seen.

Together they must now pool their knowledge to come up with a blurb for that film.

Spin off activities from this include listening to, acting out or narrating clips of the film.