I presented this workshop at the TWIST 2016 conference in Warsaw, and I’ve just realised I never put it on my blog. Better late than never!
About my presentation
Every staffroom I’ve been into has a huge pile of scrap paper in it somewhere. We’re responsible for the death of a lot of trees! Don’t let those deaths be in vain: try these activities to energise your classes, diminish the pile and assuage your guilt.
The ‘my’ is in inverted commas, because they’re probably adapted from activities I’ve learnt from other people. If you think that person was you, please do comment!
Do you like…?
Good for: getting to know you, introducing functional language, extending conversations
Give each student a piece of scrap paper.
They write three things they like, e.g. chocolate, taking photos, learning languages.
When they have finished, they screw up the paper and throw it towards a spot you indicate.
Elicit and drill the phrases: Do you like…? What about…? And…? along with the answers: Of course, who wouldn’t? and Sorry, no.
Demonstrate the activity. Take one piece of paper from the pile, open it, and ask a student the first question, e.g. Do you like chocolate? The student should choose one of the two answers. If they say Of course, who wouldn’t? ask the next question. If they say Sorry, no move on to another student and restart the process. Stop once you’ve demonstrated with two or three people (and hope you don’t get it right first time!)
Students take one piece of paper each, exchanging it if they have their own. They mingle and find the person who’s paper they have, writing their name on the paper. Once they have both found their person and been found, they can sit down.
As a follow-up, students work in pairs, telling their partner who they found out about (preferably without looking at the paper).
Russian roulette
Good for: revising vocabulary, testing what students already know, last-minute cover lessons
Choose a category, e.g. food.
The teacher writes down (in secret) a word from this category on a piece of scrap paper, e.g. apple.
While doing this, students work in small groups to brainstorm as many words as they can in this category, writing them on scrap paper, and try to guess which word the teacher has.
Nominate one student from one group to say a word. If it’s the same as your secret word, they lose a point. If it’s different, they gain a point.
Continue with other groups. If they repeat a word or can’t think of one, they also lose a point.
Good for: revision of vocabulary sets or prepositions, introducing a topic, speaking practice, laughter!
Give each student a piece of A4 scrap paper. Make sure they have something to lean on.
Students put the paper on their head. They can’t look at it.
Dictate a scene to the students. To make it more challenging, move around the picture. For example: My living room is large and rectangular. In the bottom right corner if you look at it from above there is a door to the hall. The door to the balcony is in the top left corner. Next to the balcony door there are two windows, also on the left-hand wall. In front of the window there is an armchair. Facing the window is a fireplace. In front of the fireplace is a table with four chairs. Under the window and next to the armchair there is a small square coffee table, with another armchair on the other side of it. The bottom wall, near the door to the hall, has a sofa next to it. [Other possible topics: a monster/robot, a Christmas scene, a desert island…]
Students compare their pictures and try to remember the teacher’s description.
Error correction running dictation
Throughout the lesson, collect some of the mistakes the students have made. Write each one on a piece of scrap paper with enough context to make it easy to work out what the correct sentence should be. If you want to, include some examples of good language.
Stick the paper to the walls/board on one side of your classroom. Arrange the students on the other side, so the room looks something like this:
3. When you say go, the running student goes to one of the errors, remembers the sentence, runs back and dictates it to their partner as is. Once they have done this for half of the errors (e.g. four out of eight), they switch roles. When they have finished all of them, they work together to correct the errors.
4. When finished, allocate one error per pair. They should write the correction on the paper they dictated from. After you’ve briefly checked them, pairs walk around to confirm they were right.
This is a super quick activity I suggested to a teacher last week which I haven’t tried out, so please do let me know if it works! I also haven’t created an example because I’m feeling lazy today, so I hope it makes sense; let me know if you need one to help you understand how to set up the activity.
We were talking about how to practise reported speech patterns in a fun way when you can’t play Chinese whispers/telephone, which I think would be pretty hard to transfer online (I’m happy to be corrected if you’ve made this work somehow).
It goes like this:
Set up a Jamboard with a 5 or 6 stickies of direct speech, all in the same colour. This could be before the lesson (easier to ensure all patterns you want to include are covered), during the lesson (using real things students have said so potentially more motivating) or in a follow-up lesson (using real things from a previous lesson and ensuring all patterns are covered – win-win!). Duplicate the frame so that different pairs/groups can work on the same set of sentences simultaneously. Put a different number in the corner of each frame for ease of reference.
In the lesson, demonstrate the activity on frame 1 (your frame!) Choose one of the direct speech quotes. Ask students to help you change it to reported speech – type this version onto a sticky, choose a different colour to the original speech, and move it on top of the direct speech. It’s important that students can’t see the direct speech any more once they’ve written their original version.
Share the link, telling students which frame they should work on. With their partner(s), they write reported speech versions of all of the quotes, hiding the direct speech with their new versions.
To extend the activity/For fast finishers, add an extra stage (or two or three) where students look at the reported speech and try to reproduce the direct speech. They can compare their version of the direct speech to the original version to see what problems they had with tense shifts etc. They can do this flip-flop for as long as you think it will be useful / to give slower finishers more time to complete the activity.
I think the most important thing to point out in any activity incorporating reported speech is that while there are some common patterns, it’s not an exact science. There may be multiple possible versions of the reported speech depending on what the imagined speaker is trying to emphasise when they reproduce the speech.
I first experimented with this activity when trying to make a very dull induction week session about contracts and school requirements a tiny bit more interesting. I’ve recently tried it as a way of practising quantifiers with my students. In both cases it went down really well, taking about 30-60 minutes from start to finish.
A bit of origami
You can prepare the paper before the session, or you can give students the instructions below to prepare their own.
Take a piece of A4 paper (scrap paper is fine).
Hold it landscape.
Fold it in half, joining together the two short edges.
Unfold it.
Fold one half to the middle, and repeat.
The final result should look something like this:
Creating the questions
Ask students to fold the paper so that they can see the A5 half only (column 1 in the diagram above).
Give them a topic/task and a time limit to write as many questions as they can.
For teachers in induction week, each group had a section of the contract appendix and a couple of other short admin documents.
For students practising quantifiers, they could write questions on any topic they wanted to based on information they found on their phones, with two caveats: it had to be a gapfill, with the gap being a quantifier we’d just studied, and the question had to be something they thought other students could answer.
After each question, they should draw a line across all five columns/the whole A4 page.
They should also make a note of their answers on another piece of paper.
Completing the quiz
Students from group A pass their quiz to group B, and so on. B answer the questions in the right-hand column, furthest away from the questions (5 in the diagram above) – this is very important! Make sure that you check by asking a question when giving instructions and by monitoring closely (there’s always one group who write in the wrong place!)
When B have answered all of the questions, they fold their answers underneath and pass the paper to group C, with only columns 1-4 visible. C write their answers in column 4, then fold it under again. Group D write in column 3, and E in column 2.
Group A then get the quiz back and check the answers to find the winner for their quiz. The teacher then tells the class who won each quiz, and an overall winner is decided based on which team won the most quizzes. Be prepared for arguments! It’s better to base it on overall winners for each quiz than on the total number of questions answered correctly across all the quizzes, as different groups will probably have written different length quizzes.
My students
If you only have a small class, like I did, group B can write in column 5 and group C write in column 3, leaving space for their answers to be marked in columns 4 and 2.
Here are two completed examples from my mostly teenage students. I was particularly impressed by the not-quite-Monty-Python references. Some of the questions were quite controversial as multiple answers were possible, and they didn’t always understand the vocabulary used by other groups. This prompted debate afterwards, but they argued in English and learnt some extra words, so it was OK in the end! You can decide how much you want to vet the questions, but I think it’s more fun if the students are in charge.
Tuesday evening. 7:15pm. I walk out of the cover lesson I’ve just completed, working with a lovely group of pre-intermediate teens. Running through my head: right, I need to take the key downstairs, pick up my stuff, and pop into the supermarket on the way home. Followed almost immediately by: [Four-letter word], I forgot to find cover for the last lesson! That’s my evening out the window! Cue 10 minutes of running around trying to work out where to get some food from to get me through the rest of the evening (thanks Shannon and Emma!), telling people how stupid I am, and canvassing for ideas for an unplanned cover lesson with low elementary adults I haven’t met before.
As (nearly) always with these things, the lesson itself was absolutely fine. Two students came, one of whom had forgotten to do his homework. The first 45 minutes were spent working on pronunciation of comparatives from the homework, and with them testing each other, plus practice of very large numbers. For the other half of the lesson, I gave them the choice of unplanned functional language (the next spread in the book), unplanned superlatives (the spread after), or revision (which they’d also had, along with a test, in the previous lesson). They went for revision, and this is the activity which I came up with, based loosely on collaborative profiles, an idea suggested by my colleague Sam just before the lesson (thanks!) I joined in to, so see if you can work out which drawings were mine!
Revision squares
Fold A4 paper into 6 squares (or 8 if you have more language points).
In the first box, each person draws a person.
(Optional) In the second box, the next person asks three questions about the person. (This didn’t work very well, as I hadn’t thought it through, and I decided I wanted different people’s drawings on each paper, not the same person every time in our group of three.)
In the second box, the next person answers the questions about the person/writes a basic profile describing them.
Pass the paper on (do this after each stage to get a truly collaborative piece of work). Under the person, draw where they live.
Write about where they live.
Draw two or three hobbies, plus one thing they can’t do.
Write about them.
Draw three things they do every morning.
Guess what…write about them!
Draw their last holiday.
Write about it.
As the paper was passed on, I encouraged the students to read what others had written and link their texts if they wanted to. I also corrected texts as part of my turn, because it was obviously a bit easier for me to write! The students asked me questions about what they were writing, and about my corrections. There was also negotiation in English as we tried to work out what other people had drawn. Obviously with only two students, it wasn’t that hard, so you might have to think about how/if you want to correct/join in if you’re using the activity with a bigger group. To round it off, we all read all three stories quickly and decided which person we would like to be friends with and why.
In about 30 minutes, these elementary students produced about 100 words of English, and practised:
question forms
interpreting and replying to basic questions
There is/are
rooms and furniture
like + -ing
can/can’t
hobbies
daily routine
past simple
holiday vocabulary
prepositional phrases of various kinds (time, place, manner)
vocabulary they wanted to use, based on their drawings
We had an empty box as we ran out of time, but I think I probably would have done something with future plans, like plans for the next weekend, though I don’t think they’d got to that in their book. Alternatively, drawing their family, their job, their favourite clothes…lots of options!
I’m pretty sure it could be adapted for a wide range of other language. I’d be interested to hear what you decide to do with it.
I put together this selection of memorisation activities for a CELTA course at LangLTC in Warsaw and thought it would be a good idea to share the activities here too. The activities can be used:
after error correction
to help students fix bits of new language in their heads before they need to produce it at a later stage in the lesson
to exploit decontextualised sentences, for example from a gapfill
to improve students’ confidence with bits of language
as learner training – once they’ve learnt them, a lot of the activities are things they can try themselves or with fellow students, without needing a teacher to set them up
They are taken from various wonderful people I’ve worked with in the past, plus a couple of my own ideas. If you think there are any that should be credited differently, please let me know. It would also be great if you could add your own ideas for activities in the comments. Enjoy!
Draw your sentence
Aims: To exploit students’ creativity. To personalise language.
Use this after students do a controlled practice exercise or study a new set of vocabulary.
Students fold a piece of A4 paper into 8 boxes and put small numbers in the corner, like so:
1
2
1
2
3
4
3
4
On the left half of the paper only (which should have 4 boxes), they illustrate four of the sentences/words in any way they choose, one per box. They shouldn’t write the sentence/word.
Everyone puts the original sentences/words away.
Give them the paper from another group. On the right-hand side of the paper, they should write the corresponding sentence/word.
The original group corrects their answers and gives them feedback.
Mini books
A more high-tech version of ‘draw your sentence’, via Luke Raymond. Use this video to help you make your book:
Page 1 (the front cover) shows the target word/sentence. Each student should have a different item.
The book is passed to student B who draws a picture on page 2 to represent the target language.
Student C looks at the picture and writes the word/sentence they think it is on page 3, without looking back to page 1. They fold the book so page 3 now becomes the front cover.
The process is repeated until the book is finished.
Much hilarity ensues as the students see the way the language has been illustrated and how it has changed throughout the book.
Students love the ‘Chinese whispers/telephone’ nature of this game 🙂
What do you mean you didn’t read the sentences?
Via Olga Stolbova
(I now call this ‘evil memorisation’!)
Aims: To encourage students to notice context. To make them aware of gaps in their language.
Use this after students do a gapfill exercise.
Check the answers by writing them on the board (just the answers, not the complete sentence).
Students put away the original exercise.
They look at the answers on the board and have to recreate the original sentences. Expect protests! 🙂 Encourage them to write whatever they can remember, even if it’s just isolated words or phrases.
If they’re really struggling/When you start feeling sympathetic, give them one minute to look at the exercise without writing anything, then close their books again and continue to work on reproducing the sentences.
Students compare their recreated sentences to the originals. What were the differences?
Optional extra evilness: put away the sentences you’ve just rewritten. Now say them all to your partner./Write them all again. You can also do this at the end of the lesson when they’ve done other things in between.
If students are depressed that they can’t remember everything, tell them you don’t expect this. I normally say that I want them to remember about 80% of the sentences immediately (with some effort), and about 50% by the end of the lesson, once we’ve done a few other things and they’ve had time to forget. It can be useful to show them the forgetting curve too.
Vocabulary revision game
Via Anette Igel
Aim: To revise vocabulary covered in previous lessons.
Give each group a stack of small pieces of scrap paper (about 1/8 of A4 in size).
They should write the English word/phrase on one side, and put either the translation, definition or example sentence on the other side. The game can also be played with word/vocabulary cards if this is something you use with your students.
To create counters, rip one piece of small scrap into coin sized pieces. They write a letter or draw a symbol on each to indicate which is theirs. Alternatively, they can use any small item they can find (e.g. a paperclip, pen lid, etc).
The final thing they need to prepare the game is either a coin, or a scrap paper ‘coin’, which can be made by folding another small piece up into a tight square, then writing ‘heads’ on one side and ‘tails’ on the other.
The words should be arranged in a circle to create a game track. All of the counters should be placed on the same word to start.
One player flips the coin. Heads = 2, tails = 1. To help them remember which is which, H has two legs, T has one leg. They move 1 or 2 spaces around the circle. When they land, they can do one of two things:
If the word/phrase is face up, say the translation, definition or example sentence.
If the translation/definition/example sentence is face up, say the word/phrase.
In either case, if they are correct, they turn the card over and stay there. If they are wrong, they turn the card over and go back to where they started the turn.
The winner is the person who has moved furthest around the circle at the end of a specified time.
Back translation/Reverse translation
Aims: To help students notice differences between L1 and L2. To help them notice gaps in their language.
Select one sentence per pair or ask students to choose one. Sentences could be from controlled practice exercises, tapescripts, reading, sentences produced by students…
Each pair translates their sentences from English into L1. For multilingual groups, they work alone.
Either: give the sentence to another pair immediately (if they share a language) OR take sentences away and return them to the same person/pair in the following lesson.
Students translate the L1 sentence back into English.
They then compare their English version to the original, and notice any differences. The teacher’s job is to point out whether the students’ English version is still acceptable, and to help them understand any mistakes or differences in meaning. Though it obviously helps, you don’t need to speak L1 to do this activity.
This could also be set up as a mingle activity. Student A says their L1 sentence, student B says it in English, then student B says their L1 sentence and A says it in English. If they get it wrong, the ‘L1’ student should say ‘No, try again.’ until they get it right. My students seem to get a lot out of this, especially with language that differs structurally from Polish, like verb + gerund/infinitive.
Drill, drill, drill
Aims: To improve student confidence before speaking. To help students internalise the language.
There are hundreds of ways to drill new language.
Point at words/flashcards, moving rapidly between them and returning to problem words often.
Whisper, shout, go slow, speed up, say it like an old lady/Arnold Schwarzenegger, be happy/excited/sad.
Boys and girls, call and response (e.g. half say question, half answer).
What’s missing? Students close eyes/turn around. You remove one or more flashcards/words.
Disappearing text (good for dialogues): start with the whole dialogue on the board. Gradually remove parts of it, either a line at a time or leaving behind key words, with students repeating it multiple times.
Key word drills (good for functional language): draw a table with numbered cells. Put one word from each sentence in each cell e.g. for the phrases How about going to the cinema?What about seeing a film? Let’s watch a film. you could have:
1. How 2. What 3. Let
They say the phrase from memory. They can test each other by saying the number and their partner saying the sentence. Removing the words (but not the numbers!) increases the level of challenge. Follow up: can you remember all the phrases without looking?
Mingle: students have one picture/word each. They mingle, show their paper to their partner who has to say the correct word/phrase. To add challenge, they swap after each turn.
Circle drill: pass a flashcard around the circle. Each person says it in turn. You can also turn it into a dialogue e.g. Receiving student: What’s the weather like today? Passing student: It’s sunny. To add challenge, time the class to see how long it takes to pass around the whole circle, then repeat faster.
Some important things to remember are:
Make sure students know the meaning of the language before the drill.
Choral > group > individual. Don’t put students on the spot too early.
Model language naturally: you need to sound like a stuck record. It’s easy to overstress when correcting.
Keep the pace up. Add variety wherever possible. For example, can they drill it in pairs and listen to each other?
Mini challenges
Many of these can be done as pairwork after a teacher demonstration. Some are useful for fast finishers too.
Say all of the new vocabulary/sentences from the exercise as fast as you can to your partner. You can do this before drilling as a test, so that you only drill language students struggle with.
Can you remember the word/sentence before X on the list? If students really struggle, give them 1 minute to look and remember before doing the exercise.
How many of the words from the page can you write alone in two minutes? Compare with a partner. This can be at the end of a lesson after lots of work with the language, or at the start of the next class.
Mistake sentences: read the sentence with a mistake and students correct it. Mistakes could be false friends, articles, tenses (especially ones where connected speech confuses)…
Pause sentences: read a sentence but pause in the middle of the collocation. Do students know what comes next? Good for improving the ability to predict upcoming language when listening.
Quizlet
Quizlet is an easy-to-use website which allows you to create lots of activities for the price of one – add some vocabulary and you immediately have about 6 games, plus the ability to print flashcards for lots more. For a full guide to how to use Quizlet and create your own content on there, plus links to level-specific groups, see http://independentenglish.wordpress.com/quizlet – it’s a bit out-of-date as the site has changed it’s layout, but most of what’s on there still holds. If you have at least 6 devices (phones, tablets etc) in your classroom, you can also play Quizlet Live – my students absolutely love it!
Quizlet Live with a room of 40+ teachers in Kazakhstan
A very simple activity, which works very well as a filler, as revision, or as the prompt for a whole lesson. All you need is a window with something going on outside.
The view from our classroom at IH Sevastopol
Ask the students to look out of the window and tell each other/you what they can see. With my elementary students I encouraged them to use a few structures they’d recently studied:
There is/are…
Present continuous
NOT: I can see… I can see… I can see… (which is what they started with!)
Feed in any vocabulary and structures that they might need, and make a note of them on the board. The students should focus on speaking as much as possible for now, rather than note-taking. Give them time and space to think of ideas – it took my students time to warm up, but then they came up with lots of ideas.
When they’ve run out of steam (after about ten minutes for my group of four elementary students), let the students make notes based on what you put on the board, as well as ask more questions about language.
I repeated the activity a week later, and the students managed to remember about half of the new vocabulary they’d used the first time, as well as adding adjectives and more description without any prompting from me at all. They had resorted to ‘I can see…’ again, but after a reminder from me started to use ‘There is/are…’ and present continuous again.
I’ve read many times about this kind of activity, but this is the first time I’d used it, and it definitely won’t be the last!
[I wrote this post nearly a year ago, but never pressed publish. Better late than never!]
This is a very simple two- or three-stage activity I’ve successfully used with small classes of young learners and teens to revise both grammar and vocabulary. They love drawing on the board!
Stage one: drawing
Drawing the past simple
Divide the board into a space for each student/team.
Say a word (e.g. car, trousers) or a sentence featuring the grammar structure you want to practise (e.g. I went to the beach. I played with my brother.)
Ask the students to draw a relevant picture. They shouldn’t worry about their artistic skills, just draw anything that they feel represents the language.
Repeat, ensuring they don’t clean the board in between.
When they have about 10 pictures, stop! 🙂
Stage two: hitting
Before giving students the flyswatters, I normally give them two rules:
If you hit anyone with it, we stop.
They’re very cheap. If you hit the board too hard, it’ll break and we’ll have to stop. (This happened once!)
Give the students flyswatters.
Call out one of the words/sentences.
The students hit the relevant picture.
Start with them hitting their own pictures, then move them around – this can be quite challenging if other students have interpreted the language in a more abstract way!
You can also ask one of the students to be the teacher. With small groups, you replace them as the player.
Stage three: cleaning (optional)
Repeat stage two, but this time, instead of flyswatters, give the students board rubbers. They clean the relevant picture each time you say the language.
When there are only two pictures left, they have to tell you the words/sentences.
Alternatives
You can also use paper rolled into a tube instead of flyswatters. Stage two works well with flashcards too.
Adults would also enjoy this game.
With larger groups it could be done in teams or on paper.
Simple, minimal preparation, and lots of fun! Enjoy!
I cancel about one lesson in four, normally the one on a Saturday. I’ve recently moved it to a Thursday in the hope that I’ll be more likely to have time then. I have two 90-minute lessons a week, the other being on Monday. We’ve never managed to make up a missed lesson, and since I pay on a lesson-by-lesson basis, this must create quite a lot of financial uncertainty, which I feel bad about.
At times, I hijack the lesson and tell my teacher exactly what activities I want to do. The last example of this was after she used a bilingual Quizlet set to introduce clothes words to me at the end of our Monday lesson. In a very rare spurt of motivation, I had twenty minutes on Wednesday night, and ten minutes on Thursday morning during which I managed to play with the words and kind of learn about 70% of them. I started the lesson by drawing pictures of clothes all over the board and writing the words next to them.
This took about 20 minutes. I then asked my teacher to define words for me, which meant she had to teach me verbs like ‘wear’, ‘get dressed’ and ‘put on’, and prepositional phrases like ‘on your head’, ‘on your feet’. She then turned the tables and made me define words for her. This whole process took 90 minutes, and meant we had no time to do anything she had prepared. I wrote notes throughout, and listened to and spoke more Russian than I had in any other lesson throughout the year. She told me: “You’re ready for it now.”
I constantly make demands about what I want from my lessons. My main demand is to have my lessons entirely in Russian (or as entirely as possible for a beginner/elementary student), but this is difficult because of the above statement/belief, that you have to have a certain amount of language to be ‘ready’ to speak/listen to more. This is not a choice I have in the real world, where I have to deal with whatever is thrown at me, and the person who’s speaking to me often doesn’t know how to change their language to help me understand.
We’ve also got into the habit of speaking English in class. In an average 90-minute lesson my teacher probably speaks about 10 sentences of spontaneous Russian which are not read from a piece of paper and/or accompanied by an English translation. I speak less than this, and occasionally read new vocabulary/sentences from the page, although this is not consistent – I probably only say about 50% of the new language that is introduced to me during any one class. Both of us have spoken a bit more Russian in the last couple of lessons because I’ve made more of an effort, but it hasn’t lasted long. The rest of the lesson is in English, including chats and all grammar explanations. I rarely have to produce any Russian that isn’t part of a drill based on an exercise from a worksheet. I’m trying to speak a bit more Russian in class now, but I don’t have a lot of the classroom language I need unless I ask for it to be translated, because I’ve never heard it or been made to use it.
Most of the published materials my teacher uses are taken from a text-only coursebook, with lists of vocabulary and dialogues, or a slightly more ‘designed’ coursebook with some pictures and tables. Both of them are through the medium of English. I have no idea how you find published materials to learn Russian if you don’t already speak English (this is true of a lot of none-EFL materials). We have occasionally used a website with some very entertaining short videos telling the story of John, a Canadian visiting Russia, which is available in various languages. The videos are very short – less than a minute each – and accompanied by subtitles in Russian or other languages if you want to read them.
We have never listened to any ‘real’ Russian in class, like music or videos, or any audio designed for the classroom. All of my listening practice comes from life outside the classroom, very rarely with support from an English-speaker to help me, but English speakers normally do the work if they’re there, rather than me! That means that most of the time I’m trying to piece things together myself, using what skills I’ve picked up from learning other languages, and the pre-intermediate Czech that I know. This has, of course, got easier as the year has progressed.
I demand context, trying to move away from isolated vocabulary. I constantly ask for the prepositions and cases that go with the verbs/nouns, even though I know I won’t remember them at the moment. I try to get as much new language in sentences as possible. Having said that, I find the Quizlet sets useful for building up sets of vocabulary in topics like the body or clothes. I’m trying to get exposure to as much language as possible while I have access to somebody who can mediate it for me. During a lesson which isn’t based on materials, we fill a notebook with random notes. There’s a lot of Russian here, but it’s almost all written – there’s very little speaking, very little controlled practice, and almost no free(r) practice at all, unless I instigate it. The bit of text you can see in the top-left corner of the page is the second half of twenty minutes worth of writing I did at home to force myself to produce an extended stretch of Russian.
In some classes, I give my teacher English sentence after sentence I’ve tried to say in Russian during that week, but didn’t know, ask her to translate them, then fail to learn them. This week we have a week off school and I’ve finally had time to dedicate to Russian. I’ve copied out the sentences onto cards (made from A4 pieces of paper cut into 16 rectangles, yellow because it’s a happy colour!), with pictures on the other side as prompts. There’s a huge backlog, and I have no idea how long it’ll take to actually learn them.
My teacher has a degree in teaching Russian. She is a native speaker of the language, who also speaks very good English and knows bits of other languages, so can occasionally tell me when grammar is similar to other languages I speak. She is a lovely person to put up with me. She puts a lot of time and effort into preparing lessons and materials. Here’s an example of a summary of tenses she made:
She’s also started making Quizlet sets for me after I showed her the site and she realised that it motivated me! I copy the sets she’s made and get rid of the English if I can, trying to make things Russian only. When I got ill and was given a special diet, she translated the sheet I was given by the doctor and made me a list of all of the food in Russian and English, with pictures for things I might not know. When I found out just before a lesson that my grandad had been taken into hospital, she took me for a walk in the park and we chatted, then wouldn’t let me pay for the lesson.
The last lesson we had was at my flat, and she decided to try something different. We labelled everything in my kitchen that I didn’t know the names of already. I’d been meaning to do this for ages but hadn’t got round to it. We did this entirely in English, with me asking ‘How do you say…?’ in English. I was never forced to use Russian, and I forgot to try. I could have practised using the words in sentences and spelling them – although I can read Russian confidently now, I still have no idea how to say a lot of the letters. We could also have played a describing game again, but I didn’t think about that until I was writing this.
When I have time, normally in three- to four-hour blocks about every six weeks, I transfer the language in my class notebook to a vocabulary notebook, organised by topic. This is the first time I’ve tried this approach, and I mostly use it as a dictionary. Copying the words/phrases helps me to recognise them, but I haven’t really used the notebook to learn.
With pictures and colours where possible…
…with English where it’s not. (or when I run out of motivation)
With colour-coding to show grammar patterns
I also use index cards to write out grammar and some vocabulary sets, particularly those connected to time. I try to have as little English as possible on the cards, and use regular layout and colour-coding to help me reduce the need for English. If there is English, I often write it in tiny letters that are difficult to see – I want Russian to be the first thing I see when I look at the cards.
Verb conjugation, time and reflexives
Time index cards, showing colour-coding
I then blu-tack them all over my flat. (Blu-tack is the one thing that I always take with me when I move to a new place!)
Cards start on the cupboard I look at when I’m getting ready in the morning/doing my physio exercises
They graduate to the inside of my front door when I think I know them. (Loosely arranged by grammar point, e.g. verbs at the top, and with the really easy stuff at the bottom)
Surrounding them with postcards makes me more likely to look at them (maybe…)
This is what my desk looks like in the process:
Some conclusions
Both the teacher and the student(s) need to have a lot of willpower to conduct the lesson entirely in the target language.
The student also needs to be given the classroom language they need to be able to operate in the target language.
The teacher needs to be flexible, to respond to the language that the student needs, the time they have available, and the mood they are in.
The student needs to make an effort to study what has been learnt in class.
Language should be introduced in context, rather than as isolated items. It should be learnt as chunks to start with, then pulled apart for grammar later.
Seeing language once is not enough. Students need to manipulate it, play with it, say it, use it, in class to help them remember it.
The student needs exposure to real language in the classroom environment to prepare them for what they will encounter outside the classroom.
Some methodological terms which I can hear you shouting at me
March and April have beenprettybusy, both personally and professionally. They came not long after I’d finished Delta, and this week off has been a great opportunity to catch up and get a handle on a lot of things. Most of the things you can see in the photos in this post were written out in a one-day marathon study session. Three days later I had another whole day of study, which meant I finally finished copying everything out and caught up. This is something I want to avoid in the future!
I have therefore decided that in May I am going to try something (new) for thirty days and study Russian for 10 minutes every day. This could include any of the following activities:
Using my sentence cards, where I try to remember them/write them out
We checked the answers in class, and they were fine, but I wanted them to really notice the language. One student drew a picture for each idea in the text, numbering them from 1 to 10 to help her. (She was early and this was a way to help her before the other students arrived!) These are the final five pictures:
She’s a much better artist than me! By the time she had finished, the rest of the class had arrived. They used the pictures to reconstruct the text on the board. It’s a small group, so using the board enables them to easily change their mind about the text. Students could also use mini whiteboards, tablets/phones, or good old-fashioned pen and paper!
Once they were happy with their version of the text, they compared it to the original and asked me questions about differences they didn’t understand, particularly why ‘three-month-old’ had no ‘s’. They spoke a mix of English and Russian, and were engaged and motivated, arguing about whose memory of the text was better.
This is a very simple game which is perfect for revision, and requires almost no pre-class preparation. All you need is some small pieces of scrap paper, some kind of blutack to stick it to the table, dice for each group, and a counter for each student. The blutack is optional, but it does stop the paper from blowing away! You could use post-it notes instead, but sometimes they curl up making it easy to see the answers! It works best for revising grammar or vocabulary in closed questions.
Give a pile of pieces of paper to each pair/group of students. Ask them to go through the units of the book which you want them to revise. They should write questions for other students in the class, writing one question on each piece of paper, and write the answer on the back. They can create the questions themselves, or copy them directly from the book, along with any relevant instructions, like ‘Write the correct form of the verb.’ My students normally spend about 15-20 minutes doing this. Here are some examples from my intermediate group:
Once you have a pile of questions, shuffle them all up (easier if you have scrap paper than post-it notes at this point!), then divide them evenly between all of the groups in the class. Each group should lay out a track of questions to create a board game, so it looks something like this:
The groups then play the board game. When they roll, they should answer the question they land on. If they’re correct, they can stay there. If not, they have to go back to the question they were on at the start of the turn. The winner is the person who gets to the end first, or who is in the lead when they run out of time.
The board can even go up and down!
I got this idea from somebody at IH Brno, but unfortunately I can’t remember who. I use it almost every time I’m revising for a mid-year or end-of-year test, and it always prompts a lot of discussion. The group shown in these pictures even asked if we could keep playing it when I said the time was up!
I like it because as well as reminding the students of the grammar and vocabulary areas likely to appear in the test, it always prompts a lot of discussion and shows them which areas they still need to revise.
What were you doing?
What were you doing?
What were you doing
At 10 last night?
I was sitting on the sofa.
I was sitting on the sofa.
I was sitting on the sofa
At 10 last night.
What were you doing?
What were you doing?
What were you doing
At 10 last night?
I was watching the TV.
I was watching the TV.
I was watching the TV
At 10 last night.
What were you doing?
What were you doing?
What were you doing
At 10 last night?
I was listening to music.
I was listening to music.
I was listening to music
At 10 last night.
What were you doing?
What were you doing?
What were you doing
At 10 last night?
I was looking at the sea.
I was looking at the sea.
I was looking at the sea
At 10 last night.
What were you doing?
What were you doing?
What were you doing
At 10 last night?
I was on vkontakte.*
I was on vkontakte.
I was on vkontakte
At 10 last night.
What were you doing?
What were you doing?
What were you doing
At 10 last night?
I wasn’t doing anything.
I wasn’t doing anything.
I wasn’t doing anything
At 10 last night!
I made up this chant, inspired by Jane Harding da Rosa, to help my pre-intermediate students with the concept of past continuous to talk about ongoing events at a fixed point in the past. I had a few ideas for verses and they added more.
We also tried a variant where they asked:
What was she doing?**
What was she doing?
What was she doing
At 10 last night.
The verse was about a particular student, and the others had to choose a possible answer. For example:
She was listening to music.
She was listening to music.
She was listening to music
At 10 last night.
…to which the student who was being discussed had to respond with either:
Yes, I was. Yes, I was.
Yes, I was. You’re right.
OR
No, I wasn’t. No, I wasn’t.
No, I wasn’t. You’re wrong.
(followed by a verse of them saying what they really were doing)
Through the chant, the students had practice with the positive, negative, question, and short forms of the past continuous. It is also designed to help them with the rhythms of English, as they struggle with listening, especially with weak forms (something I identified using this post-listening reflection questionnaire from Mat Smith’s blog). They responded really well, and a week later were chanting it when they came into class. I tried it with my teens too, and they didn’t get it at all!
So, what were YOU doing at 10 last night?
*Vkontakte is a Russian equivalent of facebook, which is very popular among my students.
One of my advanced students asked if we could do a lesson about the differences between ‘would’, ‘should’ and ‘could’. I looked around but couldn’t find anything that really helped. In the lesson I came up with we ended up looking at them separately in depth, but there wasn’t much comparing and contrasting them, or any controlled practice, as I was pushed for time when planning. I did create one exercise, available below, with the help of the BBC World Service explanation of the differences.
(You can download it by clicking ‘slideshare’ and logging in – it’s free to create an account, and you can link via facebook if you want to.)
Answers: 1. should; 2. would; 3. could; 4. should; 5. should, would; 6. would; 7. should, would; 8. could [he didn’t have the ability to finish]; 9. would, could [I would if I could, but I can’t so I won’t 🙂 ]; 10. should, could, would
Over three and a half hours (two lessons), this is what happened:
I taught the class a few items of ‘playing card’ vocabulary, by drawing it on the board: ace, jack, queen, king, diamond, spade, club, heart, suit, picture card. To find out why, keep reading…
I put students into pairs.
Each student had three double-page spreads from Scott Thornbury’s Natural Grammar*, one each for ‘would’, ‘should’ and ‘could’. One page had the rules, and the other had exercises.
The pairs worked together to complete the exercises, and they could do them in any order. As they were advanced students, I didn’t need to present the grammar to them, and they were confident enough to ask me for help whenever they needed it.
Doing the exercises
As they completed each exercise, the pairs would come to me (i.e. they did one exercise, I checked it, they did another). I would tell them if they were 100% correct, or if not, how many errors they had, but not where they were. They would then correct the errors. If they still had errors the second time, I would tell them where. After the third time, I would put them right, if it took them that many attempts.
This is where the cards come in. Once an exercise was 100% correct, the students could take a random card. Between ‘would’, ‘should’ and ‘could’ there were 10 exercises, so once they had completed all of them, they should have 10 cards. This worked perfectly as I had 5 pairs 🙂
Pick a card, any card
It took the students about 3 hours to complete the 12 exercises, with lots of to-ing and fro-ing and a lot of discussion. After that, the students worked together to decide whether the sentences in the worksheet above needed ‘would’, ‘should’ or ‘could’.
On the board, I drew the symbols for the four suits of playing cards in a random order (e.g. spades, diamonds, clubs, hearts). I also told them that aces = one in this game.
We then all sat around a single empty table.
The students had to choose one card from the 10 they had collected during the grammar exercises and place it face down on the table.
I told them the first answer: ‘should’. If they had the wrong answer, they lost their card completely. If they had the right answer, they could turn it over. The highest number won a point for the sentence (‘trick’). If two teams had the same high number, then the order of the suits on the board was followed (from the list above, the ten of spades would be better than the ten of diamonds, for example).
We repeated this for the rest of the sentences. When a question had more than one gap, they had to get all of the gaps correct to play for the point. I reminded the students that tactics might be important too, which resulted in one pair winning a point with a 6, because the other pairs had all thrown away 2s and 3s!
Making tactical decisions
I realise that sounds quite complicated, but it went really well. Everyone got really competitive about the cards they selected after each grammar exercise, even though it was completely random! They enjoyed the game and said it made the grammar more interesting.
If you have any ideas for how I could have taught this lesson more usefully in terms of comparing the three modals, particularly for ways of providing freer practice, please please please share them in the comments!
*I get 10% of anything you spend if you click on the Amazon link and choose to buy something. Thanks in advance!
On Friday I created a new revision game for my students. I hope you like it too!
Collect a series of mistakes your students make throughout the week/course, for example with tenses or collocations. Or choose a set of lexis you’ve recently taught. You need about 15 things.
Write a key word prompt at the side of the board for each of the mistakes. For example, if your students always say ‘I want to make a Masters’, your prompt could be ‘do a Masters’.
Turn it into a table, like so:
Divide your class into teams of 4-5 students. I had two teams, so there were two empty columns, but if you have more, add more columns! You need one column for each team.
Each team needs a mini whiteboard, a pen and a board rubber. If you don’t have mini whiteboards, you could put a piece of paper in a plastic wallet and give the students tissues to rub out the sentences after they have scored for them.
Now that you are all set up, this is how the game goes:
Each team chooses a prompt from the table (they can use the prompts in any order).
They write a sentence using the prompt correctly. I was very strict and told my students that all punctuation had to be correct too.
They show the teacher the sentence. If they are the first team to use that prompt and the sentence is perfect, they get 2 points. If they are the second team to use it, they get 1 point. If there is a mistake, they don’t get any points. Instead, put a little cross in the corner of the box. They have to rub out that sentence, work on a different one, and then they can come back and try that prompt again later. (With 4 teams, give 4 points for the first team, 3 for the second and so on)
When one team has used all of the prompts, the game stops and the points are added up. The team with the most points wins.
They can use more than one prompt in the same sentence if they want to. Remind the students that it’s a race, and that they have to be quick to make sure that the other team(s) doesn’t beat them to all the high point scores!
This was my board at the end of a pre-intermediate class.
Examples of sentences I accepted were:
When were you born?
I have lived in Newcastle for a year.
I like playing noughts and crosses.
Sentences I didn’t accept include:
Can I go home (no question mark)
He is a student. (not the same as on the board – I wanted to make sure they remember you can use ‘he’s’)
My career is teaching. (no ‘in’)
The next teacher saw the game, and asked me to explain it to her, so we played it with her upper intermediate class too.
It took about half an hour to play. By making the students write a completely new sentence each time they make a mistake, instead of editing what they just wrote, they have to really focus on accuracy. The students were engaged, and really wanted to be accurate, because they knew they wouldn’t get any points if they weren’t!
I hope that all makes sense. Let me know if you have any adaptations.
This post has been contributed by Roya Caviglia as part of the simple games series. If you would like to contribute a game, let me know via a comment on the blog or through Twitter.
Roya is currently teaching in Hamburg, Germany and has recently completed her Delta. She is about to start as a Celta trainer-in-training. You can find her on Twitter or at http://languagelego.wordpress.com/ She’s new to the world of blogging, and this is her first guest post. I think you’ll agree: it’s a great start!
Teaching aim: Vocabulary revision
How to play:
1. Ask each student to write down 3 or 4 words, each word on a separate small piece of paper. Make sure the learners choose vocabulary that they understand the meaning of and that they are sure the others in the class will know too (vocab that has come up recently in class is ideal). They fold up the pieces of paper and pop them into a hat/bowl.
2. Split the class into 2 teams. Ask them to choose team names. Then proceed with the following 3 rounds:
Round One – Taboo
Team A start. One of the team takes the bowl of words. They have to take out a word and describe it to their team, without ever saying the word (just like taboo). When their team guesses a word correctly they get to keep it. The same player then takes another word and continues for 2 minutes (teacher is the timer, time can be adjusted if necessary).
It helps if Team B listen carefully to the words that come up because this will help them in later rounds.
When the time is up Team A keep the words they won and pass the bowl to Team B which then have 2 minutes to collect as many words as possible in the same way.
Then back to Team A who continue with another player describing the words. This goes on until the bowl is empty. Count the scores, each word = one point. Scores go on the board.
Round Two – Pictionary
Team B start. Round two is just like round one, except that the players draw the words instead of describing them. This can be done on the board so everyone can see. Just like pictionary, no talking, letters or numbers are allowed.
Round Three – One word
In this round, the players can only use one word to describe the word on the paper (obviously not the one on the paper! But usually a descriptive word gets connected to the piece of vocabulary at an earlier point in the game).
There could also be a charades round, where players act out the word, good for young learners or for energising tired adults!
These games are learner-centred and the words are chosen by the students not the teacher, making for a really meaningful and memorable review.
My intermediate class were really struggling with spellings, so I decided to play a game to make them a little more fun. I have lots of different word games at home, including Scrabble, which include tiles with different letters on them. I also have cut-up letters making up three complete alphabets.
We put two small tables in the middle of the room with the letters spread out on them, and all of the other tables around the edge of the room. Each pair of students was allocated one table.
I called out a word from pre-prepared list. The pairs had to work together to take letters and spell out the word on their table. When they had finished they stood by their table. There were five pairs, so the first team to finish with a correct spelling got five points, the next four and so on down to one point for the last team to get the spelling correct.
As you can see from this photo, the students were all involved, and the most common words we spelt during the game were much more accurate after the class 🙂
I learnt this during a conference at the Park School in Brno, Czech Republic. As will become a theme in these posts, I don’t remember whose session it was, but if it was you, please let me know!
All you need is one of these (photo by @aClilToClimb on flickr.com/eltpics)
All students require to play this game is one pen or pencil each. If you can, push the furniture to the side of the room and have everyone stand in the middle holding their pen. I normally join in the game and demonstrate it at the beginning.
Think of a vocabulary item you have recently introduced to the class. For example, we have looked at verb + noun combinations like “make a sacrifice” or “overcome your shyness”. Your pen ‘becomes’ that vocabulary item. Every student thinks of a vocabulary item but does not say it yet (this is important!)
As an example, pass your pen (A) to a student and say your words. They should give you their pen (B) and say their item. Then repeat this with another student, giving them your new pen (B), with them giving you their pen (C).
Generally this is enough for my students to get the idea, but you could continue to repeat the demonstration if they are having trouble. When they understand how the swapping works, return the pens to their original owners and ask everyone to think of a new vocabulary item.
Everyone mingles, swapping pens and passing on their vocabulary items. If someone forgets the item attached to the pen they have (very easy to do!), they should just pick something they know is going round and continue the game. If they get their own pen with a different item attached to it, they shouldn’t change it back to their original phrase, but should pass on what they got. They can swap with the same person more than once, as it will be with different pens.
After a few minutes stop the mingle, and get everyone to stand in a circle with the last pen they got.
Starting with the pen you have (if you joined in), tell the students the phrase you ‘received’ with it. Then find out whose pen it is and what phrase they attached to it at the start of the game.If the two are the same, give the class a point. If they are different, no point. Continue round the circle, giving one point for every pen which finished with the same phrase attached to it.
Give the pens back to their original owners, everyone thinks of new collocations and repeat the game. As a class, they shold try to get more points by keeping pens with the same vocabulary items when passing them on.
Sometimes you forget that the activities you use all the time might not be known to other teachers at all. To that end, I would like to share some of my favourite classroom games in a series of posts, and I invite you to do the same.
On to the first entry:
Giant noughts and crosses
I learnt this game (like many I will share) during an observation at IH Brno. Unfortunately I can’t remember who I was observing, so if it was you, please make yourself known!
Start by dividing the board in squares. Aim for more than 25 to give the students plenty of options later in the game.
In each square write an item of vocabulary which your class has recently studied. You could also ask the students to write these up. Your board should now look something like this:
Divide your class into two or three groups. Each group needs a pen and paper or a mini whiteboard if you have them. For two groups, one is noughts and one is crosses. For three, add triangles (or whatever other shape you like!)
Ask the class to choose a number between six and twelve. For example, nine. This is the minimum number of words in the sentences they must produce.
Choose one group to start (A). That group selects any word from the board. Every group (A, B and C; not just A) has two minutes to write a sentence including that vocabulary item. In this example all sentences they produce should have nine or more words.
When every group has a sentence, the group which chose the word (A) reads their sentence out. If the rest of the class think they have used the vocabulary item correctly, they can mark their nought/cross on the word. If not, the other team can try by reading out their sentence. If neither team has a correct sentence, the square is available for another turn, but they must write new sentences.
The aim of the game is to win lines of three squares, horizontally, vertically or diagonally. For every line of three, the team gets one point. At the end of the game, the winning team is the one with the highest number of points.
If you want to add an extra challenge, groups are only allowed to include each square in a maximum of two lines. In the photo above, that means triangles cannot use ‘rise’ in another line, circles can’t use ‘realize’ and crosses can’t reuse ‘actually’.
It is great revision, and can easily fill a two-hour lesson.
What are your favourite games? If you would like to share one as a guest post here, let me know and we can arrange it.
I’ve just read Cecilia Coelho’s post about using a vocabulary bank with her classes, which was a response to Emma Herrod’s vocabulary blogging challenge. This is the first challenge which I’ve taken part in, so here goes…
As a relatively new teacher, I’m still constantly finding new activities to revise and practise vocabulary. The one which I use most is very popular at my school (IH Brno), and was introduced to me by Lily-Anne Young. With all of my groups, especially the adults, I have created a vocabulary ‘box’. All new words which are introduced to the students are written on folded slips of paper. The word / phrase is on the outside of the paper, with a definition and example sentence on the inside. I then use them in most sessions with a variety of activities, often variations on a theme. Here are some of them:
I / a SS read(s) a definition. The SS call out the word. The first person / team keeps the word.
Spread the cards on the table / floor. SS are divided into teams. Each team has a fly-swatter. Somebody says a definition and the teams swat the correct word. The team that gets the word gives the next definition. (from Anette Igel)
A selection of cards are placed around the room. Each SS / team has a ball of scrap paper. Somebody reads a definition and the SS must through the paper at the correct card. They then get to keep it. (from Lily-Anne Young)
Divide the cards between all of the SS in the class. They mingle and give definitions. When the other SS guesses the word correctly they take the card. If you want to make it competitive, you can give them a time limit and the winner is the person with the most cards at the end.
Give SS 5-10 cards each. They have 20 minutes to write a story including as many of the words as possible.
Put the SS in teams. One SS comes to you to see a definition. They run back to their team and tell them the word. The team must create a grammatically correct sentence using the word / phrase. (based on a game for pronunciation revision from ‘Homework’ by Lesley Painter)
Use 9 of the words to create a noughts and crosses board. SS must use the words/ phrases in a short conversation to win the square.
In order to avoid ending up with too many words in the box – you could easily have a couple of hundred by the end of the year – I ask SS to put a small mark in the top corner of each card after the activities if it has been correctly used. When there are three marks in the corner of the card I ask SS if they think they know the word. If they agree we remove it from the box. I normally keep the cards and a couple of months later pull them out and do a quick revision activity with only the old cards.
With most of the groups I encourage SS to write the words on the cards during the session, then take them home to write the definitions / example sentences. Occasionally the words don’t make it back to class, but there are always more than enough cards to keep us going!
With teens I use a pared down version of the vocab box. We just have large slips of paper with only the words (generally I can remember the context of most of them). They fight over who gets to write on the cards after each vocabulary activity!
For YLs, I use a variation of the vocabulary box, called a vocabulary monster. I got this idea from a book in 2004, but I have absolutely no idea which book it was – if anyone can provide me with the source I would be eternally grateful, as it’s stood me in good stead through the years! This is how to make one:
Stick two A3 pieces of paper together along the short side, making a long thin piece of paper.
Fold a piece of A4 paper in half and attach it to the bottom of the paper to make a pocket – make sure the sides are sealed, but not the top. This is the monster’s plate – you can draw a picture on there or ask your kids to do it.
Use two pieces of A5 paper to make a mouth and stomach and draw your monster around this. I’m not an artist, but I can manage a monster 🙂
The final result should look something like this (the second pair of legs was added by the confused software which I used to stitch the photos!):
You can use word or picture cards with the monster. At the end of the class put the words into the monster’s ‘plate’ pocket. At the beginning of the following class, take out the cards and show them to the SS. They should call out the words / draw a picture / do the action / use the word in a sentence. If they do this correctly, the card goes in the monster’s mouth. If not, it stays on the plate. In week 3, any correct words from the mouth go into the stomach. In week 4 any correct words are taken out of the monster. If SS use the word incorrectly it always goes back to the plate. Obviously if you have a large class, it’s your call whether to move the word on or not – it depends what percentage of the class you think is comfortable with the word. I’ve used this with 5 or 6 small classes and they’ve always really enjoyed it.
These activities are just a taster – the great thing about the vocabulary box is that the cards can be used for literally hundreds of activities, and require almost no work at all to prepare. It’s great for warmers, coolers, revision lessons and waking up sleepy students half way through a lesson. And the best thing is, you can use scrap paper for all of it, so you’re not even wasting resources 😉
, page 53, Unit 6C
, one each for ‘would’, ‘should’ and ‘could’. One page had the rules, and the other had exercises.
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