So, as you may or may not know (I only found out this morning), the Queen is having another birthday. I swear she has about 8 a year.
Anyway, I threw together a quick lesson for my students so I just thought I’d share it with you in case you too suddenly realised you should probably do a lesson on it.
Enjoy
Procedure: procedure
Materials: When I’m 90
I’m sorry…I may have gone too far this time and I completely understand if you want to turn your back on me and leave me to wither away into nothingness. I’ve made a lesson out of a Script song. In my defense, it’s not my fault. A student made me do it. This is what happens when you have Spanish teenage girls, who’ve spent a summer in Ireland as students. Honestly not my fault.
Anyway, you may remember that I once wrote abouthaving a short extract from a song for every language point. The idea was that it was engaging for students, it gave them a bit of access to the culture and it (hopefully) made the language point a little more memorable.
My first lesson was on “used to” and “would” using a Coldplay song…again, sorry. Check it out if you want to see what I was on about.
This one shouldn’t be a long lesson but it’s a nice communicative one with some guided discovery in there.
Level: Int and above
Time: 1 – 2 hours (depending on how chatty your students are)
Aim: see above
Objective: see above
Materials:
Procedure:
So this is the second and last of the “bits of the paper we ignore” series. This one is based on my personal favourite, Rush Hour Crush. If you don’t know what this is, I suggest you check it out. Each morning on the way to work lovely people hand me a copy of the free newspaper, The Metro. It’s mostly awful (but actually very useful for the classroom as the articles are not that difficult or long) but I do love the Rush Hour Crush section.
The idea is that commuters see people they fancy on the tube or a train or bus and they write a text to that person and send it to The Metro who prints it in the paper. It’s sooooo creepy and weird and hilarious and absolutely choc full of lovely vocab and noun phrases. Great fun for the classroom. So, if you don’t live in London, I shall bring London to you in all of its creepy glory. Enjoy!
Level: Intermediate and above
Time: 1.5 – 3 hours (depending on activities)
Objectives:
Materials:
Procedure:
This is reasonably straightforward but I’ll take you through it step by step:
Follow-up
This is to be part 1 of a 2 part series focusing on the bits of the newspaper we throw away. A lot of our lessons on this blog and the lessons we do in class use articles as the basis for the lesson. But what about the rest of the paper?
We want to encourage our students to be fully-functioning autonomous machines out in the real world, constantly analysing the English around them, learning new words and structures and reconfirming what they have learnt before. One way to do this is to help them find what they should be analysing in the first place.
This first lesson looks at an advertisement for a film. It’s a film I haven’t seen a to be honest I have absolutely no intention of seeing ever…but that doesn’t matter. Check out the lesson and let me know how it goes.
Level: Intermediate and above (although low-ints might need some help with some of the questions on the worksheet. A lot of ICQs and CCQs please!)
Time: 1 – 2 hours (depending on discussion times and follow-up activities)
Aim:
Materials:
Procedure:
This is quite a straight forward lesson. The worksheet takes you through it nice and easily. I think the only part that might need to be commented on is the final part, the reflection. The idea here it to get them thinking about the English that surrounds them. Even if you don’t live in an English speaking country, the Internet is at your disposal and by driving them to sites like IMDB.com, you can help them to see this.
Possible Follow-up Activities:
So there I am, sitting in Nandos in Gatwick airport, killing time with chicken, when I glance to my left and see a large text painted on the wall. As all EFL teachers know, there are two aspects of the job that we just can’t turn off:
The second of these has made Facebook and Twitter hard to bear for much of us, especially with friends writing things like “You should of called me”…GAHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Sadly Nandos is no different and this little text had three separate mistake clangers in there. However, it also had some negative inversion and some nice vocab in there so I decided to take a photo (I then had to put up with weird looks from around the room) and use it in a lesson.
I’ve yet to use it but here’s the material and the procedure. If you try it before me, let me know how it goes.
Level: Upper intermediate + above (nice for Cambridge exam groups too)
Time: 90 mins – 3 hours
Material:
Objective:
Procedure:
Follow-up:
So, this idea came about today in class. It is just a short one and won’t take up much class time but it may, just may, get your students planning. I’m hoping it will mine.
As I have mentioned before, I spend a lot of my time teaching exam classes, and so writing is a big part in my lessons. One of the things I constantly hear in class is:
“but we don’t have time to plan”
I am sure you have heard that one too. For years I have been getting students to write down as many words about a topic as they can in a minute to prove that they do in fact have time to plan, the logic being that it shows them how much they can actually write in one single minute.
Today, I took things a step further. Having reminded them of the need to plan and having been confronted by nodding students, who I could tell were going to do no such thing, I decided to prove to them the value. Luckily my plan worked. Here it goes:
Hopefully the second far outweighs the first, it did in mine and they looked shocked, which was gratifying.
I now got them to look at the two examples, though some had very little in the first. Looking for errors to correct. In general, the second had fewer errors, was more interestingly written and contained double the words.
Case closed!
You could extend it then by asking them to write more, or then as I did to ask them to look at an exam task.
Either way, I found it a handy way to drive home the importance of planning and it did seem to make a difference to their attitude. Let’s see when I mark their writing!
At our school we offer weekly free pronunciation lessons to all of our students. We get quite a lot of students attending each week and some of them come week on week but for others it’s their first week. This means we need to come up with new ideas all the time, building on the previous week but ensuring that new students can join at any time and not be lost. We also need to design lessons that span all levels from Elementary to Advanced (sometimes Beginners attend but not so often).
My favourite thing to look at in these classes is connected speech for the following reasons:
In the teacher’s worksheet below, I have included my own boardwork so that you can visualise what I’m talking about.
NB: don’t panic if you don’t know the phonemic chart off by heart. Highlight where linking occurs and model any other connected speech that comes up. You don’t need the phonemic symbols (but they do help).
Level: All levels
Time: 60 – 90 minutes
Topic: advice (almost every level has come across 1 or 2 ways of giving advice).
Materials:
Procedure:
Help me, I need some advice!
My girlfriend came home last night and told me she wanted to move to Brazil. She says she is sick of London and needs a change. The problem is that I have friends here, I have a job, my family live close to here.
I would love Brazil, it sounds amazing but now is not the time to move. I’m scared if I say no that it will be the end of our relationship.
So this lesson uses a fantastic newspaper article from the Guardian.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/27/eight-words-sexism-heart-english-language
It was one of those things I read and knew I had to make a lesson about.
The lesson focuses on collocation, vocab building and reading skills if you fancy going down that route, as ever, you are welcome to pick and choose bits and pieces.
Aims: build awareness of collocation / get students to respond to a text naturally
Level: Advanced / strong upper Ints could cope if it is scaffolded
Time: This really depends on how the conversation part goes but you will need a bare minimum of 1hr, I think 1.30-2hrs is more realistic.
Procedure:
Introducing collocation:
http://phrasesinenglish.org/searchBNC.html
Reading:
Feel free to completely change this section adding gist questions or scanning tasks, but what I wanted here was two things:
You could, if you have a nice even number, cut up the 8 words and get the students to read them and then tell the other students about them, a jigsaw reading of sorts.
Otherwise follow the questions on the worksheet.
Reflection:
Having had a chat to a friend about some of the attitudes of her students recently, I was keen to put a reflection section into this lesson, they feature in lots of our lessons, but this one is thinking more globally about language. This could result in a big discussion or be over in 6 minutes, really depends on your students. Go with whatever feels right.
Vocabulary:
Again, as part of training students to be more autonomous the idea here is to get them to try to work out the meaning of words using their context. They can then check them against a-f
As always, if there are any changes you put in, let us know and tell us how it goes.
Materials:
You may or may not have noticed but I have a tendency to call everyone in my lessons Barry. I don’t know when this started, I don’t know why but it has definitely become a thing for me. Maybe I just like the name.
So, in keeping with this, we’ve decided to make Barry a little more real. We’ve given him a second name and over the next few months, we’re going to do a string of Barry-related lessons. Obviously they’ll all be standalone lessons but there’ll definitely be a thread running through them.
This is the first of many Barry-lessons and we join him in the Shard in London…but it doesn’t start off well for the poor fella.
Level: Intermediate and above
Objectives: By the end of the lesson, your students will be better able to identify useful chunks of language in a text by themselves
Language Points: Phrasal verbs and expressions related to relationships and dating
Time: 2-3 hours depending on activities
Procedure:
The worksheet and text are pretty straightforward for this one and take you through the steps one at a time. The general idea of this lesson is that your learners are gradually brought from just finding the meaning of vocabulary, to identifying useful chunks of language and finally grasping their meaning from the text.
Material:
So, a good friend of mine, Kat, has started her DELTA, so I dug out some of my books and started flicking through them and had the idea that Binomials might be quite a useful thing to help my students make their informal writing seem a little more natural and give it that extra sparkle it needs.
This lesson grew from that and starts with a dictagloss, something I am quite a fan of, before moving onto a language focus. The text here isn’t authentic but is a series of little monologues which enabled me to emphasise the target language.
From there the lesson moves on to look at collocation building with the binomials and the construction of chunks which can be used in students own writing or speaking. There is a little bit of a focus on punctuation too, as this is something often neglected.
Aim: raise awareness of binomials and collocations
Level: Advanced, maybe a strong Upp Int if you scaffold.
Procedure:
Dictogloss
Binomials
Give the students the sheet with the extract on and the question, page 2.
Answers below:
3. Now look at extract 2. Ask the students if they can predict the missing words, read the text once for them to check.
4. Ask the students to try to fill in the table, the box below has the answers but tell them to try to do it without initially if you want to raise the level of challenge.
Now check together as a group and accept any others which would work, e.g. life and death as well as life and soul.
Collocations
My students struggled with this, so you could allow them to use dictionaries, looking at the examples or encourage them to look online or use something like the British National Corpus
http://phrasesinenglish.org/searchBNC.html
e.g. spick and span – usually works with the verb ‘be’
Why do this? As well as making them more autonomous, i just think it is a far more engaging task than you telling them what the answers are, you might also get some interesting different answers this way.
Plus it will help them later on.
Punctuation
This is a really important element that students have difficulty with and since there are often a lack of rules, teachers avoid. Therefore it is something to focus their attention on, getting them to ‘notice’ the punctuation as it occurs
Follow the instructions on the sheet. I would be tempted to get the to add them to the board if you can copy and paste into an IWB before the big test so that you can observe any errors that you can then highlight and teach.
Follow on activities
The obvious ways to go, would be to get students to record little monologues or dialogues, where they have to use 3 of the binomials.
Alternatively, and this is what I did, ask your students to write a blog about something, e.g. living in their home town, whatever topic you have been doing recently will be fine. I was teaching a Cambridge exam class and so we focused on article writing.
Materials:
textploitation 