textploitation

Present not so simple

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I’ve often wondered about the logic of teaching present simple to beginners. It is the most complex and fiddly tense to get right. If proof were needed, how many high level students still make mistakes with it? Yet we ask beginners and elementary students to struggle with this tense, their first.

Of course, I know why we focus on this tense. It has to be done. The present is the logical starting point. It doesnt make it any easier for our poor students though.

This lesson aims to try to solidify those rules, and also offer reading skills practice and some vocabulary work. The context is someone talking about their likes and dislikes looking for a flatmate. The final task is about them leaving a voice message with the opportunity for some controlled and free practice.

Here is a copy of the text.

Hi there!
I’m looking for a social friendly fun flatshare with people my age. I currently live in Dalston east London and I am looking to move south to New Cross, Brockley or Deptford. £650 pcm is my budget and I would like a double room.

I work 9-5 for a charity and volunteer at the weekends, which keeps me pretty busy but I love having flatmates I can socialise with. I love going out to eat, exploring fun bars, watching good films and experiencing all London has to offer. I am looking to share with fun and interesting people. I also love animals, so cats and dogs are not a problem for me! I’m a smoker so I’d need somewhere I could smoke but happy to go outside.
Thanks in advance!

Sarah

 

Enjoy and let us know how it goes

Aim: practice present tenses

Level: Elementary +

Procedure:

Pre reading task

1.1 Chat about flats, ask students to think of what they want when they move to a place?

1.2 Ask about what they they want the people they live with to be like?

Vocab

2.1 Do vocab match and check as a class

Grammar focus

3.1 Look at the Present simple practice exercise, checking together.

3.2 Look at the rules and help the students by monitoring

Production

Target: to record a voice message that they could leave on Sarah’s phone

4.1 Ask the students to think whether they would like to live with Sarah

4.2 Ask them to complete the plan for a phone call and add any extra parts they choose

4.3 Ask the students to record it – and save – this part of the lesson goes test – teach – test.

4.4 This is where you can get into any pronunciation details you want. I looked at connected speech, weak forms and tone units.

4.5 Now ask them to listen to their first recording and think of where they could improve it. They will initially tell you it is all terrible so make them listen a couple of times.

4.6 Ask them to rerecord it and email it to you so that you can send feedback.

Materials:

Listening skills – making use of global knowledge

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Disclaimer: This is more of an idea than a lesson (however, I am going to give you some materials at the bottom that you can use to turn it into a lesson should you so desire).

It’s an answer to a question and the question is one that my students ask me over and over, again and again.

Teacher, why can’t I understand the news and the radio?

The answer is very simple: you just got her and you don’t know enough of the back story to have a hope of making head nor tail of a complex news story.

Realising this, I have over the years done virtually the same lesson with a variety of different news stories. It’s simple and it only has 4 steps:

  1. Test: play a radio / news story about something complex and topical. Ask the students how much they understood. Usually, to their dismay, not a lot.
  2. Teach: Break out a lovely article from a current newspaper on this topic and do with it what you will. Perhaps some vocab, a bit of a discussion, general and specific comprehension…all the classics. (see here for tips on using articles in class).
  3. Test: Replay the original story.
  4. Reflect: How much did they understand now? What did they use?

This is a simple formula but it has a number of benefits:

  • Encourages students to use what they know about the world when engaging with listening texts. Instead of just waiting for information to reach their ears and make sense. It’s all about being pro-active listeners.
  • Can foster an interest in the culture and society of the language they are learning.
  • Leaves students with a sense of accomplishment.
  • It can be applied to any topical story.

 

So, as promised, here is a link to a news story. It’s a little old but it’s one that works and usually leads to some interesting discussion. The article you can use is below.

Material: living wage

Sing a song of Grammar, a pocket full of…hammers?

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So, over a pint…or ten, a friend of mine and I came to the conclusion that if we were going to teach our teenage students grammar, we needed a way for it to stick in their head. We decided that if they had a catchy line / verse from a song for each grammar point they might actually learn it.

Whether or not we were right remains to be seen but what did happen was that we came up with a lot of quick and easy grammar lessons based on one verse / chorus of songs from a variety of genres. Over the next while, I’ll hopefully share some of these with you.

Here’s one that worked well with my Spanish teenagers. They really liked Coldplay…don’t judge me.

I used to Rule the world by Coldplay

I used to rule the world
Seas would rise when I gave the word
Now in the morning I sleep alone
Sweep the streets I used to own

Possible Quick Activities:

  1. Gapfill
  2. Focus on pron
  3. Changing the words but keeping the rhythm.
  4. “used to” / “would”  Guided discovery – see below

Possible Guided Discovery Questions:

  • Does the singer rule the world now? When did he rule it? Was it just one brief action?
  • Does he own the streets now?
  • Can you find another word that has the same use as “used to”?

Pronunciation:

  • How does the singer pronounce “I used to rule…”?
  • Which word is stressed?
  • How do they pronounced “would”? Is it stressed?

Benefits:

  1. These are short musical lessons that can break up a grammar lesson.
  2. With long term students, you can refer back to this if the language point arises again.
  3. The lyrics can be placed around the room to remind them.
  4. Students are encouraged to engage with the language and the culture. By fostering an interest in music inside the classroom, hopefully learners will go off and seek it out outside the classroom. The little taster of the song will hopefully whet their appetite.
  5. Songs are perfect for a bit of guided discovery as shown above.

Model answers

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I am always shocked by two things when it comes to model answers:

  • Students ignore them in the coursebooks, never look at them, never borrow bits of language from them.
  • Teachers don’t use them, don’t see the value, expecting students to magically be able to produce a piece of writing with almost no instruction.

Both of these are generalisations, but in the many years I have been teaching and observing teachers, both of these things come up time and time again.

This is just a little look at how we can use model answers to get students to notice features of language that they can use in their writing.  It is really simple and totally applicable to any type of writing you can do.

I prepare worksheets like this all the time, one bonus of writing them yourself is that you can focus on exactly what you want.  However, a lot of coursebooks now do exercises like this, focusing students on models.  Even if they don’t, the coursebooks may have examples of text types and typical features at the back of the book.  If you are teaching general English, Cambridge exam books can provide some decent models if you don’t have time to write them yourself.

Level: Upp int – Adv

Aim: raise awareness of what different elements contribute to a piece of writing

Procedure: 

1. Ask students to read the model answer and decide if it is a good example or not, discuss in pairs and then whole class feedback

2. Ask students in turn to look for examples of:

  • hypothetical
  • passives
  • good collocations

3.1 Ask if there is anything that could be improved.  Hopefully they will notice that there is some repetition

  • ‘as’ and ‘however’ used twice
  • It was felt

3.2 Ask if they can think of synonyms for these.  With ‘however’ i ask them to rewrite using ‘although’

It was felt by some, however, that the experience would have been more productive if students had been given more time in each department,

to

Although it was felt by some that the experience would have been more productive if students had been given more time in each department,

4. You can do a synonym hunt for some of the vocab if you think your students will be unfamiliar with it, or if you have trained them how to do this, ask them to work in pairs on the meaning from context.

Follow up

Obviously asking students to do some writing is a good idea, but i am a firm believer that it does not have to be a whole piece of writing.  I would rather see one good paragraph written, with the students focusing on quality and using all of the target language rather than 250 words of mediocrity.

Materials

model answer

English is everywhere…even in the toilet!

/ textploitationtefl / 3 Comments

 

As long as you don’t think about its origins too much, this is a nice idea for a lesson.

The overall aim is to get students into the frame of mind that English is everywhere (if your teaching in an English speaking country that is), it’s all around them and they can/should be noticing it…even if they’re in the bathroom.

This is a quick lesson based on a half-ripped sign on the cistern of the toilet in school. It could be done at the beginning or end of a lesson. These sorts of mini-lessons could be done regularly (here’s another one on using a text message) to keep students thinking and noticing the language around them. They take very little prep but over time you can train your students to analyse chunks of language and hopefully they will start bringing in their own signs, emails and text messages for you to exploit in class.

Level: Pre-int and up

Material: toilet sign

Procedure: You could do some or all of these.

  1. Identify the origin: get students to try to decide what kind of a text it is and where it came from. As a class discuss how they figured it out (language / register / how it looks).
  2. Gapfill: the sign is half-ripped. Get your students to fill in the blanks. The clues are all in the text. Encourage your learners to use them. (answers below).
  3. Grammar grab: Get your learners to identify the passive voice in the sign. Find a prefix (what is its meaning). Why is “must” used instead of “have to”
  4. Reformulation: Rewrite the sign as a conditional sentence. Rewrite it in the active voice. Rewrite it as spoken advice to a friend.

 

Office Politics – Listening

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So, this is a little listening lesson, pretty tricky unless it is scaffolded properly.  It also shows students some conditionals in a natural situation, which is always a plus in my book, it can conveniently fit into either a lesson on work or comedy, but for the purposes of this, it is as a bit of a break from a unit/week on work.

Do let them listen a few times, especially at the beginning, as it is pretty fast.  Your job as teacher is to stop them getting discouraged and to explain that the reason for this is to try to bridge the gap between what they do inside the classroom and what happens outside those walls.

Enjoy

Aims: expose students to real conversation, show grammar, conditionals, in a real context, focus on pronunciation, sentence stress.

Time: 1hr +

Level: High int +

Procedure:

The worksheet should be fairly easy to follow so the procedure would be to follow that, rather than me writing a lengthy one here.  But do have a look before you go into class as i’ve tried to really mix the activities, listening as the main background activity with lots of things coming off it

I would recommend putting in the time for students to reflect on what they have seen as for this I think it is important for all lessons, but especially this one.

Here are the answers to the word stress exercise at the end, feel free to disagree but this is what I hear.

T. Hey dude

G. Give it back

T. I’m just using it for a second

G. It’s got my name on it, Gareth

T. No, it says Garet, actually, but

G. Ask if you want to borrow it.

T. Yeah, you always say no mate, so what’s the point

G. Perhaps that’s why you should ask

T. Gareth it was just there ok

G. Yeah, that’s its home, leave it there.

Also, you could obviously go onto connected speech at this point or other pronunciation features, depending on how your students are feeling.

Materials

Worksheet: the-office-worksheet

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1PHpkdvNOs

How can I write it if I don’t know what it is?

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So, this lesson was something I taught yesterday to try to help my students with their writing, I only took over the class recently and in the needs analysis a few of them stated that they needed to work on their writing, two of them telling me that they hadn’t been able to join the advanced level because they hadn’t done well in the writing paper of the level test.  When I asked what had been wrong with the writing, one reported that the writing had been “good but in the wrong style”, I asked what she meant, but she just said, that was what she had been told and wasn’t sure how to change it.  A quick check with the rest of the class confirmed that she was not alone in being a bit lost when it came to how to write in different styles, so I thought I would start at the beginning.

That’s what this lesson is, a beginners guide to genre, or a quick revision of it, whichever you prefer.

Aim: to increase awareness of genre and register in writing, so that the know the key features so that they are at least aware of what they should be using for different writing

Level: High Int + (the class I did this with yesterday were a pre-advanced level)

Procedure:

1. Cut the extracts out from the page, stick them on the wall and invite the students to read them with some background music playing. (I only did this to generate interest as I felt handing them a piece of paper would be a little dull.) While reading I asked them to think about what type of writing they were and where they thought they had come from.

2. Ask them to sit down and discuss it in pairs or groups for a few minutes

3. Write the possibilities on the board and ask them to match the types of writing to the possibilities in their groups.  Once most of them had got close to finishing I asked them to sit down and gave them the worksheet so that they could look at them and confirm their decisions.

4.  Check the answers but at this stage I gave them the answers only, I did not give them reasons.

5. Elicit from the students how they knew the first one was an essay and wrote what they put on the board.  I then asked them as a group to go through the other examples explaining what features of the text they thought were typical.  I monitored and helped to steer them in the right direction if they were lost.

6. Group feedback – you could give them the answer sheet here, but I think it is more fun to elicit and get the information from the students.

7. Give the students the opportunity to check any vocabulary they don’t know, they may have done this already, as always try to encourage them to guess the meanings, but help if needed. (you could arrange a matching exercise here if you wanted with meanings, but as it wasn’t the main focus of the lesson I chose not to this time)

8. Ask the students to arrange the different types of writing into similar styles, don’t set them any rules here, what they decide is often very interesting and useful for them.  If you have them get them to write it up on the IWB, the different groups.  Make sure all the groups are involved even if it is only to affirm other groups decisions.

You can obviously make your suggestions once they have discussed theirs.  For example, all of the formal types together, etc.

Follow on: Obviously writing, but where you go totally depends on your students and where you feel they need practice.  The easiest would be to carry on the story.

You could also get them to predict what the title of the article might be, or activities that get them interacting with the texts more.

Hopefully the good thing is that this lesson can be referred back to whenever you want to focus students on different genres.

 

Materials: 

1.Genre

2. Answers

Pronouns – giving cohesion to students’ writing

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This lesson is based on something I did with an Upper Intermediate class.  With some of them it really did make a big difference to their writing, well, to the ones who took it on board and applied it.  For some of them, it was a bit of a challenge and it is not a panacea but a bit like the articles lesson we put up earlier, it just focuses students on why we use pronouns, what they do, and what they refer to, getting them to notice them.

This is also useful as a little extra for FCE/CAE students as in the long multiple choice reading activities there are often questions asking the students to choose what the pronoun in a certain line is referring to.

This lesson can be done with any text and as a follow up activity, I would recommend that you incorporate a bit of a focus on pronouns regularly after doing this lesson.

Not wanting to confuse the students or put them off, I have only focused on ‘it’ in this lesson, though obviously, if you think your class are ready for more then take the idea and expand it however you want, and let us know how it goes.

Aim: to get students to think about the use of ‘it’

Level: Upp Int + (though if you have a strong Int they might be able to do it)

Time: 45mins-1hr

Procedure: 

1. Speaking – generating interest: Get students to think about their favourite songs, what are the themes/topics in the song?  Chat and compare in pairs or small groups.  Maybe ask if anyone has ever written a song.

2. Reading – context and content: What advice is given by the writer, do the students think it is good advice?

3. Vocab – synonym hunt: Ask the students to try to match up the words, explain that the words are in order in the text.

4. Pronouns – what are they doing: Firstly ask the students to underline ‘it’ in the text.

Then ask them to answer the question at the bottom of the page about what the first ‘it’ refers to, the answer is writing in this case.

Now ask the students to think about what each of the other 8 examples of ‘it’ refers to.

5. Pronouns – function: Ask the students whether each ‘it’ in the text is used to help avoid repetition or introduce an idea?  Check as a class

Materials: pronouns worksheeets

 

Follow up activities

1. For homework you could ask the students to find a text and repeat the activities on pronouns, what do they refer to and what is the function?

2. Set students some writing and before they hand it in, get them to examine their own work for pronouns, and to check what they are replacing, or what they refer to.

Film Reviews: A Diagnostic Listening exerise

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A long time ago I came across an article that argued that a Dictogloss would be used in class to assess a student’s listening ability, that it could be used as a kind of diagnostic listening and the results could inform your following lessons. Sadly I have lost the article and forgotten the name of the author…which is pretty crappy of me.

At the time, I remember thinking that it was quite an interesting idea. OK, we all know dictoglosses as a great way of introducing a topic, as a nice listening exercise and as a way of working on a student’s general knowledge of English syntax…but, with a little twist it can work as a diagnostic! I’ve only ever taught this lesson once or twice and it’s always been quite interesting. I could see why people might disagree with the idea above but try it out and let us know how it goes.

Time: 1- 3 hours (depending on which activities you choose to do)

Materials: Safe House – Dictogloss

Level: Pre-int + above

Procedure:

(1) Intro

I suppose it’s good to get the ould schemata activated so any little discussion question on films will do here. “what’s the last film you saw?” “Would you describe yourself as a film buff?” “Can you describe the plot of a famous film from your country?”

If you’re giving feedback at this point, I’d focus on gathering adjectives to describe different films as this will be useful later.

(2)  Dictogloss

Hand out the page with the “Notes” box facing up. Make sure you tell the students not to turn over the page until you tell them to (if they do, give them a little tap on the nose, bad student!)

Let them know you’re going to read a description of a film to them but you’re going to read it at the normal speaking speed of a native speaker. Tell them to write down any words they hear in the “Notes” box. Read the description twice at normal speed and then allow students to check their answers.

(3)  Reflection

This is where the dictogloss changes into a diagnostic. The theory being that everything the students have written down is what they heard and everything else is what they have missed and therefore their notes can be used as a diagnostic of sorts.

Have the students turn over the page and compare their notes with the actual text. I usually get them to circle the words they got correct. Then direct them to the reflection questions below the text. This is the really interesting part. Encouraging your learners to think about why they found a listening task difficult and going beyond “You speak too fast” can be really useful for them.

Once they’ve done it, it’s important that you sit down with them and talk it through. Their answers should give you the information to plan what is taught in future lessons. For example:

  1. if they have combined two words into a new word, perhaps you need to focus on linking between words.
  2. if they have focused on grammar words and missed out on the important words, then you need to encourage them to focus on content words.
  3. if they’ve completely ignored any content words that were new to them, then perhaps you could help them with writing what they hear or raise their awareness of common English pronunciation Versus spelling rules.
  4. If it was a speed issue, perhaps this type of exercise should be repeated more often so that they’re more confident with taking notes while someone is talking.

At the very least, the students will be able to focus on their own issues. Let them know that you will be using their answers to inform their future lessons.

(4) Engaging with the text

We always think it’s important for students to have a real response to a text and not just do TEFLy exercises. At this point, following the quite heavy reflection stage, I usually get them to read the text very briefly one more time and then discuss the questions at the bottom of the page.

When you’re listening to them, think about the kinds of things you might say in this situation and then correct them based on that instead of just looking at grammar errors. Think of the natural pieces of English you would use. E.g. “It sounds…” , “I’m not really into / a fan of…”.

(5) Language Focus:

Even though this is a tiny little paragraph, you’ve got quite a bit to work with here. I usually pluck out one or two features and, instead of doing an entire grammar lesson based on it, just use it to train students to notice language in context.

For example, you could choose to focus on present perfect continuous versus present perfect by highlighting the sentence: “Frost has been working with the CIA for years but has recently changed sides” and asking them to compare the two forms and discuss why each was used in this situation. You could also briefly examine the passive “Frost is marched” or you could look at reduced relative clauses: “Frost, played by Denzel,…”. You’re spoilt for choice.

(6)  Writing follow-up

I think after all of this it’s nice for students to go back to the beginning of the lesson and think about the plot from a famous film in their country and write their own mini review. Limit the number of words and highlight the adjectives from the beginning of the class.

A nice idea once they’re finished it to put them up around the room and have students move around in pairs and discuss which films they’d be interested in seeing and which review grabbed their attention. Meanwhile you can be pulling out a few of the common errors and boarding them for a final feedback stage.

Set texts – go on, set a text!

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So, CPE is the last one standing, the set texts having been taken away from the FCE and CAE exams as no one answered the questions on them.  Well, some of my students did, and even if they didn’t, reading the set text gave us the chance to practice lots of other skills as well as the obvious benefits of students reading.

When I first started teaching I encouraged my students to read and the first advanced class I taught we read a book together, I have also used audiobooks in class for extended listening practice.  To be honest, some of those were not so successful, but I think that was a failing with me as a teacher, I just wasn’t experienced enough to get the most out of the materials.  Last term I taught CPE, and we read Howards End by Forster and as well as note taking, building character profiles, discussing themes etc. we also did a variety of other things.

I’ve put ideas for some of them below, give them a go, they give the reading much more focus.

  • Turning a page of it into a part 1, 2, 3 Use of English, classic but reliable fall back and a chance to get the tip ex out! Or, if you are very smart try to copy and paste from a digital version.  With my last CAE class last year, I wrote summaries of the chapters and then made them into different parts of the paper.
  • Getting students to create their own reading parts of the exam, for example giving them a section and getting them to write multiple choice questions for it.
  • Cutting up the text and seeing if they can put it back into order using logical sequencing (you have to check that you can do this yourself).  Practices reading part 2
  • Showing the film of the book (if there is one) and getting the students to review it.  With the film there are obviously lots of opportunity to work on pronunciation as you already have a model to work from.
  • Summary writing of sections of the text will help them write concisely and learn how to paraphrase. Summary writing is also a necessary skill for CPEs.
  • Encourage students to make a set text dictionary, especially useful if they can list page numbers and example sentences, to help build vocab.
  • Do a Grammar hunt in a particular piece of text, students search for Conditionals, participle clauses, passives etc to build grammar awareness.
  • Vocabulary from the context, students match synonyms, practises scanning as well as building their vocabularies.
  • Rewriting some of it into a different register, for example if you have a book with rather formal text it can be fun to get them working in pairs to rewrite it in an informal way.
  • Using the direct speech for students to practice intonation and word and sentence stress, get them to record themselves, practice it, get them to think about changes in meaning depending on where the stress is and to think how it should be said, it is also really good to get students to think about where phrases should end and where they should breathe, for many, this is a real challenge and encouraging them to think about it can really help, especially if you do a little of this often.  Recording again after working at it gives students the opportunity to really see progress and who doesn’t like that?

Many students don’t want to read, so short stories or any form of text can be used for a lot of these activities, but I do think that for many students the satisfaction of reading a story and understanding it, along with the practice that they have put in by reading it can make a real difference to their confidence as well as level.

Just always remember to stress why it will be useful for them and what skills you are practising!