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Star Wars – may the grammar be with you

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So, Star Wars, love it or hate it, I am firmly in the former camp, it is going to be a big deal this winter.  So, what better way to engage students with a bit of grammar?

This is using quotes from the film, the whole tiny texts thing that we are into.  I’ve tried to use them for different grammar points and it should be seen as either revision, or perhaps an introduction for some of these grammar points.

I would say you should be thinking Upper Int upwards, though you could edit out sections, for example the section on negative adverbial inversion, and do it with Intermediates.  It really is a bit of a pick and mix, whichever parts you want.

Procedure:

Just follow the worksheet really.

However,  with the scrolling text you need to try to get them to take notes to check, or you could throw some simple questions up there for them.

  1. What type of base is it?
  2. What did rebels steal?
  3. Where is Leia going?

Materials:

  1. Star Wars – Word
  2. Star Wars – PDF Version
  3. star-wars-answers

PS – the reason for the PDF was that the fonts changed and it really annoyed me.

The Beatles – Dead or Alive!

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The idea for this one came from a teacher I used to work with, great teacher. He used wikipedia entries on the Beatles to compare Past Simple and Present Perfect. I loved the idea and so when I had to cover a class last minute the other day, I decided I’d try it out.

This is the lesson I did. It works on a couple of things:

Objectives:

  1. Reinforce and examine the difference between present perfect and past simple.
  2. Raise awareness of the features of different texts (in this case wikipedia entries)
  3. Encourage students to notice chunks of English and adopt them into their own writing / speech.
  4. Encourage learner autonomy (ye olde holiest of grails) in reading.

Level: Int / Upper int

Time: 1.5 – 3 hours

Materials: wikipedia present perfect – BEATLES

john and paul

 

Procedure:

(1)

Introduction:

List the following discussion questions on the board:

  • What kind of music do you listen to?
  • Have you ever been to a concert/gig/festival?
  • Have you ever met anyone famous?
  • Who would you like to see perform live?

Let students discuss these questions in small groups. As you monitor, note down any present perfect/past simple mistakes (if there are any) for use later. Choose any errors you like to give feedback, but I find with music discussions, learners very often misuse a lot of vocabulary (e.g. live) and I tend to focus on that area.

(2)

Before Reading

Display the pictures of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. In small groups, students discuss everything they know about the two musicians. Feedback as a whole class and board all of their facts.

(3)

Gist Reading

Fold the sheet in two so that students can only see one wikipedia entry. Divide your class into two groups (Johns and Pauls). Students have 2 minutes to read through the text and note any extra facts that they didn’t know. DO NOT MENTION THAT THEY ARE WIKIPEDIA TEXTS!

Put Johns together to compare their facts and do the same with the Pauls.

Then get a lovely mingle exercise going so that Johns share their info with Pauls.

As a whole class, board the most interesting facts from the students.

(4) 

Focus on genre:

Sit the students down in pairs of Pauls and Johns (to mix them up a bit) Display the following questions and get students to discuss in pairs:

  1. What type of text is this? Where does it come from?
  2. How do you know? What clues are in the text?
  3. What is the writer’s opinion?

Obviously you want the students to notice that not once does the writer give their opinions as it’s a factual text.  (By raising awareness of features of different texts, you can encourage students to think more about what they are writing and about appropriate language for different genres and situations)

(5)

Focus on language 1: Present Perfect

Encourage students to look more closely at what they read. We want to create fully autonomous language analysts. One way is trying the following type of exercise. Little and often is the key.

Display the following questions for discussion:

  1. What are the main tenses used in the texts?
  2. Is there any difference between the tenses used in John’s text and Paul’s text?
  3. Why do you think that is?

What we’re looking for here is that John’s contains past simple only whereas Paul’s contains both. Past simple for his early life with the Beatles and Wings (ahem) and Present Perfect for his life and achievements since then.

At this point, you could bring out any pres perfect errors from the introduction stage and get sts to correct them in pairs.

(6) 

Focus on language 2: Passive

Highlight/Display the following sentence from the text and compare it to the one below it:

“He was murdered three weeks after its release”

“Someone murdered him three weeks after its release”

In pairs, students discuss why the author chose the first one over the second one. What we’re looking for is that the author wanted to keep John Lennon as the focus of the sentence.

Get students to scan the text and find other examples. It might be a good idea at this point to highlight that the musicians are the subject of almost every sentence and definitely every paragraph.

(7)

Focus on language 3: Vocabulary

By now students will be chomping at the bit for all of the vocabulary in the texts. In pairs, get them to find the phrases from the vocabulary section of the worksheet.

Feedback as a whole class. Then point out that there are some phrases that you would commonly find in such an article (e.g. born and raised  / critically acclaimed / of all time). In pairs get students to hunt for more chunks they can lift from the text and use for themselves.

(8) 

Focus on Organisation

Ask students to take one final look at the texts and decide how they are organised. Essentially, in both of them there is a general intro paragraph about the musician and then a second section going into more detail about their various achievements.

(9)

Follow-Up:

You have now focused the students’ attention on all of the necessary features of this genre. It’s now up to them to write something.

In small groups, get them to choose a teacher in the school and give them ten minutes to write a short Wikipedia entry on their life. Allow them to make up whatever crazy details they like. You’ll undoubtedly end up with “teachers who reached worldwide fame for their critically acclaimed present perfect lessons”.

When they’re finished, put them up around the room. Students walk around and vote on whose they like best and whose was most like a wikipedia entry.

Teachers use this time to move around and board some errors on the board and then correct as a group.

(10)

Reflection:

After this type of lesson, you really need to sit down and chat about what’s been achieved. Yes the students have created something, worked on their own errors, gather lots of vocab and discussed the present perfect but the real aim is autonomy!

You want them to take these skills outside and use them when they’re reading their own texts. We need them to be stealing their own chunks of language from their own texts.

Today you might meet a tall dark stranger – Horoscopes for Modals

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So as you know, we try, as much as possible, to use found authentic sources here, though sometimes we do write them ourselves.  This is in the former category, as I don’t fancy myself as a mystic meg.

Why horoscopes, well, basically, because one day as I was flicking through the paper I noticed they contained a lot of modals.  I’m not a big horoscope reader, but I’ve found that it is something that some, not all, students enjoy and can get into.

I would obviously recommend using the days horoscopes but have included two example ones taken from the independent to show what I mean.

I use this as a revision exercise of modals, so from Int upwards really.  I always try to get students noticing grammar in the real world.  The vocab is often very challenging but can be really good for working out meaning from context as hopefully I’ve shown in the worksheet.

For this you will either need copies of the days horoscopes or let them use their smartphones to access one, I used the Independent’s ones as they had quite a lot of good language in them and seemed to avoid lots of mentions of phases of the moon and other lexis that isn’t so high frequency.

Procedure:

Introduction

  1. Basic question to introduce topic
  2. Ask students to find their horoscope for the day, what does it predict? (if you have a really large class, you could start off altogether with one persons on the board and use that for the following exercises, before moving to students looking at other horoscopes.

Language analysis

  1. Ask Students to underline the modals in the text, there are normally a few. – see example worksheet
  2. Ask the students to match the modals to their function, are they talking about possibility / advice / prediction, etc.  Monitor and help sort out any problems / confusion.
  3. Synonym hunt, I have scaffolded it here, and as long you are all using the same paper, then you can do the same.  Otherwise, encourage students to write down the words they don’t know, and ask them to predict the meaning by substituting other words in their place.  Again, this will involve you monitoring and again, using one example with a large class may be more beneficial.

Possible extra:

You could, with higher levels, examine the other language that is contained in the examples.  Virgo contains lots of relative clauses, which could be good for Ints / Upp Ints.  Virgo also contains ‘Not only…, but also…’ good for higher levels.   Aries has some lovely ‘passives’ and ‘imperatives’.

Production:

  1. Ask the students to write / and/or record a horoscope, get them thinking about the style that is used and encourage them to use the appropriate modals and other language.
  2. If you have asked them to record it, then you can really work on pronunciation, getting them to think about the way it might be said, the added pauses to increase tension etc

Follow on:

  1. Ask the students to find a horoscope as homework and to underline the modals as they have done in class.  Also ask them to try to predict any unknown lexis.  Just to give them some extra noticing and vocab from context practice.

As I said at the beginning, I don’t see this as being a lesson for everyone, I predict some classes will like it while others won’t, which is ok.  You know your class, try it out on the classes it might work with.

I’m going back to my runes and crystal ball.

Brick by Brick – a lego based approach to writing

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So, this was an idea I have been knocking backwards and forwards for a while, I started using parts of it a few years ago, and the main idea is to try to treat writing as something which can be broken down, learnt and constructed rather than a mysterious thing that some can do and others can’t.

There are plenty of other blogs on here with a big focus on writing but the aim with this one is to try to do something a bit different.  Hopefully to appeal to visual learners and maybe even the kinaesthetic ones too.

Why lego? Well, lego is built of brightly coloured blocks.  Hopefully all else will become clearer later, if not, then write to me and tell me, as I really need to rethink this!!!

This lesson is focusing on improving essay writing, especially for exams, but it really can be done with lots of different styles, merely change the names/functions of the bricks.

I haven’t used bricks themselves here, but I have included an idea for them to be used later on in the procedure as an option.  I think their use could definitely be of benefit in certain classrooms and with particular classes.  But, as always trust your instincts, you know your class!

Aim: improve writing and enable students to better understand register required for academic writing

Level: High Int +

Time: 1hr +

Procedure:

Planning

  1. basic brainstorm – follow the worksheet and do all class feedback, checking the ideas and boarding ones you are happy with.

Register focus

2. Put students in pairs or groups and ask them to think of language you would / wouldn’t expect in an essay.

Answers: linkers / relative clauses / passives / passive reporting structures / high level vocab / modal verbs to soften / no phrasal verbs / no contractions / no idioms

They might not get them all, but that is fine.

Brick by Brick writing

This is the type of writing I sometimes get from newer students.

I’ve gone for a task-teach-task approach to this part of the lesson as I feel it allows you to measure current student ability better, especially with new classes.

3.1 The students work in pairs to discuss how the writing could be improved

3.2 Ask students to look at the building blocks and show them the example below them.  Get them to consider what each thing is doing to make the writing more formal and to improve it.  Ask them to underline the sections in the corresponding colours, so passives in green etc.

3.3 Controlled practice, ask students to drop in words from the blocks above to complete the sentence.

Obviously here, other options are possible

Moreover, it could be argued that older buildings may play a vital role in a country’s culture . Additionally / Therefore, their preservation could be important in future generations’ education.

3.4 Ask Students to use the approach on one of their ideas from planning section 1, get them to write it, monitor as they do so and prompt and suggest improvements, try to ensure they are using all of the different ‘bricks’.

3.5 Peer editing – ask the students to pass their sentences to other students who have to identify the different ‘bricks’ being used.  This could be done by underlining, or if you have different lego bricks it could be done by the students actually selecting different coloured bricks and putting them together to form a collection, end on end, so: green brick, blue brick, yellow brick, red brick, blue brick, representing the different language used.

3.6 Ask the students to reflect on their normal way of writing and how they think the planning section and how thinking about the writing may help.  It can be helpful here to pull out examples of their writing so that they can see how it could be improved.

3.7 Ask students to complete the essay for homework – remind them to use a plan, I often elicit a workable one from the class and board it before they leave.  Also stress that you are hoping to see the things looked at today, so modals / passives / higher level vocab.

You can even ask them to highlight this for you at home or when they come into class next.

Enjoy!

Materials: worksheet

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:

Home made listening texts

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So, earlier this year, quite a while ago now, we spoke at IATEFL and also watched a number of other talks, which was fantastic.  One thing that we noticed in our speech was how the audience got excited by the idea of making their own listening materials and so here are ideas based around doing that.

Something we’ve long felt to be true was that students need to be given access to listening materials that push them and that are also true to how people speak outside of the classroom.

One of the most interesting talks I went to was by John Hughes, you can find a link to his site at the bottom of this blog.  He spoke about setting up a situation with people and then just recording it and seeing what functional language came up.  In the spirit of investigation, and also as I think it really fits into the sort of thing we do, I have tried it a few times.  Guess what? It works really well.

So the idea is this.  Decide on a piece of functional language you want to teach, e.g. directions / buying things in a shop and just ask two/three people to have a conversation and record them.  I found giving the people realia, e.g. items in a shop situation, made it more natural.  This way you get all of the wonderful features of natural speech, fillers, false starts, discourse markers.  Rather than making it more difficult for listeners these often help in my opinion.  For more on listening definitely check Field’s excellent book, Listening in the language classroom.

Procedure:

  1. decide on situation
  2. record speakers, first recording is good, you want it to be natural
  3. listen for which language is used
  4. write a couple of basic gist questions
  5. set checking questions for grammar / vocab
  6. you can then get students to make their own recordings using the target language

E.g. what language was used to ask for directions “could you tell me where … is please?”

Other really useful things for lower levels could be questions about how many people are speaking, this can be really good for low levels.  I tend to subscribe to the view that grading the task not the text is equally appropriate for listenings, after all in the big wide English speaking world, students are not going to have things graded for them by native speakers!

http://elteachertrainer.com/

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

Grammar Girlfriend: The future

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Grammar girlfriend is my made up girlfriend that I use to tell stories to introduce language points. The idea is simple: your telling your students a story so there is a clear context for the language, it’s nice exposure for them to natural speech and story-telling and because it’s you and it’s “personal”, your students are much more engaged and invested than if it was written in a book or some random recording.

This is a very quick story that I use to examine how we express the future in English. Feel free to steal, adapt or just to take the basic idea of having a made-up grammar partner.

So my girlfriend (Actually my ex now) came home one day with a picture she’d bought at a market somewhere. She came in all happy and pleased with herself and tried to show me the picture. Now, I was playing Xbox so didn’t really pay much attention (maybe that’s why she’s now my ex). Anyway she asked me to hang the painting on the wall for her.

A few days later she comes home and there’s the painting lying against the wall where she left it. “David!” she says, “David! My painting!”.

Now at this point I have three things I can say to my girlfriend:

  1. Don’t worry, I’ll hang it tomorrow.
  2. Don’t worry, I’m going to hang it tomorrow.
  3. Don’t worry, I’m hanging it tomorrow.

At this point I display these three options on the board and explain that each of them is grammatically correct, each of them is possible in this situation and in each one the result is the same, the painting will be on the wall tomorrow but that each one gives my girlfriend different information.

The task for the students is to discuss each of them, decide what information each one tells her and which one I probably said.

  1. Don’t worry, I’ll hang it tomorrow. – I’ve only just decided about this and I hadn’t given it any thought before this moment.
  2. Don’t worry, I’m going to hang it tomorrow. – I thought about it before now and made the decision to hang it tomorrow.
  3. Don’t worry, I’m hanging it tomorrow. – Don’t worry darling, I thought about this before now, I’ve organised everything, I’ve bought a hammer and a nail and got my spirit-level out and all that jazz, it’s happening tomorrow…worry not my dear. 

Above is the info you’re looking for from the students, and obviously the answer is number 3. This usually leads to a discussion about the future in English and how it’s all about what the speaker wants to express to the listener and by using “will” alone, the learners are limiting themselves. You could also look at the fact that I said 3 but 1 was probably the truth.

Enjoy.

Quotes – the return

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Good afternoon from a sweltering London (words that don’t often appear together).  As some of you may have seen there is a lesson written months ago on Inversion that feature in quotes.  link below for those who haven’t seen it.

https://textploitationtefl.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/mini-lesson-inversion-in-quotes/

So it will come as no shock that we are going to return to some quotes.  I love them as they are little nuggets of text, great for prediction activities, great for grammar, and often chock full of interesting lexis.  Frankly, what is not to love.

This time rather than focusing on quotes for a particular grammar point, we are going to look at a collection of quotes and take what we can from them.  All sitting comfortably, then I will begin.

Obviously, you can use whichever quotes you want and use the same activities i have just picked out 4 that i felt i could make a lesson from and ones which might engage my students.

The ideas below are a sort of pick and mix of different activities, select the ones that you think would work with your students, the worksheet has some of these activities for the quotes i selected.  But really they should all transfer across.

Level: Int +

Ideas

1. Word Jumble – broken sentences need fixing (see worksheet)

2. Independent research – prediction and a reason for reading. Give the students the quotes and ask them to predict what type of film they came from, get them to chat in groups and explain why they think that and then ask them to try to find out which film they did come from using smart phones or computers. (I am sure that your students will have no problems doing this, but if they are remind them of quote marks.)  When they have found which film they come from ask them to find a summary and does the summary match their prediction?

Obviously, at this point it would be good to get the students to think about what they mean.

3. Grammar hunt – This is pretty easy as it is aimed at Ints, the conditional though may need some scaffolding, such as try to find a phrase that could be replaced by ‘if’.

4. rewriting – The most obvious thing to do with all quotes is to turn them to reported speech.  When I do this I prefer to give them a choice of reporting verbs so that they are reporting the meaning a little and not just relying on said/told.  I always find that students are ok with the backshift, it is the pronouns they tend to forget, so maybe remind them of that.  To raise the level of challenge I have put in extra tests like linkers.

5. Follow up – Encourage the students to watch one of the films.  Or you could watch one, or clips of one in class together – obviously giving the opportunity for work on vocab and pronunciation

Materials: Quotes – the sequel

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/what-to-watch/greatest-quotes/