A might well:The many forms of “might”

January 20, 2016 / textploitationtefl / 1 Comment

A borderline advanced student stopped me in the corridor the other day and asked me what the difference was between might, might as well and might well and for a moment I was stumped. He was holding his Upper Int coursebook on the grammar reference section for “might” and he made a very good point which was:

The Upper Intermediate book has exactly the same information as the Intermediate.

He was right, so I decided to look at it in a little bit more detail and came up with the lesson below.

The materials and the teaching notes are all in the same file and I’ve attached it as a PDF and as a WORD doc so that you can edit it if you like.

Enjoy

might-as-well – WORD doc
might-as-well – PDF

Could I ask your advice on something? Should / If I were you…

January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 / textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

This is a relatively straightforward test/teach/test type of lesson but there’s lots that you can do with it. I’ve put the basic lesson plan below and then a few suggestions for extra activities you could do.

The whole point of the lesson is to practise giving advice, largely using conditionals and should. It really encourages students to analyse language and hopefully to use it afterwards.

Level: Intermediate and above

Time: 2 – 3 hours

Materials:

Procedure:

(1)

Test:

As the first test, I like to walk in and tell my students a personal problem. I quite like pretending that it’s a real one and asking their real advice but that’s up to you, you could even say it’s your friend’s problem and your telling them about it. Here’s a problem I often start with:

So, my girlfriend rang me last night. Turns out she wants to move to Brazil. She says she can’t handle the weather here anymore and needs a change. I completely get it, going to Brazil would be amazing but we’ve got stable jobs here, things are going well, I’m really enjoying where I live right now…I just don’t know what to do.

We usually discuss it for a bit and then I say OK everyone, write down one piece of advice for me. (It’s a nice idea to give them a post-it note and then collect them in afterwards). you can come back to these pieces of advice later on.

(2)

Pre-Reading / Gist Reading

Display the picture of the 2 men on the board or hand them out and get sts to decide what they’re discussing.

Instruct sts to read through the dialogue and answer the questions on the top.

(3)

Language Focus: Advice structures

Get the students to read the dialogue again and underline any structures giving or asking for advice. They should find the obvious “should” and “if I were you” but also highlight the chunks of English “Do you mind if I ask your advice on something?”.

Very often students skim over language without really noticing what’s going on. The idea with this exercise if to get them in the habit of examining the structures they come across in the hopes they can reproduce them in the future.

The really interesting piece of language here is that the “If I were you” structure is used twice, once to give advice for future and once to comment on the past. Draw their attention to this and to the form as they’ll have the opportunity to practice it in a second.

(4)

Controlled Practice

Display one of the pictures and the problems from the set, whichever one you like.

In pairs, ask sts to write their reply to this person. Don’t give them too much in the way of guidelines here as this can produce some really interesting language. I like to give them a post-it note to do this on as then I can collect them in easily.

Correct any errors in advice that come up, board any other ways of giving advice that come up and any interesting language you find.

(5)

Freer Practice

Display the remaining problems and pictures around the room. Students walk around in pairs and give advice to the pictures.

Teacher monitors, helps out when necessary and notes down interesting errors and language.

Feedback as a whole class and correct anything that has arisen.

The Beatles – Dead or Alive!

December 3, 2015December 3, 2015 / textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

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:

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

Level: Int / Upper int

Time: 1.5 – 3 hours

Materials: wikipedia present perfect – BEATLES

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:

What type of text is this? Where does it come from?
How do you know? What clues are in the text?
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:

What are the main tenses used in the texts?
Is there any difference between the tenses used in John’s text and Paul’s text?
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.

Don’t trust everything you read!

February 24, 2015February 25, 2015 / textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

So, this lesson is designed to be taught as a follow up to teaching the dreaded verb patterns (stop, remember, forget, regret, try). I usually bring this out a few days after they’ve been taught. But it can also be used as part of a test, teach, test type lesson. If the students read it for errors before you teach these verbs and then reread it again at the end, they’re generally delighted that they can now identify the mistakes that completely eluded them at the beginning of the lesson. You can’t argue with that type of in-your-face improvement.

The main idea is to check their understanding of the differences between the gerund and infinitive versions of these verbs but also to get them to analyse language in a text and not just skim over it. The awwwwww moment when they realise that something they’ve happily read 3 or 4 times is riddled with errors is always fun to be a part of.

Materials: Smoking – gerunds and inf story

Procedure:

Feel free to do any sort of lead in about vices, smoking or health or to change the end of the story if you think it’s too depressing (although I find that happy stories don’t really generate much discussion in classrooms). I also think that the vocab sections are pretty run of the mill and there’s nothing special there really.

The interesting part is when you’ve finished discussing the topic and examining the vocab and you ask the students to go back and read the text for errors. You can then get them to underline all of the gerunds and infinitives in the text and decide which ones are correct and which ones need to be changed. The real kicker is when both are possible but have slightly different meanings.

What’s the big deal with phrasal verbs anyway?!

February 17, 2015March 3, 2015 / textploitationtefl / 4 Comments

This is quite a high level lesson and it came in response to students freaking out about Phrasal Verbs. My hope was to highlight the importance of learning phrasal verbs in context and not worrying so much about learning lists of them (something which the vast majority of students seem to be obsessed with).

However, when I taught this lesson the first time, I realised that the main issue students had was not with the phrasal verbs but with the pronouns in the text. They really had trouble deciding who they were referring to. So the second time I used this story I added in a section on referencing which the students found extremely useful.

If you’ve tried any of our other story-based lessons, you’ll notice some common activities but the really interesting part is the referencing. I’ve included a short procedure below but the worksheet is pretty easy to follow.

Material: pick up story

Procedure:

(1)

Creating interest in the story:

Show the students the title of the story and ask them what they think the story will be about. Ask them if they think it will be a happy story or a sad story.

(2)

First Reading / Discussion:

Get students to check their ideas from part 1 by skim reading the story and then discussing it. Discourage them from discussing vocabulary at this point.

(3)

Focus on Vocabulary:

Match the definitions to the language in the text.

Get students to underline all of the examples of “pick up” in the text. Ask them if it’s got the same meaning in each case. Using the context, ask them to come up with a definition or synonym for each situation.

It’s a good idea to have a little chat after this section on the importance of learning phrasal verbs in context and try to demystify them a little. The idea is to encourage students to notice them when they’re reading / listening and hopefully to not be as scared of them as they can often be.

(4)

Focus on Pronunciation:

Examine the features of connected speech in the direct speech from the story. It can sometimes be good to get the students to record themselves here so they can really focus on natural speech.

(5)

Referencing within a text:

Get students to follow the instructions on the worksheet. Really encourage them to work in pairs and to discuss this as they can have some real issues with this.

(6)

Follow-up Activities:

There’s lots you can do as a follow-up to this story.

I find it usually leads to a discussion about living in big cities how they can be lonely places or about Facebook “friends” etc.
You can also get students to write the story of how some of the characters met. The focus here can be on using the phrasal verbs in context or on referencing within the text.
On another occasion, I focused on the night John and Tina met. We expanded the connected speech section, discussed flirting and opening lines and then students created the dialogue and acted out their first meeting. This was obviously a lot of fun but the real challenge was getting them to mark the connected speech on the dialogue before they acted it out. For homework I asked them to try it again and to record themselves. We played them in the next lesson and there had been real improvement.

A bit of appropriacy please!

February 16, 2015February 25, 2015 / textploitationtefl / 2 Comments

So, I’ve had a little obsession with using text messages / whats-app style messages in class over the past few weeks, hence this is the second lesson I’m putting up about texting. Soz!

The main reason for this is that we tend to focus on language in classes and very often miss out on appropriacy. Trust me, as someone who spends a lot of their time in correspondence with students, appropriacy is something we need to be looking at. What I’m talking about here is both style (levels of formality) as well as register (the right words for the right context).

Just the other day a student started a spoken conversation with my by saying: “Dear David,”

This cannot continue. Something must be done. It starts here. Actually that’s probably a little bit too extreme but it’s definitely something to think about.

Procedure:

I think the procedure for this one is pretty self-explanatory as you just follow the worksheet but the really interesting thing is focusing on the features of a text message. Think about examining the following:

Informal vocabulary
Lack of punctuation (but not in all instances e.g. we’re could look like were)
Omitted words (e.g. You free on Tuesday?)
Shortened words (e.g. Tue / Fri)

A lovely follow up for this exercise for this is, once they have got the appropriate text message language down and have practised with one of their one, give each student a pile of post-it notes and tell them they are going to have a whatsapp group chat, making plans for the weekend. One person starts off the conversation by writing a message and placing it on the wall in front of the group. From then on the conversation happens in real time. Each student can reply to the message(s) that came before but they have to keep an eye on the thread as their partners may send the message they had planned to send. It’s quite fun but also ties the lesson together and makes error correction quite easy at the end as you have all of the physical messages.

Let us know how it goes, if you’d like a more detailed procedure, leave a comment and I’ll put something together.

Material:

A) Making plans Text messages worksheet

A Day in the Life – Elementary / Pre-Intermediate

January 20, 2015February 25, 2015 / textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

This lesson came after I started learning Spanish and the immense sense of achievement I got from reading and actually understanding a short story. I was fully aware that it was written entirely in the present simple and was probably the worst written story of all time and that the ending did not make sense in any language…but that didn’t matter, I’d read a story a I felt great.

This is a simple story for lower level students, hopefully giving them a similar feeling. There are a number of activities that go along with it but I particularly like the last one, in which the students write a text message from one character in the story to another. Students tend not to think about the different language you might put in a note/text as opposed to a story or a formal email. It’s important to draw attention to these differences and to practise different types of writing.

A) Material: A Day in the Life A Day in the Life

Procedure:

(1) Intro (Get the students thinking/predicting)

Get the students to give you a list of famous people. Choose one that they all know and ask them what they think they do on a normal day. Get some student suggestions up on the board and work through any present simple errors that come up. I’ve always found Tiger Woods works well for this…I can’t imagine why.

tiger

(2) Reading (Checking predictions)

Tell the students they are about to read a story about a new movie star. Ask them to give you a few ideas about what his average day is like. Board their ideas.

Give the students a limited time to read through the story. Negotiate this time with them but really highlight that you don’t want them to focus on every detail, you don’t want them worrying about vocab or grammar, you ONLY want them to check their predictions.

Let them discuss in pairs before feeding back as a class.

(3) Language focus 1: Vocab

(Giving the students access to the text / encouraging sts to move away from dictionaries)

Ask students what if they don’t understand a word. Have a discussion about how dictionaries have a time and a place but that there are other ways to understand a work (e.g. the context / the type of word / the surrounding words). Direct their attention to the vocab section.

When you’ve finished correcting this exercise, take a moment to ask the students how they found the answers. Reflect on it for a moment and ask them if they could have found the meanings without the help of the exercise.

(4) Detailed reading

Ask students to reread the story, negotiate the time again. Direct their attention to the true/false questions afterwards.

(5) Engage with the text (Encourage sts to have a real response to a text)

Let the students have a real reaction to the text. It’s not important that they loved the story, they could hate it with every fiber of their being but at least they have the chance to express that. Try a few of the following questions but feel free to add more:

Did you enjoy the story? / Did you like the characters? / Were you surprised by his answer? / Do you think any celebrities have similar lives? / Do you think he will have the same life in one year? / How much of the story do/did you understand? / How did you feel when you read the story?

(6) Language focus 2: Chunks of English

It’s nice, even from such a low level, to introduce sts to lexical chunks and different ways of using words they “know”. Draw their attention to walk in the story, ask them to underline all the examples and then to do the activity.

(7) Follow-up (Encourage students to use appropriate levels of formality)

Hand out a post-it note to each student and ask them to write the text message at the end of the worksheet. Give them 5 minutes and then take in the post-its. Don’t just look for mistakes, focus on unnatural language, get it up on the board and naturalise it with the students. As a class, build one perfect text message, highlighting the type of language as you go.

As a further follow-up or for homework, ask the students to write another text message in the space at the bottom of the page. This can be a reply to the one above or something more personal.

Life in the Countryside…the origins of Textploitation

January 15, 2015February 25, 2015 / textploitationtefl / 3 Comments

So, this was the first text that we textploited. It was a story that we wrote and decided to use in class. I’d been using it as a lesson for some time and then Mark got hold of it and added his own touches and now we’ve got it to a solid 3-hour lesson, which is quite flexible and gives the students a little bit of autonomy as they get to choose what exactly they do with it.

It’s also the text that we use to demonstrate Textploitation in any CPD sessions we do on it.

We’ve laid out a lesson plan below as well as a number of follow-up possibilities. The idea is that you can leave it up to the students what you focus on in the second part of the lesson.

Procedure:

Pre-Reading

Introduction: Activate a bit of schemata by asking the students whether they’d prefer to live in the city of the countryside.
Prediction: Explain to the students that they’re going to read a story about a couple living in the countryside and display the following words from the story: (Tread / muck out / the high life / godforsaken / vodka / farm / I’m used to / sunshine / heels). Ask them to predict what will happen in the story, explain that if they don’t know what a word mean, that’s OK, just ignore it. The idea here is that there will be some words they don’t know and without a context they can’t figure them out. Later when they have the context, they’ll be able to work out the meaning.

Reading:

Gist/Checking predictions: Give the students a few minutes to skim read the story and check their predictions.
Vocab (meaning from context): Focus the students attention on the vocab exercise below the story. Encourage them to use the context of the story to find the meaning and to stay away from dictionaries. (The idea here is to highlight the importance of context and encouraging them to avoid dictionaries – not that dictionaries aren’t great but they shouldn’t be a crutch.)
Reflection: Sit down and have a bit of an informal chat with the students. I like to lead by asking them if they thought the 9 pieces of lexis that I chose were important words for them to learn (e.g. pig pen). Are these words that they will use every day? The answer is obviously a resounding “no”! So why did we spend 15 minutes working on them? (You want to herd the students towards the understanding that you’re teaching them / practising a skill. You can also take the time to ask them why they thought they were unable to understand the key words before they read but were more than capable of understanding them once they’d read the texts.)
Engage with the text: This story tends to lead to quite a bit of discussion as it is very much open to interpretation. I like to take a moment here and explain to students that this is an example of Flash Fiction, which is shorter than a short story and perfect for a student of English who has ten minutes to spare on the bus. They are usually quite open to interpretation. There are two questions that I find really open up the discussion on this story and with any class this will lead to some lovely error correction:

Did you like the story? Why / why not? What would you change? what more would you like to know?
Who did you sympathise with most, Barry or Brenda?

Post-Reading

So, the second part of the lesson is very much up to the students. Ask them what they would like to focus on. I’ve given you a few different options below, one of which I stole from the wonderful Gillian Lazar, who wrote the amazing book: Approaches to Using Literature. I highly recommend checking it out if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

(1)

Focus on punctuation: Punctuation is one of those things that we assume translates from a student’s L1, however, this does not always seem to be the case. Take some of the direct speech from the story (which the students have probably read about 3 times at this stage) and write it on the board, removing the punctuation. Ask the students what punctuation they’d like to add. They will probably want to use colons, inverted commas at the base of the words, full stops outside the quotation marks or any other number of variations.

(2)

Keeping with the direct speech, draw students attention to the fact that both Barry and Brenda have one large piece of speech each. My advice would be to prerecord both sections on your phone naturally and then to use this to raise their awareness of connected speech.

And this was stolen from Gillian Lazar. Using the same pieces of speech, we want to encourage students to put a bit of emotion into what they’re saying, to move away from the monotonous robot speech. Try following these steps:

Get the students to say it to each other in pairs without any preparation.
Ask them to think about which words would be stressed and try it again.
Ask them to put down the sheet and do it again but adding in hand gestures.
One more time, but standing up, with emotion.
Finally, ask them to stand up, put down their sheets and try it from memory. Let them know that it doesn’t matter if they remember every word as long as they convey the message and capture the emotion.

Trust me, the difference between Step 1 and Step 5 is unbelievable. What you’re basically doing is drilling but by changing the instructions slightly each time, the students don’t get bored. Also, with each repetition they become less worried about the language and focus more on their delivery. It’s also loads of fun!

(3)

This story is only full of grammar (like any story). Let the students choose what they want to focus on: wishes / be + get used to / narrative tenses / direct – reported speech, and then just give them a few questions that will help them to uncover the grammar within.

For example, if they choose wishes, give them the following guided discovery activity and leave them to it:

underline all of the strong desires in the text.
Are they real/possible or imaginary/hypothetical?
What time do they refer to: past, present or future?
What is the form?

Check it as a class and then encourage them to make their own examples.

Materials

A) Life in the Countryside (Story + Exercises)

Reading skills – Newspaper articles

November 15, 2014June 23, 2015 / textploitationtefl / Leave a comment

This lesson basically came about when I recommended that all of my students read newspapers on a regular basis. The obvious reasons being, I wanted to widen their vocabulary, improve their reading skills and increase their cultural knowledge. It seemed so simple at the time.

After a week I asked them how they were getting on and they all dropped their heads sheepishly murmuring to themselves. I was about to give them a pompous little lecture on how they had to put more into their English studies as 3 hours a day in class wasn’t enough and all of that other stuff that we say, when one student piped up and said: I tried, I really did but I couldn’t get past the headline, if I can’t understand that, how can I understand the rest of the article?! (I’m paraphrasing here but you get the idea).

It was then that I realised I’d asked them to do something without giving them the tools to do it. The next day, I taught this lesson and sent them off into the world with no excuses…they still didn’t read very much but at least they had no excuses now.

Time: 90 minutes – 3 hours (depending on the optional language focus section)
Level: Pre-int and above
Aim: To raise your students’ awareness of the skills they need to tackle a newspaper article.
Sub aim: To encourage students to discuss possibilities in the past/present

Materials:

Pictures
Article and exercises
A variety of articles / a few free newspapers (if possible)

Procedure:

Opening discussion / outlining your aims: Put your students in small groups and ask them if they read newspapers in English. If not, why not. Feedback as a whole class. (you will probably get something about headlines here. feel free to explain puns to them but suggest that they ignore the headlines until after they’ve read the article as they often contain a cultural reference or pun and can be demotivating). Explain that by the end of the lesson they should have the tools/skills they need to read an authentic English article.
Prediction: Display the two pictures and ask sts why they think these two boys were in the paper and what their relationship was. Feedback and write students ideas on the board.
Optional language focus: Inevitably your students will have used “maybe” or “perhaps” or just present simple in their predictions. Explain that a native speaker would probably have used “might” at some point. Ask them to rewrite the predictions on the board using “might”. give them no help at this point. Feedback as a class and highlight how “might” works in the past and present. Further practice can be, if any student or teacher is absent from the school ask students why they think he/she is not here.
First reading: Give the sts the article and ask them to check their predictions. Ask them how long it will take them to read the whole article, then tell them they have 90 seconds. Tell them to focus only on their predictions and ignore language they don’t understand. feedback as a class. Briefly discuss how it doesn’t matter if all of their predictions are correct, just that they’re constantly making and correcting them based on new info.
Vocabulary focus: Ask students to underline all of the crimes the boys committed, even if they don’t understand them. Then draw their attention to the vocab exercise on the worksheet. Allow sts to work in pairs. After about 5 minutes, allow students to use their dictionaries to confirm their answers. Feedback as a class.
Second reading: Ask sts to reread the article in their own time and then in pairs to decide on the best summary from the worksheet.
Discussion: Place sts in groups, arrange them in a circle so that you are not a major presence. Direct their attention to the discussion questions and highlight that these are just to get their conversation going but they can move the discussion any way that feels natural.
Error correction/emergent language: Monitor carefully and divide your board into: Errors (you don’t need to put the titles on the board), interesting language and pronunciation. board student errors and the language they struggled for but couldn’t quite get and any words that they had issues pronouncing. Call an end to the discussion whenever you feel it’s appropriate and direct the sts in their groups to the board. Sts work together to correct the errors. Feedback as a class.
Skills focus: Ask sts to think back over the lesson and decide what the steps were. Direct them to the skills box on the worksheet and in pairs get them to match up the steps. discuss the final questions as a class.
Skills practice: Hand out the extra articles / papers and in small groups ask the students to choose an article and follow the steps. Monitor and help sts along when necessary but if possible, leave them to it.
Reflect: take a few minutes at the end to ask sts how they feel about articles and if they feel they could read them. Deal with any issues and highlight that it’s not important to understand everything and that it might be a good idea to start with shorter articles or articles on topics they are familiar with.

Writing skills – Restaurant Review

November 1, 2014November 9, 2014 / textploitationtefl / 1 Comment

Being someone who regularly teaches Exam skills, teaching writing plays a key part in my normal week. One of the main things I always try and do is focus students on key features of genre. These are things we often take for granted, so as well as vocab and grammar, I look a lot at what makes up register encouraging students to ‘notice’ the key features, such as genre specific vocab, sentence length, objective or subjective. It’s easy to forget that what we know and expect of a text might not for the student necessarily be the same, so it is often worth highlighting these things. This lesson also goes into paragraph structure and touches on theme and rheme (the topic and the comment made about it).

The aim is to give students the opportunity to produce a piece of writing that will have some interesting lexis, some grammatical range and cohesion.

For copyright reasons I wrote the review as I didn’t want ‘Time Out’ to kill me!

Level: Upper-intermediate and above

Time: 1.5-2hrs + homework

Aims:

To examine language used in restaurant reviews
To build learner autonomy
To teach genre specific high level adjectives
To prepare students for a piece of writing

Outcome:

The students will be prepared to write a restaurant review

Age group: Adults – especially FCE / CAE / CPE

Procedure

Discussion of restaurants / favourite foods / favourite flavours
Language focus: Vocab – working it out from the context / Grammar participle clauses
Pronunciation focus: matching the script to the new lexis
Writing: planning / cohesion
Practice: Writing a review

Materials