Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Back-to-Back


The old back-to-back game, excellent as a listening exercise.

Insert any pair work into the equation, have your student turn their chair around so your are back-to-back and work on finding the answers.

This works particularly well with pair-based gap fill activities, giving instructions or practising telephone drills.

Love it!

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Warm up games




There are loads of great EFL/ESL resources for teachers out there on the web, so to fill the time between me posting my own ideas I thought I'd share this excellent page with you; it offers 11 zero preparation ideas to get students warmed up and ready for class. My favourite is 'What does your name mean?' - Tenacious Original Beautiful Yuppie!

Happy teaching!

Monday, February 21, 2011

I 'used to' be happy

Teaching 'used to' is pretty straight forward, but getting students to actually use it is another matter.

Start your class by showing a picture of a person with 'today' written on it. Ask the s to tell you about them.

Show them a picture of another, completely different person with 'last year' written on it. Tell the s it is the same person. Ask them to tell you about the person last year.

Ask s to point out what has changed. What is not true about the person any more.

At this point demonstrate using 'used to be'/'used to do' etc. Remember, Did you use to...? (Not 'Did you used to...?)

Feed in a practice activity at this point.

Now get the s to draw two columns. Head one 'today' and one '1965'. Ask s to brainstorm things that were better/worse today and in 1965. i.e. music (1965), technology (today) etc... Adapt this activity to your knowledge, needs, interests etc.

Role play: A is a middle aged person who used to have a relationship with B in the sixties. You are meeting up for the first time in 40 years, having gone your seperate ways. A thinks everything today is wonderful and hates the sixties. B thinks everything today is aweful and loves the sixties. Use the ideas in the column to provide ideas during the role play. A should try to bring B around to their way of thinking, B the same. (in a 121 situation the teacher will have to be one of the pairs) Target the use of 'used to' and correct later.

Likely errors: missing the to, using a gerund instead of infinitive.

For more advance students you can tie in the teaching of 'would' as well as 'used to'