http://www.onestopenglish.com/ProfessionalSupport/Tips/scrivener_gapFill.htm
Teacher's Tips
For teachers of English
By Jim Scrivener author of the best-selling Learning Teaching and teacher trainer at International House in Budapest. New tips every month.
Glorious gaps
There seem to be an awful lot of gap-fill exercises in course books nowadays. And sometimes they can be rather dreary for students and teacher alike. Except for saying "Do exercise two" and then checking it when they finish, what on earth can you do with them?
Well, you could do this…100 metres sprintWith books closed, announce that students have exactly one minute to do the whole task. Say go and then stop after 60 seconds – when students have to close their books.
Gather student reactions to doing it quickly then ask them to look through more carefully, without a time limit, and see if they want to change any of their original answers. Only then, go through the answers together.Books shut task Do the task with books closed and you reading the text aloud.
Whenever there is a gap, make a beep noise instead and ask students to write down a word for each blank. At the end let them look at the text and see if they think their first answers were good, before you go through answers together.
Partial answers
When checking gap-fills that require students to choose between a number of possible words, at first only give partial answers. For example, tell them only how many of each choice there are e.g. There are 3 answers with “going to”.
This will make students re-check their answers to see if theirs fit this information – and it may cause them to rethink some choices.Teacher studentInstead of getting students to do it, do the task yourself on the board.
Ask students to check if you get all the answers right. Make two or three errors and see if people spot them. Get students to teach you how to correct your sentences.Mark the teacher!
Similarly, you could do the task on paper before class and hand out copies in class for students to mark.
Student teacher
At the end of a task ask a student to come to the front and be the teacher to check the task. Hand the student the answers and let them go through the class’s answers. Encourage them to ask people for reasons.
Dictated answers
Give students a chance to read through the gapped text then tell them that you’ll dictate all the answers to them – but in the wrong order. Students have to quickly find the right space for the words you read out.
Unreliable information
After they’ve finished a task pretend to be giving answers as normal, but without warning, tell them some right and some wrong answers. If a student challenges or questions you, argue fiercely for your answer. Give just enough encouragement to your critic to keep them challenging.
Finally give in – and congratulate them (and change your own answer)! Once students have the idea that you may not be an entirely reliable informant they will be more motivated to listen much more carefully – and think rather than just accepting your answers.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Saturday, July 16, 2005
Vocabulary Games
I'm not sure if this game is on the list under a different name but I thought I'd give it a whirl. The teacher divides the room into four corners: agree, somewhat agree, somewhat disagree, and disagree.
Then the teacher makes a statement like "Movie stars deserve to be paid huge sums of money for what they do." The students move to the corner that best depicts how they feel about the statement. The students in each corner have a few minutes to discuss why they feel this way and then their group presents. Depending on the type of statement made by the teacher, this game can be very serious, very funny, very political etc...
Cultural differences among students are highlighted in this game and debate can get intense.
Then the teacher makes a statement like "Movie stars deserve to be paid huge sums of money for what they do." The students move to the corner that best depicts how they feel about the statement. The students in each corner have a few minutes to discuss why they feel this way and then their group presents. Depending on the type of statement made by the teacher, this game can be very serious, very funny, very political etc...
Cultural differences among students are highlighted in this game and debate can get intense.
Questions Activity
My students love this game; i always use it as a stadby if things are lagging, or if we finish the lesson early.
You need a stack of small post-it notes. On each one (one for each student), write the name of a famous person or character. Get the students to sit in small groups (for a shorter game) or one big circle (for a longer and funnier game).
Then go round and stick a post-it note to everyone's forehead. When they have finished laughing at the names on everyone else's heads, and the fact that their calssmates all now look silly, they have to guess the name on their own note using a 20 Questions format (yes/no questions, a yes answer gets you another question, a no answer means the next person starts asking).
Use a variety of names: Disney characters, famous politicians, movie & pop stars, international sports gods (i.e. Beckahm, Ronaldo) and religious figures are all good.
You need a stack of small post-it notes. On each one (one for each student), write the name of a famous person or character. Get the students to sit in small groups (for a shorter game) or one big circle (for a longer and funnier game).
Then go round and stick a post-it note to everyone's forehead. When they have finished laughing at the names on everyone else's heads, and the fact that their calssmates all now look silly, they have to guess the name on their own note using a 20 Questions format (yes/no questions, a yes answer gets you another question, a no answer means the next person starts asking).
Use a variety of names: Disney characters, famous politicians, movie & pop stars, international sports gods (i.e. Beckahm, Ronaldo) and religious figures are all good.
Vocabulary Games
I did this with an adult intermediate ESL class. I had three colors of index cards, and each color had a different activity on it for students to pantomime for other students in front of the class. Each color was worth either 1, 2 or 3 points, depending on how difficult the activity was to describe. For instance, a 1 card might be "brushing your teeth" and a 3 might be "seeing a mouse in your house (eek!)".
You can adjust these to your class level. Break them into groups of three, and they can choose to have one person give all three clues to the class, or each person can give one...whatever they want. I give them one minute to describe all three things, and you score each team on the board. If teams tie, you can do playoffs with the more difficult questions.
I gave prizes to all for their participation, but the winning team got some extra goodies. This provides lots of laughs, and is best done at the end of class! (It is also important to do "word banks" if necessary before this activity in order to make sure the students know what the words in the clues mean. I did a word bank the class before I did the actual activity).
You can adjust these to your class level. Break them into groups of three, and they can choose to have one person give all three clues to the class, or each person can give one...whatever they want. I give them one minute to describe all three things, and you score each team on the board. If teams tie, you can do playoffs with the more difficult questions.
I gave prizes to all for their participation, but the winning team got some extra goodies. This provides lots of laughs, and is best done at the end of class! (It is also important to do "word banks" if necessary before this activity in order to make sure the students know what the words in the clues mean. I did a word bank the class before I did the actual activity).
Bingo
I think most people know the game bingo, and I am sure that there is a recipe for word bingo here. Just in case there is not I will quickly run through it. Each student gets a bingo grid 4x4 squares.
I write about 20 words on the board and ask them to choose 16 words and put one word in each square. As I call the words out the cross them off in order to make 4 in a row across, down or diagnal.
Ok so my Bingo with a twist is to use opposite words. I use this game after teaching about opposites to reinforce the ideas. So for example they write hot, fast, easy etc but I call out cold, slow, difficult etc. I have found it works well as they think about it more than they otherwise would and they find it more challenging than ordinary bingo. I played this with Junior 2 (age 12-14) and it worked very well!
I write about 20 words on the board and ask them to choose 16 words and put one word in each square. As I call the words out the cross them off in order to make 4 in a row across, down or diagnal.
Ok so my Bingo with a twist is to use opposite words. I use this game after teaching about opposites to reinforce the ideas. So for example they write hot, fast, easy etc but I call out cold, slow, difficult etc. I have found it works well as they think about it more than they otherwise would and they find it more challenging than ordinary bingo. I played this with Junior 2 (age 12-14) and it worked very well!
Vocabulary
I don't believe that no-one has thought of this game! What is wrong with a variation on the simple "I Went Shopping and I bought .........."?
Divide the class into groups. Then the teacher starts by saying "I Went to ...... and I bought........." (adapt it to suit your town). Then go around group by group and see how much your students remember.
I tried this with a junior middle school class and they surprisingly needed very little prompting. You just need to make sure that no-one in the class writes the list down as it is going around. You just need to make sure that the same students don't speak over and over again. Encourage everyone to participate.
Divide the class into groups. Then the teacher starts by saying "I Went to ...... and I bought........." (adapt it to suit your town). Then go around group by group and see how much your students remember.
I tried this with a junior middle school class and they surprisingly needed very little prompting. You just need to make sure that no-one in the class writes the list down as it is going around. You just need to make sure that the same students don't speak over and over again. Encourage everyone to participate.
verb tenses activity
Here is a short activity that you can use for practising the past form of "to be"
Step 1:
Teacher sticks some pictures of object on board with blu tack. E.g., a picture of a house, a picture of a toothbrush etc.Firstly, teacher revises the vocabulary by saying: “Look at the board. There is a picture of a house. There are two pictures of toothbrush etc.
Step 2:
Teacher asks students to close their eyes. Meanwhile s/he removes one picture on the board. After this, teacher asks students whether they can remember what picture is missing. If they say:” Yes, the picture of the house is missing, teacher says: “Yeas, there was a picture of a house on the board but is gone now. Teacher repeats this procedure.
Step 3:
Lastly, teacher removes all the sentences and asks students to repeat some of the sentences that were presented and writes them on board. Teacher asks students what all the sentences have in common. “Forms of to be” has to be the answer. Teacher continues by asking questions like: “Why did we use “was, were” in all the sentences? “ to raise their awareness.
Variations:
This activity could also be done as a group activity. Groups write down the sentences like as follows: “There was a picture of a house on the board. If they have correct sentences, teacher gives one point for each correct sentence.
Step 1:
Teacher sticks some pictures of object on board with blu tack. E.g., a picture of a house, a picture of a toothbrush etc.Firstly, teacher revises the vocabulary by saying: “Look at the board. There is a picture of a house. There are two pictures of toothbrush etc.
Step 2:
Teacher asks students to close their eyes. Meanwhile s/he removes one picture on the board. After this, teacher asks students whether they can remember what picture is missing. If they say:” Yes, the picture of the house is missing, teacher says: “Yeas, there was a picture of a house on the board but is gone now. Teacher repeats this procedure.
Step 3:
Lastly, teacher removes all the sentences and asks students to repeat some of the sentences that were presented and writes them on board. Teacher asks students what all the sentences have in common. “Forms of to be” has to be the answer. Teacher continues by asking questions like: “Why did we use “was, were” in all the sentences? “ to raise their awareness.
Variations:
This activity could also be done as a group activity. Groups write down the sentences like as follows: “There was a picture of a house on the board. If they have correct sentences, teacher gives one point for each correct sentence.
Vocabulary
A good chain speaking game to get your reticent students talking and let you take a breather. It also makes students listen to each other better and gives them more confidence in their speaking ability. Good for high beginner onwards (students that can form coherent sentences).
1) Write some interesting, open-ended situation on the board. Keep it simple, but full of possibilities for development. Use your imagination. For example, "I was walking downtown. It was dark, and very late at night. The street was empty. It was really scary. Suddenly a rough voice from behind me shouted, 'Gimme all your money!'"
2) Have one student read the sentence aloud, and then it's that student's turn to go first.
3) He or she has to make a (only one!) sentence that logically connects to yours. For example, "I turned around and saw a fierce-looking mugger with a long knife." Then another student goes next, etc.
4) Students take turns building on each others' sentences to make a vivid, compelling story that is all their own.
5) Sit back and correct their grammar if you feel like it, or give them some help, and/or contribute yourself to the story formation.
Tips:
a) encourage students to spin out long, not short, stories
b) have advanced students bring to class their own open-ended story starters
1) Write some interesting, open-ended situation on the board. Keep it simple, but full of possibilities for development. Use your imagination. For example, "I was walking downtown. It was dark, and very late at night. The street was empty. It was really scary. Suddenly a rough voice from behind me shouted, 'Gimme all your money!'"
2) Have one student read the sentence aloud, and then it's that student's turn to go first.
3) He or she has to make a (only one!) sentence that logically connects to yours. For example, "I turned around and saw a fierce-looking mugger with a long knife." Then another student goes next, etc.
4) Students take turns building on each others' sentences to make a vivid, compelling story that is all their own.
5) Sit back and correct their grammar if you feel like it, or give them some help, and/or contribute yourself to the story formation.
Tips:
a) encourage students to spin out long, not short, stories
b) have advanced students bring to class their own open-ended story starters
Vocabulary Battleship
This is an exciting game for all students where they must simply find random words on a printed page. First make a photocopy of a page of text, maybe from a novel or text book. It should be fairly dense with words for advanced students and a lot less dense for beginners.
Then paste that photocopy on a larger blank sheet of paper. Just above the pasted on photocopy evenly write A,B,C,D to about J and along the side write numbers from one to about twelve. That way when a student finds a word he can pinpoint the location and like in Battleships announce F-6 or B-12 to prove he found it.
Now make enough copies for all the students in your class. Your preparation is done. In class hand out the prints and on the blackboard draw an elongated grid that should resemble straight race track with one lane for each row in the class. Number the lanes so row one is team one, etc.
Then break up the horizontal lanes by evenly drawing eight vertical lines. Write the word GOAL or FINISH at the end and lets play. Call out a word from anywhere on the page. Try an easy word like HAVE or THIS at first to let the slower kids know they can play too. Use it in a sentence if you want. The students must scan the print and the first student to find the word you called out should raise his hand.
You ask him where the word is and he should say F-6 or something like that. If he is right draw a chalk circle on his team's grid in the first section on the track. Make sure you cross out the word on your copy so you don't call it again.
Call out another word, maybe a more difficult one to make it challenging for the better students. Each time a student finds the right word draw a circle on their team's lane, erasing the previous circle until one team completes the course. At the end give the winning team a hand of applause. My kids liked this game a lot.
Then paste that photocopy on a larger blank sheet of paper. Just above the pasted on photocopy evenly write A,B,C,D to about J and along the side write numbers from one to about twelve. That way when a student finds a word he can pinpoint the location and like in Battleships announce F-6 or B-12 to prove he found it.
Now make enough copies for all the students in your class. Your preparation is done. In class hand out the prints and on the blackboard draw an elongated grid that should resemble straight race track with one lane for each row in the class. Number the lanes so row one is team one, etc.
Then break up the horizontal lanes by evenly drawing eight vertical lines. Write the word GOAL or FINISH at the end and lets play. Call out a word from anywhere on the page. Try an easy word like HAVE or THIS at first to let the slower kids know they can play too. Use it in a sentence if you want. The students must scan the print and the first student to find the word you called out should raise his hand.
You ask him where the word is and he should say F-6 or something like that. If he is right draw a chalk circle on his team's grid in the first section on the track. Make sure you cross out the word on your copy so you don't call it again.
Call out another word, maybe a more difficult one to make it challenging for the better students. Each time a student finds the right word draw a circle on their team's lane, erasing the previous circle until one team completes the course. At the end give the winning team a hand of applause. My kids liked this game a lot.
Vocabulary/Drawing Game
I don't know if this game has been mentioned yet, but I find it to work effectively with my Korean students.
First, I divide the class into two teams and I draw a line down the center of the board. I have a student from each team come to me and I secretly show them a picture. These two students then go to the board and after I count to 3, they draw the picture as fast as they can. The first team to guess the picture gets a point. Then I choose two different students to draw. The team with the most points wins! This game is obviously very similar to Pictionairy.
First, I divide the class into two teams and I draw a line down the center of the board. I have a student from each team come to me and I secretly show them a picture. These two students then go to the board and after I count to 3, they draw the picture as fast as they can. The first team to guess the picture gets a point. Then I choose two different students to draw. The team with the most points wins! This game is obviously very similar to Pictionairy.
Upper Intermediate Games
This isn't my idea, but it's an activity that deserves to be on Dave's site as it's adaptable and fun, and so here's the version I've used. It's useable with pre-intermediate students (as long as they are confident) to advanced students, and requires at least forty minutes.
Firstly, you need to set the scene for your students, and create a little atmosphere, as you are going to strand them on a desert island.Start with drawing a picture of the sea, and then add a ship. Tell them that they are on the ship, and then get them to name it and give the destination... Elicit a story!
Then draw a giant rock or iceberg, and sink the boat just like in "Titanic". Tell them that just as the ship goes down they spot an island on the horizon, and so they start to swim for it. As they are swimming they come across a box floating in the sea, and they open it up to discover several items.....
At this point, what you really want is a bag full of objects that you've kept under you desk, some should be obviously useful for life on a desert island, and some should require more imagination to use. Now, reveal them one by one.I use:
a pencil, a radio, a knife and fork, a metal bowl, a towel, a sewing kit, a camera, a minature bottle of whiskey, a map of the world, a box of matches, a toothbrush, a mirror, a novel, some antiseptic ointment, a compass, and a magnifying glass. I also use an axe and a rope, but as I don't have either of these I have to draw them on the board.Why not throw in a cuddly toy, jar of chillis, etc?
Get the students to name them as you reveal them, and teach any unknown vocabulary.Ask the students how each item could be useful. I do this as a class. Then tell the students they can only carry five items to the island, and that they must choose which five.
This usually stimulates questions about the island, such as, "are there any dangerous animals on the island?" "Are there any mountains, trees, etc?"You can decide on these details.Get each student to write their list of five items individually, and then place them in groups and get them to compare, and write a new list together.
Finally, the lists can be written on the board, and similarities and differences discussed. My students are not always the most willing to speak or the most able, but they got into this activity, and came out with some imaginative uses for objects, eg using some physics to turn the radio into an SOS transmitter.
Adapt the items, and the number of items as you wish. If you wanted you could get them to rank order them, or possibley the "stranded students" could discover Ben Gunn's Shop on the island and have to bid for them. Remember, at all times, be an enthusiastic storyteller and creater!
Firstly, you need to set the scene for your students, and create a little atmosphere, as you are going to strand them on a desert island.Start with drawing a picture of the sea, and then add a ship. Tell them that they are on the ship, and then get them to name it and give the destination... Elicit a story!
Then draw a giant rock or iceberg, and sink the boat just like in "Titanic". Tell them that just as the ship goes down they spot an island on the horizon, and so they start to swim for it. As they are swimming they come across a box floating in the sea, and they open it up to discover several items.....
At this point, what you really want is a bag full of objects that you've kept under you desk, some should be obviously useful for life on a desert island, and some should require more imagination to use. Now, reveal them one by one.I use:
a pencil, a radio, a knife and fork, a metal bowl, a towel, a sewing kit, a camera, a minature bottle of whiskey, a map of the world, a box of matches, a toothbrush, a mirror, a novel, some antiseptic ointment, a compass, and a magnifying glass. I also use an axe and a rope, but as I don't have either of these I have to draw them on the board.Why not throw in a cuddly toy, jar of chillis, etc?
Get the students to name them as you reveal them, and teach any unknown vocabulary.Ask the students how each item could be useful. I do this as a class. Then tell the students they can only carry five items to the island, and that they must choose which five.
This usually stimulates questions about the island, such as, "are there any dangerous animals on the island?" "Are there any mountains, trees, etc?"You can decide on these details.Get each student to write their list of five items individually, and then place them in groups and get them to compare, and write a new list together.
Finally, the lists can be written on the board, and similarities and differences discussed. My students are not always the most willing to speak or the most able, but they got into this activity, and came out with some imaginative uses for objects, eg using some physics to turn the radio into an SOS transmitter.
Adapt the items, and the number of items as you wish. If you wanted you could get them to rank order them, or possibley the "stranded students" could discover Ben Gunn's Shop on the island and have to bid for them. Remember, at all times, be an enthusiastic storyteller and creater!
speaking games
For intermediate level students or above. I have used this with adults and teenagers. The teenagers really get into the characters, even cheering for their favourite singer. Students have to activate all tenses: present, past and present perfect, even future, in a more real life situation (i.e. they have to resond on the spot). They make lots of mistakes, but appreciate the practice and really enjoy themselves.
Divide the class in two - famous people and television interviewers. If there is an odd number, then one extra famous person. The famous people have to choose and state who they will be. For the odd number, two people are a famous couple. I write their names on the board with their chosen personality beside it.
Then I assign one journalist to each personality, and note this also on the board. The journalists work together in one group to prepare questions for their famous person, helping each other with ideas. I explain that they are responsible for the running of the interview.
They have to introduce their person, keep the questioning going, encourage the person to expand, and end it when they realise it is over. I go around and check that their questions are correct grammatically and offer ideas. I insist on not just boring questions, but more juicy ones based on their knowledge of this personality.
The other group is the famous people who have to dredge up all the information they know or the others in the group know of their personality. They can ad lib information if needed, but must keep in character. They must discuss this in English to prepare themselves for the questioning. They do not know what the questions will be, so are the ones with the hardest task. Usually it is the students who are most outgoing or strongest in the class.
Then the next stage is one pair after the other of interviewer and famous person sitting in front of the class and talking to us, the TV audience.
It takes from one to one and a half hours in total. I take notes but do not interrupt the interview. At the end of each interview we applaud. At the very end I ask for feedback and offer general comments on their performances and groups of gramatical or vocabulary errors. It's a very popular game.
Divide the class in two - famous people and television interviewers. If there is an odd number, then one extra famous person. The famous people have to choose and state who they will be. For the odd number, two people are a famous couple. I write their names on the board with their chosen personality beside it.
Then I assign one journalist to each personality, and note this also on the board. The journalists work together in one group to prepare questions for their famous person, helping each other with ideas. I explain that they are responsible for the running of the interview.
They have to introduce their person, keep the questioning going, encourage the person to expand, and end it when they realise it is over. I go around and check that their questions are correct grammatically and offer ideas. I insist on not just boring questions, but more juicy ones based on their knowledge of this personality.
The other group is the famous people who have to dredge up all the information they know or the others in the group know of their personality. They can ad lib information if needed, but must keep in character. They must discuss this in English to prepare themselves for the questioning. They do not know what the questions will be, so are the ones with the hardest task. Usually it is the students who are most outgoing or strongest in the class.
Then the next stage is one pair after the other of interviewer and famous person sitting in front of the class and talking to us, the TV audience.
It takes from one to one and a half hours in total. I take notes but do not interrupt the interview. At the end of each interview we applaud. At the very end I ask for feedback and offer general comments on their performances and groups of gramatical or vocabulary errors. It's a very popular game.
Upper Intermediate Games
I have used this game to get my upper-intermediate class talking. They get very competitive and forget about making mistakes. This is a very simple game, but I've written down the directions in excruciating detail since sometimes I find simple directions can be confusing--so bear with me!
Fold a letter-sized sheet into eight rectangles. On each rectangle make a list of 10 common, everyday words--they must be words that students not only recognize but can pull from their own vocabularies. Each list should have ten words on it, five if the class is low intermediate.
I usually do this by writing down one word of a certain category on each list (rather than ten words on the first rectangle, ten words on the 2nd rectangle, etc.) By filling all the lists simultaneously you make sure that each list has the same difficulty level and a variety of words.
For example, start with a category like kitchen objects and write one object on each of the eight lists: fork, spoon, knife, plate, pot, napkin, glass, stove. Other categories might be animals, rooms in a house, places of business, clothes, body parts, months, numbers, classroom objects, etc.
Mark "team 1" on four of the lists and "team 2" on the other four.
Make 2 copies of these lists. Keep one for yourself and cut the other into the 8 lists. Keep them hidden until you are ready to hand them (one at a time) to a clue-giver when he/she comes to sit up front.
My classes are small, from 4 to 8 students, so eight lists are more than enough for each person to have a turn giving clues. You can make more than eight lists, but it gets harder to come up with easy words for ten or twelve lists.
Divide the class into two teams. One student sits on a chair at the front of the class and gives clues to his teammates so that they will guess his words. Each team has 2 or 3 minutes (you decide, depending on the level of the students) to guess all 10 words on their clue-giver's list. Use an egg timer or look at the clock.
When the first team has guessed at their first list then the second team sends up a clue-giver to give clues about one of their lists. This continues until both teams have had a chance at guessing at the words on all four of their lists.
Clue-giving rules are 1) no using hand gestures and no looking at an object that might be in the room--students may have to sit on one hand and hold their list with the other 2) no "sound effects"--if the word is "dog" they may not bark 3) the clue-giver may not say any part of the word, for example if the word is swimming pool, she may not say "swim" as part of the clue.
You must keep a copy of all the lists to look at as students play. If any of the above three rules are broken, you tell the team that they have disqualified that word and the clue-giver should continue with the next word on the list. The clue-giver may pass any word and come back to it later. Encourage students to do "easy" words first and come back to words they are having trouble with. Check off each word a team guesses on your sheet and tally the points after both teams have guessed at their four lists.
This game is possible with lower intermediate students but you should give them a chance to work with a partner on their team (before playing) to come up with clues. Otherwise they have no idea what to say and use up their time with thinking.
Because the prepositions are so difficult to deal with and can make or break meaning, it is also a good idea to practice some sentence forms they might need beforehand: this is something you use to cook with, this is something you sit on, this body part is between your head and your shoulders, you put these things on your feet, etc.
Fold a letter-sized sheet into eight rectangles. On each rectangle make a list of 10 common, everyday words--they must be words that students not only recognize but can pull from their own vocabularies. Each list should have ten words on it, five if the class is low intermediate.
I usually do this by writing down one word of a certain category on each list (rather than ten words on the first rectangle, ten words on the 2nd rectangle, etc.) By filling all the lists simultaneously you make sure that each list has the same difficulty level and a variety of words.
For example, start with a category like kitchen objects and write one object on each of the eight lists: fork, spoon, knife, plate, pot, napkin, glass, stove. Other categories might be animals, rooms in a house, places of business, clothes, body parts, months, numbers, classroom objects, etc.
Mark "team 1" on four of the lists and "team 2" on the other four.
Make 2 copies of these lists. Keep one for yourself and cut the other into the 8 lists. Keep them hidden until you are ready to hand them (one at a time) to a clue-giver when he/she comes to sit up front.
My classes are small, from 4 to 8 students, so eight lists are more than enough for each person to have a turn giving clues. You can make more than eight lists, but it gets harder to come up with easy words for ten or twelve lists.
Divide the class into two teams. One student sits on a chair at the front of the class and gives clues to his teammates so that they will guess his words. Each team has 2 or 3 minutes (you decide, depending on the level of the students) to guess all 10 words on their clue-giver's list. Use an egg timer or look at the clock.
When the first team has guessed at their first list then the second team sends up a clue-giver to give clues about one of their lists. This continues until both teams have had a chance at guessing at the words on all four of their lists.
Clue-giving rules are 1) no using hand gestures and no looking at an object that might be in the room--students may have to sit on one hand and hold their list with the other 2) no "sound effects"--if the word is "dog" they may not bark 3) the clue-giver may not say any part of the word, for example if the word is swimming pool, she may not say "swim" as part of the clue.
You must keep a copy of all the lists to look at as students play. If any of the above three rules are broken, you tell the team that they have disqualified that word and the clue-giver should continue with the next word on the list. The clue-giver may pass any word and come back to it later. Encourage students to do "easy" words first and come back to words they are having trouble with. Check off each word a team guesses on your sheet and tally the points after both teams have guessed at their four lists.
This game is possible with lower intermediate students but you should give them a chance to work with a partner on their team (before playing) to come up with clues. Otherwise they have no idea what to say and use up their time with thinking.
Because the prepositions are so difficult to deal with and can make or break meaning, it is also a good idea to practice some sentence forms they might need beforehand: this is something you use to cook with, this is something you sit on, this body part is between your head and your shoulders, you put these things on your feet, etc.
Correcting Game
First just let me say thanks to the other contributors for their ideas. As a token of my gratitude, here's my humble contribution. It isn't original, but it doesn't require any handouts and can be prepared very quickly for any small group at any level.
Divide the class into two teams. Write up 10-15 sentences on the board, and tell the class that each one contains a mistake. (Tell them to read the phrases and look for the mistakes as you are writing them up - no time wasted!)
Naturally the phrases should be graded according to the level of the group, and ideally should concentrate on points of grammar and vocabulary which you have studied recently and/or on typical mistakes which students make at that level - if like me you keep a record of mistakes made by students during the lesson this is an unthreatening, anonymous and fun context in which to highlight them.
When you've finished, give each team 100 points. Team A chooses a phrase for Team B to correct - obviously they'll choose a difficult phrase (i.e. one they're not sure about!) - this gives plenty of scope for a bit of friendly nastiness! Team B decides how many points they'd like to gamble (obviously the more confident they are, the more points they'll gamble), and after consulting for a minute they give their answer.
If they identify the mistake, they add these points to their total. If not, they lose them. Team A then get a chance to pick up bonus points by correcting the phrase - if they can they get the points that Team B bet. (This means they will be consulting at the same time, so everyone's brain will be focussed on the phrase.)
It's then the turn of Team B to choose a phrase for Team A to correct. (Cross out the phrases already chosen.) The maximum bet should be 100 points, otherwise there is the risk that one team will run away with the game very quickly. It can take a while (impose a strict time limit for consultation) but the level of concentration even from students who usually don't worry too much about how correct their English is can be miraculous!
Divide the class into two teams. Write up 10-15 sentences on the board, and tell the class that each one contains a mistake. (Tell them to read the phrases and look for the mistakes as you are writing them up - no time wasted!)
Naturally the phrases should be graded according to the level of the group, and ideally should concentrate on points of grammar and vocabulary which you have studied recently and/or on typical mistakes which students make at that level - if like me you keep a record of mistakes made by students during the lesson this is an unthreatening, anonymous and fun context in which to highlight them.
When you've finished, give each team 100 points. Team A chooses a phrase for Team B to correct - obviously they'll choose a difficult phrase (i.e. one they're not sure about!) - this gives plenty of scope for a bit of friendly nastiness! Team B decides how many points they'd like to gamble (obviously the more confident they are, the more points they'll gamble), and after consulting for a minute they give their answer.
If they identify the mistake, they add these points to their total. If not, they lose them. Team A then get a chance to pick up bonus points by correcting the phrase - if they can they get the points that Team B bet. (This means they will be consulting at the same time, so everyone's brain will be focussed on the phrase.)
It's then the turn of Team B to choose a phrase for Team A to correct. (Cross out the phrases already chosen.) The maximum bet should be 100 points, otherwise there is the risk that one team will run away with the game very quickly. It can take a while (impose a strict time limit for consultation) but the level of concentration even from students who usually don't worry too much about how correct their English is can be miraculous!
Paired Activities
This one is really fun!Bring several pictures to class. Postcards are great: they come in a variety of images: art, publicity, landscapes, cartoons, abstract or classical paintings, public figures...Then pair the students and give a card to only one of them.
The student with the card has to describe the image to his partner, who doesn't see it. As he listens to the description, the student who doesn't have the picture is asked to draw what the partner is saying. When this is finised, compare the originals and the copies with the entire class. You can use this step to introduce comparatives (on the first picture the sun is smaller, bigger...)and induce discussion.
The student with the card has to describe the image to his partner, who doesn't see it. As he listens to the description, the student who doesn't have the picture is asked to draw what the partner is saying. When this is finised, compare the originals and the copies with the entire class. You can use this step to introduce comparatives (on the first picture the sun is smaller, bigger...)and induce discussion.
Vocabulary Games
This is a good one. You don't need anything except a blackboard and a few pieces of paper. Divide the class into teams of 2,3,4 or even 5 kids and seat each team around around a desk or a group of shoved together desks.
Each group must have a piece or two of blank paper and one student in each group will need to be a secretary. Next, evenly spaced out on the board you need to write Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, etc., depending on how many teams you have. Big groups are fine. I had a great time once with eight teams.
So now with the desks arranged and the blackboard prepped you are ready to play. It is very simple. You will announce a general topic to the entire group such as "fruits and vegetables" or "animals" or "holidays" or "irregular verbs" or "adjectives" or "Hollywood actors" or "fast food items."
Adjust the topics to the level of your students. The groups then will have just one minute to "brainstorm" and write on their piece of paper as many English words related to the topic as they can. So if the topic is animals they will probably write words like bear, horse, pig, etc.
After one minute announce time is up and make sure the writing stops. Then do an eeny, meeny miney, mo or my mother and your mother were hanging up clothes to see which team can go first and ask the chosen team to tell you one word - just one word from their brainstorm list.
You will then clearly pronounce the word and write it beneath their team number on the board. Then in turn ask the other teams for one word from their lists. Now here's the catch and the "rummy" part of the game. Once a word has been written on the board another team may not use it, even if they have that word on their brainstorm list. (I love it when they groan.)
Keep asking each team in turn for a word keep writing it on the board until they run out of words. The team with the most words wins the round. I make a chalk mark by their team number to indicate the winners and then announce another topic. The winner of the last game should go first in the next round and that's it.
Each group must have a piece or two of blank paper and one student in each group will need to be a secretary. Next, evenly spaced out on the board you need to write Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, etc., depending on how many teams you have. Big groups are fine. I had a great time once with eight teams.
So now with the desks arranged and the blackboard prepped you are ready to play. It is very simple. You will announce a general topic to the entire group such as "fruits and vegetables" or "animals" or "holidays" or "irregular verbs" or "adjectives" or "Hollywood actors" or "fast food items."
Adjust the topics to the level of your students. The groups then will have just one minute to "brainstorm" and write on their piece of paper as many English words related to the topic as they can. So if the topic is animals they will probably write words like bear, horse, pig, etc.
After one minute announce time is up and make sure the writing stops. Then do an eeny, meeny miney, mo or my mother and your mother were hanging up clothes to see which team can go first and ask the chosen team to tell you one word - just one word from their brainstorm list.
You will then clearly pronounce the word and write it beneath their team number on the board. Then in turn ask the other teams for one word from their lists. Now here's the catch and the "rummy" part of the game. Once a word has been written on the board another team may not use it, even if they have that word on their brainstorm list. (I love it when they groan.)
Keep asking each team in turn for a word keep writing it on the board until they run out of words. The team with the most words wins the round. I make a chalk mark by their team number to indicate the winners and then announce another topic. The winner of the last game should go first in the next round and that's it.
Present Continuous
Activity Description:
Group in circle, first person turns to person next to them and mimes an action ,say brushing their teeth. The person next to them asks "what are you doing" the first person says anything but brushing their teet, say "I'm tying my shoelaces" that person now starts miming tying their shoelaces and the person next to them asks "what are you doing" they could say "I'm flying a kite" and then that person starts miming flying a kite then next person in the circle asks "what are you doing" and so on.. around the circle.
Group in circle, first person turns to person next to them and mimes an action ,say brushing their teeth. The person next to them asks "what are you doing" the first person says anything but brushing their teet, say "I'm tying my shoelaces" that person now starts miming tying their shoelaces and the person next to them asks "what are you doing" they could say "I'm flying a kite" and then that person starts miming flying a kite then next person in the circle asks "what are you doing" and so on.. around the circle.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Jeopardy
Here are some Jeopardy categories that I use with French high school students (14-16 years old). Some of the categories are only appropriate to french speakers.
Single Jeopardy
Give the American equivalent
100 I live in a flat. (apartment)
200 My brother’s favorite game is football. (soccer)
300 Put the suitcase in the boot of my car. (trunk)
400 We queued up for two hours. (stood in line)
500 Excuse me, could you pass me a rubber? (an eraser)
600 It’s time to change the baby’s nappy! (diaper)
100 The underground is a very efficient transportation system. (subway)
200 His glasses make him look smart. (fashionable)
300 Would you like a biscuit? (cookie)
400 Take the lift to the 10th floor. (elevator)
500 I need some more petrol for my car. (gasoline)
600 Pardon me, could I have one of your fags? (cigarettes)
Anglophone Capital Cities
100 Canada (Ottawa)
200 India (New Delhi)
300 South Africa (Cape Town, Pretoria, and Bloemfontein)
400 Australia (Canberra)500 Kenya (Nairobi)
600 New Zealand (Wellington)
Say the Number
100 17, 593
200 1/3
300 734,792
400 117, 770.3
500 89,135,964.4
600 1,000,000,000
Name the primary language spoken in these countries:
100 China (Chinese)
200 Korea (Korean)
300 Brazil (Portugese)
400 Russia (Russian)
500 Norway (Norwegian)
600 Holland (Dutch)
Name 3
100 Vegetables
200 Cities in Canada
300 Articles of clothing
400 Holidays
500 American presidents (before 1900)
600 Planetsothers: pieces of furniture, rivers in the USA, mountain ranges in the Americas
Double Jeopardy
Say the date aloud – all are 20th century (mm/dd/yy)
100 12/25/55
200 5/7/75
300 6/6/44
400 3/13/76
500 5/30/45
600 7/25/42
Trivia
100 Who wrote Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet? (Shakespeare)
200 In what building does the American president live? (The White House)
300 What river runs through the city of New Orleans? (The Mississippi)
400 What year was the American Revolution? (1776)
500 What U.S. President was assassinated in 1865? (Lincoln)
600 When was the American Civil War? (1861-1865)
harder
Who wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? (Mark Twain)
harder What’s the most widely spoken language in the world? (Chinese)
harder What’s the approximate population of the U.S.A.? (250 million)
harder What’s the longest river in the U.S.A.? (Missouri)
Name the nationality’s adjective
100 France (French)
200 Ireland (Irish)
300 Japan (Japanese)
400 Mexico (Mexican)
500 Germany (German)
600 Greece (Greek)
Country Names (translate to English)
100 L’Allemagne (Germany)
200 L’Inde (India)
300 La Mexique (Mexico)
400 Le Maroc (Morocco)
500 Le Royaume Uni (The United Kingdom)
600 Les Pays Bas (The Netherlands, or Holland)
Countable or Uncountable?
100 banana C
200 excitement UC
300 information UC
400 advice UC
500 experience C
600 fact C
A, an or The?
100 Paris is ___ capital of France. (the)
200 What ___ nice jacket! (a)
300 Picasso was ___ artist. (an)
400 Would you please turn down ___ music? (the)
500 There's ___ bug in my drink! (a)
600 It takes 10 hours by plane to cross ___ Pacific. (the)
Spell the words aloud:
100 afraid
200 lazy
300 scared
400 shocked
500 kitchen
600 frightened
Single Jeopardy
Give the American equivalent
100 I live in a flat. (apartment)
200 My brother’s favorite game is football. (soccer)
300 Put the suitcase in the boot of my car. (trunk)
400 We queued up for two hours. (stood in line)
500 Excuse me, could you pass me a rubber? (an eraser)
600 It’s time to change the baby’s nappy! (diaper)
100 The underground is a very efficient transportation system. (subway)
200 His glasses make him look smart. (fashionable)
300 Would you like a biscuit? (cookie)
400 Take the lift to the 10th floor. (elevator)
500 I need some more petrol for my car. (gasoline)
600 Pardon me, could I have one of your fags? (cigarettes)
Anglophone Capital Cities
100 Canada (Ottawa)
200 India (New Delhi)
300 South Africa (Cape Town, Pretoria, and Bloemfontein)
400 Australia (Canberra)500 Kenya (Nairobi)
600 New Zealand (Wellington)
Say the Number
100 17, 593
200 1/3
300 734,792
400 117, 770.3
500 89,135,964.4
600 1,000,000,000
Name the primary language spoken in these countries:
100 China (Chinese)
200 Korea (Korean)
300 Brazil (Portugese)
400 Russia (Russian)
500 Norway (Norwegian)
600 Holland (Dutch)
Name 3
100 Vegetables
200 Cities in Canada
300 Articles of clothing
400 Holidays
500 American presidents (before 1900)
600 Planetsothers: pieces of furniture, rivers in the USA, mountain ranges in the Americas
Double Jeopardy
Say the date aloud – all are 20th century (mm/dd/yy)
100 12/25/55
200 5/7/75
300 6/6/44
400 3/13/76
500 5/30/45
600 7/25/42
Trivia
100 Who wrote Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and Hamlet? (Shakespeare)
200 In what building does the American president live? (The White House)
300 What river runs through the city of New Orleans? (The Mississippi)
400 What year was the American Revolution? (1776)
500 What U.S. President was assassinated in 1865? (Lincoln)
600 When was the American Civil War? (1861-1865)
harder
Who wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? (Mark Twain)
harder What’s the most widely spoken language in the world? (Chinese)
harder What’s the approximate population of the U.S.A.? (250 million)
harder What’s the longest river in the U.S.A.? (Missouri)
Name the nationality’s adjective
100 France (French)
200 Ireland (Irish)
300 Japan (Japanese)
400 Mexico (Mexican)
500 Germany (German)
600 Greece (Greek)
Country Names (translate to English)
100 L’Allemagne (Germany)
200 L’Inde (India)
300 La Mexique (Mexico)
400 Le Maroc (Morocco)
500 Le Royaume Uni (The United Kingdom)
600 Les Pays Bas (The Netherlands, or Holland)
Countable or Uncountable?
100 banana C
200 excitement UC
300 information UC
400 advice UC
500 experience C
600 fact C
A, an or The?
100 Paris is ___ capital of France. (the)
200 What ___ nice jacket! (a)
300 Picasso was ___ artist. (an)
400 Would you please turn down ___ music? (the)
500 There's ___ bug in my drink! (a)
600 It takes 10 hours by plane to cross ___ Pacific. (the)
Spell the words aloud:
100 afraid
200 lazy
300 scared
400 shocked
500 kitchen
600 frightened
Family Feud
I've had fun with family feud. It's also fairly easy to plan. Family feud is a gameshow where 100 people are surveyed and the players ("families"-- they are families on the show) try to guess what other people said. The way before you play:
1) Ask your classes a series of questions; record their answers
2) Teacher writes down the 6-7 most popular answers and how many people said each answerThen on the day of the game:
3) split up into two teams
4) Line up 5 players from each team in the front of the room
5) If you want to, ask everyone their names, where they are from, interests, etc. before starting (my classes are beginners)
6) First person in line on each team gets to try to guess the most popular answer to the question. Read the question and the first player to "buzz in" reponds; if he/she names the #1 answer, their team wins this portion. If not the other player gets to give an answer, and if it's more popular she/he wins. The winning team gets 100 points.
7) The winner of #6 above gets to choose to play (you ask their team) or pass (give it to the other team)
8) The team that plays gets 3 tries to get every answer; if they strike out the other team can steal the points with any answer that made the survey.
9) First team to get 300 points wins round #1
10) In round 2, ask 2 people the same questions and give them one point for every person who gave the same answer"Name a fruit" (host)apple-- if 37 people said apple, they get 37 pointsPlayer 2 may noy duplicate player 1's answers; if they get 200 points together they win.
This game works with all ages and levels as long as the students are marginally literate, and it's a great exam review day activity.
1) Ask your classes a series of questions; record their answers
2) Teacher writes down the 6-7 most popular answers and how many people said each answerThen on the day of the game:
3) split up into two teams
4) Line up 5 players from each team in the front of the room
5) If you want to, ask everyone their names, where they are from, interests, etc. before starting (my classes are beginners)
6) First person in line on each team gets to try to guess the most popular answer to the question. Read the question and the first player to "buzz in" reponds; if he/she names the #1 answer, their team wins this portion. If not the other player gets to give an answer, and if it's more popular she/he wins. The winning team gets 100 points.
7) The winner of #6 above gets to choose to play (you ask their team) or pass (give it to the other team)
8) The team that plays gets 3 tries to get every answer; if they strike out the other team can steal the points with any answer that made the survey.
9) First team to get 300 points wins round #1
10) In round 2, ask 2 people the same questions and give them one point for every person who gave the same answer"Name a fruit" (host)apple-- if 37 people said apple, they get 37 pointsPlayer 2 may noy duplicate player 1's answers; if they get 200 points together they win.
This game works with all ages and levels as long as the students are marginally literate, and it's a great exam review day activity.
Grid Game
This game is perfect to review themes studied over a period of time or just that week. I divide the class into two teams and for each review question, the team works together to get the correct answer. This promotes team-work, student oral interaction and eliminates the chance of making one student feel "stupid" because they didn't remember the answer.
I write the numbers from 1- 6 on the board. Each number represents a different topic. ie: 1 - prepositions2 - weather3- verbs 4- idioms etc...Before their turn, the team rolls a die. The number they roll determines the topic of their question. To make the game more exciting, I make the #6 topic "Susan's Surprise!" which means I can ask them ANY question on ANY topic I choose of ANYTHING we have studied before!
It's really funny to see the looks of "terror" on their face when they roll a 6 and wonder what I'll ask them! (Of course I play it up by "cackling" or rubbing my hands together as though I'm preparing to ask a difficult question....) The team has 30 secs to come up with an answer and uses a pre-determined spokesperson to say their answer!
If their answer is correct, they can then choose co-ordinates on a pre-prepared GRID- letters A to J down the left side of the grid and the numbers 1- 10 across the top. Each co-ordinate point has a hidden point value of 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 pts which YOU have predetermined on a score key and kept out of sight. After they choose their coordinates, you reveal the value of that square. ie: A-3 is 30 pts! G-1 is 50 points! etc.
Their anticipation to find out how many points they have is hilarious and so adorable! (I usually sing part of a game show theme every time a team happens to pick a square with a 50 pt value. They love it and totally get into celebrating their success. It's also a great thing to prepare them for activities in reading maps with coordinates etc..)
I have the team add their scores each time (I keep track on the board). This gives practice in saying their numbers correctly. Another way to choose points is to give each team 2 dice, one red and one white, roll them and read them as a number, red dice first. ie if they roll a red 6 and a white2 that would be 62 points for their team. Again, make THEM add the score for number priactice! They love that too.
I have had incredible success with both my beginner and intermediate classes. It builds class spirit and each student's morale as they see how much they are able to retain! Hope you have as much fun with it as I have... Hope I didn't bog you down with unnecessary detail!
I write the numbers from 1- 6 on the board. Each number represents a different topic. ie: 1 - prepositions2 - weather3- verbs 4- idioms etc...Before their turn, the team rolls a die. The number they roll determines the topic of their question. To make the game more exciting, I make the #6 topic "Susan's Surprise!" which means I can ask them ANY question on ANY topic I choose of ANYTHING we have studied before!
It's really funny to see the looks of "terror" on their face when they roll a 6 and wonder what I'll ask them! (Of course I play it up by "cackling" or rubbing my hands together as though I'm preparing to ask a difficult question....) The team has 30 secs to come up with an answer and uses a pre-determined spokesperson to say their answer!
If their answer is correct, they can then choose co-ordinates on a pre-prepared GRID- letters A to J down the left side of the grid and the numbers 1- 10 across the top. Each co-ordinate point has a hidden point value of 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 pts which YOU have predetermined on a score key and kept out of sight. After they choose their coordinates, you reveal the value of that square. ie: A-3 is 30 pts! G-1 is 50 points! etc.
Their anticipation to find out how many points they have is hilarious and so adorable! (I usually sing part of a game show theme every time a team happens to pick a square with a 50 pt value. They love it and totally get into celebrating their success. It's also a great thing to prepare them for activities in reading maps with coordinates etc..)
I have the team add their scores each time (I keep track on the board). This gives practice in saying their numbers correctly. Another way to choose points is to give each team 2 dice, one red and one white, roll them and read them as a number, red dice first. ie if they roll a red 6 and a white2 that would be 62 points for their team. Again, make THEM add the score for number priactice! They love that too.
I have had incredible success with both my beginner and intermediate classes. It builds class spirit and each student's morale as they see how much they are able to retain! Hope you have as much fun with it as I have... Hope I didn't bog you down with unnecessary detail!
20 Q's
Here is an old favorite I play very often with my high schoolers. The students have to guess of what thing the person who is it is thinking by asking him or her at most 20 yes/no type questions.
If no one guesses the answer after 20 tries, the answer is revealed. A "yes" answer earns the questioner another chance to ask, a "no" passes the asking on to the next player. Maybe your students are advanced enough to ask appropriate questions on their own, in my case to facilitate my weak ones I hand out a print I made with examples of questions.
The first question on my print is, "Are you animal?/vegetable?/mineral? Then below that I have written outline style three catagories of questions: animal, vegetable and mineral. Under the animal heading my first question is, "Are you human?" Then I have written questions like, "Are you famous?" "Are you in this school?" "Are you a man/woman?" "Are you Japanese?", etc.
In case the animal is not human I have, "Can I eat you?" "Can I ride you?" "Are you bigger than a _____?" etc. Under the vegetable heading I wrote questions like "Can I eat you?" "Are you delicious?" "Are you in Japan?" etc. And finally under the mineral heading I wrote, "Are you metal/plastic/stone/wood?"
"Are you (blue)?" "Do I have you?" "Are you in the classroom?" "Can I see you?" etc. By using the print my students get a feel for asking questions in English and I have found many no longer need to refer to the paper. I hope you have good luck playing this great word game.
If no one guesses the answer after 20 tries, the answer is revealed. A "yes" answer earns the questioner another chance to ask, a "no" passes the asking on to the next player. Maybe your students are advanced enough to ask appropriate questions on their own, in my case to facilitate my weak ones I hand out a print I made with examples of questions.
The first question on my print is, "Are you animal?/vegetable?/mineral? Then below that I have written outline style three catagories of questions: animal, vegetable and mineral. Under the animal heading my first question is, "Are you human?" Then I have written questions like, "Are you famous?" "Are you in this school?" "Are you a man/woman?" "Are you Japanese?", etc.
In case the animal is not human I have, "Can I eat you?" "Can I ride you?" "Are you bigger than a _____?" etc. Under the vegetable heading I wrote questions like "Can I eat you?" "Are you delicious?" "Are you in Japan?" etc. And finally under the mineral heading I wrote, "Are you metal/plastic/stone/wood?"
"Are you (blue)?" "Do I have you?" "Are you in the classroom?" "Can I see you?" etc. By using the print my students get a feel for asking questions in English and I have found many no longer need to refer to the paper. I hope you have good luck playing this great word game.
Hey. Let's hear it for the past perfect continuous and all other verb tenses!
1) Teach/practice/review - whatever - the particular verb tense with your class.
2) Allow your class to practice the verb tense in pairs to become more familiar with the structure and when it would be used.
3) Now divide the class into teams: two teams, or three or four if the class is huge. On each team should be three to six people.
4) Divide the board into columns: one column for each team. (Two teams of four to six each is ideal...)
5) Let each team come up with a team name. (Last week we had "Monday's Blues" and "Monday's Rhythm"....
6) The first member from each team comes to the board. Each student standing at the board gets a marker and prepares to write as fast as possible. The rest of his team, sitting in their desks or at the table, prepares to help the writer by screaming out the hopefully correct words of the sentence.
7) The instructor lets the writers know what to write by describing a situation which the writers must then scribe in the previously-decided-on verb tense.
For example: we're doing past perfect continuous, so the instructor says something like:
"Yesterday I went to my sister's house. Her two kids, Jamie and Alicia, were in a mess. They had torn clothes, they had dirty faces and one had a black eye. They were both angry."
The writers, with the help of their teams behind them, now know the situation, and know what tense they have to write the situation in. Their team helps them to pen as fast as possible:
"They had been fighting."
You can do this speed competition for any tense. The instructor can glean situations from any grammar book ie Grammar In Use by referring to the appropriate tense page to pose the situations.
This speed competition is ACE for several reasons:
it shows students who are still weak in a particular tense just how weak they are; it forces the students to become nimble in the tenses, it reviews over and over the tense you are working on - don't use more than one tense per day and don't play this two days in a row to avoid confusion - and it breeds fluency. Ace, ace game.
Your students will be screaming out grammar in an intense, heated, passionate bid to get their correct sentences on the board first!
Move through the teams using different pairings.
1) Teach/practice/review - whatever - the particular verb tense with your class.
2) Allow your class to practice the verb tense in pairs to become more familiar with the structure and when it would be used.
3) Now divide the class into teams: two teams, or three or four if the class is huge. On each team should be three to six people.
4) Divide the board into columns: one column for each team. (Two teams of four to six each is ideal...)
5) Let each team come up with a team name. (Last week we had "Monday's Blues" and "Monday's Rhythm"....
6) The first member from each team comes to the board. Each student standing at the board gets a marker and prepares to write as fast as possible. The rest of his team, sitting in their desks or at the table, prepares to help the writer by screaming out the hopefully correct words of the sentence.
7) The instructor lets the writers know what to write by describing a situation which the writers must then scribe in the previously-decided-on verb tense.
For example: we're doing past perfect continuous, so the instructor says something like:
"Yesterday I went to my sister's house. Her two kids, Jamie and Alicia, were in a mess. They had torn clothes, they had dirty faces and one had a black eye. They were both angry."
The writers, with the help of their teams behind them, now know the situation, and know what tense they have to write the situation in. Their team helps them to pen as fast as possible:
"They had been fighting."
You can do this speed competition for any tense. The instructor can glean situations from any grammar book ie Grammar In Use by referring to the appropriate tense page to pose the situations.
This speed competition is ACE for several reasons:
it shows students who are still weak in a particular tense just how weak they are; it forces the students to become nimble in the tenses, it reviews over and over the tense you are working on - don't use more than one tense per day and don't play this two days in a row to avoid confusion - and it breeds fluency. Ace, ace game.
Your students will be screaming out grammar in an intense, heated, passionate bid to get their correct sentences on the board first!
Move through the teams using different pairings.
What's inthe Box
This "game" is lots of fun. I used it with my advanced-level conversation class, but it could also be used with beginners and intermediate-level students. Take a medium-sized box, preferable one that has a top.
Cut a hole in the top and replace it on the box. Then take an object - something that they'd be at least somewhat familiar with - and place it in the box. I used things like scissors, a fork, a pair of earphones, and a spool of thread.
Have a student come up to the front of the class and put their hand in the box. They have to describe the object to the class by TOUCH alone, while everyone else guesses what it is. It's good for building vocabulary and also listening skills. My class had so much fun doing this! Hope yours likes it, too!
Cut a hole in the top and replace it on the box. Then take an object - something that they'd be at least somewhat familiar with - and place it in the box. I used things like scissors, a fork, a pair of earphones, and a spool of thread.
Have a student come up to the front of the class and put their hand in the box. They have to describe the object to the class by TOUCH alone, while everyone else guesses what it is. It's good for building vocabulary and also listening skills. My class had so much fun doing this! Hope yours likes it, too!
Activities
I work with Spanich speaking adults at my community college. Every week they have several dictation sentences along with their spelling test. Unfortunately, they never seem to do very well, and they end up asking me to repeat the sentence a million times.
As a result, I designed a dictation game to help them prepare for their weekly tests. I take about ten sentences from their weekly story and right the words on small peices of cardboard. They day of the game I break them into teams of three and read the sentences. The first team to build the sentence gets the point. They have to buzz in, I like to use the buzzer from the game taboo, in order for me to check their sentence.
The other teams keep working until someone gets it right. They have to make sure that they have capitals, correct punctuation and spelling, and the right words. For example I might try to trick them with by, bye, and buy. This game seems to really work well. The students really get into the spirit of the competition, but more importantly their dictation abilities on their weekly tests are improving dramatically.
As a result, I designed a dictation game to help them prepare for their weekly tests. I take about ten sentences from their weekly story and right the words on small peices of cardboard. They day of the game I break them into teams of three and read the sentences. The first team to build the sentence gets the point. They have to buzz in, I like to use the buzzer from the game taboo, in order for me to check their sentence.
The other teams keep working until someone gets it right. They have to make sure that they have capitals, correct punctuation and spelling, and the right words. For example I might try to trick them with by, bye, and buy. This game seems to really work well. The students really get into the spirit of the competition, but more importantly their dictation abilities on their weekly tests are improving dramatically.
Intonation Activity
Ok, I got the idea from a book called Teaching Oral English K-8, but I've used it with my undergrad and adult learners, all to wonderful effect.
1) Explain that in English you have to give stress to certain words to deliver certain meanings: review examples like "Oh" and give emphasis to disappointment, anger, surprise, grasp idea etc...
2) Model a sentence likeYou want me to give you moneyThrowing emphasis first on MONEY? and then GIVE? and YOU? etc...
3)This moronically simple dialog can be committed to memory:
A: Hi, how are you?
B: Fine, thank you. And you?
A: Just great. What have you been doing lately?
B: Oh, not much. But I've been keeping busy.
A: Well...it's been good to see you.
B: Yes, it has...well, bye!
A: Goodbye.
Do group choral response till they seem to know it, then have them practice in pairs, still keeping an uninflected normal neutral tone.
THEN: give each pair a situation, emphasizing that it's SECRET and they musn't show it to anyone else, that they will act it out and others will have to GUESS who they are by their inflection, gestures and body language. (I suggest writing the situations on index cards, very simply: "You are two people who have just met but don't really know each other, and feel obliged to make small talk on an elevator"....)Some situations (be creative!):
1) two athletes (boxers?) who will compete in a match tomorrow
2)a sick person in hospital and friend who visits
3) two old people who are all but deaf
4) a robot and his designer
5) a divorced couple
6) a couple who's love is doomed by marriage promised to others
7) a teacher and a student suffering from infatuation
8)two people who are angry at each other
9) a landlady and her overdue tenant
10) a teacher who has given a student a bad grade, they meet years later
11)two people who have met before, but can't remember where
12) two spies who are meeting late at night
13) two old friends who run into each other on a railway platform
14)?? Confucius meets Lao Tze in heaven?
15) a detective and a criminal The idea is: they don't change the dialogue of A and B, just the inflection/intonation to suit the situation...
4)After each pair has practiced about 5 min or so, hopefully they'll have committed the simple dialogue to memory. Call each pair up and have them perform the dialogue. After each skit, the class tries to guess the situation.It's good to ask: "How does Shirley feel towards Joanna" in this skit? If it's not clear what's happened in the skit.
THen you give positive reinforcement to the actors by at least acknowledging the emotion they were trying to convey.I found the students got into it. IT's short enough time on stage that they get a little more comfortable airing their english in public, without directing it at just the teacher....Appreciate knowing how this works for you.
1) Explain that in English you have to give stress to certain words to deliver certain meanings: review examples like "Oh" and give emphasis to disappointment, anger, surprise, grasp idea etc...
2) Model a sentence likeYou want me to give you moneyThrowing emphasis first on MONEY? and then GIVE? and YOU? etc...
3)This moronically simple dialog can be committed to memory:
A: Hi, how are you?
B: Fine, thank you. And you?
A: Just great. What have you been doing lately?
B: Oh, not much. But I've been keeping busy.
A: Well...it's been good to see you.
B: Yes, it has...well, bye!
A: Goodbye.
Do group choral response till they seem to know it, then have them practice in pairs, still keeping an uninflected normal neutral tone.
THEN: give each pair a situation, emphasizing that it's SECRET and they musn't show it to anyone else, that they will act it out and others will have to GUESS who they are by their inflection, gestures and body language. (I suggest writing the situations on index cards, very simply: "You are two people who have just met but don't really know each other, and feel obliged to make small talk on an elevator"....)Some situations (be creative!):
1) two athletes (boxers?) who will compete in a match tomorrow
2)a sick person in hospital and friend who visits
3) two old people who are all but deaf
4) a robot and his designer
5) a divorced couple
6) a couple who's love is doomed by marriage promised to others
7) a teacher and a student suffering from infatuation
8)two people who are angry at each other
9) a landlady and her overdue tenant
10) a teacher who has given a student a bad grade, they meet years later
11)two people who have met before, but can't remember where
12) two spies who are meeting late at night
13) two old friends who run into each other on a railway platform
14)?? Confucius meets Lao Tze in heaven?
15) a detective and a criminal The idea is: they don't change the dialogue of A and B, just the inflection/intonation to suit the situation...
4)After each pair has practiced about 5 min or so, hopefully they'll have committed the simple dialogue to memory. Call each pair up and have them perform the dialogue. After each skit, the class tries to guess the situation.It's good to ask: "How does Shirley feel towards Joanna" in this skit? If it's not clear what's happened in the skit.
THen you give positive reinforcement to the actors by at least acknowledging the emotion they were trying to convey.I found the students got into it. IT's short enough time on stage that they get a little more comfortable airing their english in public, without directing it at just the teacher....Appreciate knowing how this works for you.
Activities
This is for those who love to play Taboo. This is modeled after the old game show from when I was a kid.
PreparationYou will need an OHP and transperencies to play this game. To prepare, create a list of categories for which you can come up with 5 examples. I have used words that start with W (window, wow, weird, Wyoming, witch), things you can't see (love, air, kindness, stupidity, friendship), things that you listen to (news reports, speech, whistle, teachers, parents). I like to have about 20 categories each time I play.
You can choose whatever you think will be most appopriate and useful for your students. To make things easier and reusable, I made a chart on my computer, grouping each category with its words. Then I printed out the groups on transperencies and cut them out. I didn't inclde the name of the category on the list, but you may want to. Sometimes it takes me a sec to remember what the category is. I don't think that having the name on the OHP will help or hinder students.
To Play
Set up the overhead. Place two chairs facing each other, with one facing the overhead and the other with its back to the overhead.
Divide your class into two teams. Two students from one team play at a time. One student (Student A) will be the guesser and the other (student B) the clue giver. Student B sits in the chair facing the OHP and student A sits with his/her back to the OHP. Give students 3 categories to choose from.
Put the category square onto the OHP. Once you remove your hand, give the team 1 minute to get as many out of the 5 words as possible. They can use any words they want, in the target language, as long as NO PART of the word to be guessed it used. Give one point for each word correctly guessed.
The team with the most points wins! Only the two team members sitting in the front of the room can speak. NOTE: The guesser often looks to the non-participating team members to see if they are mouthing the words. I try to sit the playing team members so that the guesser can't see them easily. When I see it happening, I don't give credit for the word.
PreparationYou will need an OHP and transperencies to play this game. To prepare, create a list of categories for which you can come up with 5 examples. I have used words that start with W (window, wow, weird, Wyoming, witch), things you can't see (love, air, kindness, stupidity, friendship), things that you listen to (news reports, speech, whistle, teachers, parents). I like to have about 20 categories each time I play.
You can choose whatever you think will be most appopriate and useful for your students. To make things easier and reusable, I made a chart on my computer, grouping each category with its words. Then I printed out the groups on transperencies and cut them out. I didn't inclde the name of the category on the list, but you may want to. Sometimes it takes me a sec to remember what the category is. I don't think that having the name on the OHP will help or hinder students.
To Play
Set up the overhead. Place two chairs facing each other, with one facing the overhead and the other with its back to the overhead.
Divide your class into two teams. Two students from one team play at a time. One student (Student A) will be the guesser and the other (student B) the clue giver. Student B sits in the chair facing the OHP and student A sits with his/her back to the OHP. Give students 3 categories to choose from.
Put the category square onto the OHP. Once you remove your hand, give the team 1 minute to get as many out of the 5 words as possible. They can use any words they want, in the target language, as long as NO PART of the word to be guessed it used. Give one point for each word correctly guessed.
The team with the most points wins! Only the two team members sitting in the front of the room can speak. NOTE: The guesser often looks to the non-participating team members to see if they are mouthing the words. I try to sit the playing team members so that the guesser can't see them easily. When I see it happening, I don't give credit for the word.
Activities
This is a great way to review those verb conjugations:
Divide your class into teams of equal number (no more than 5-6 students per team as that is how many subject pronous there are in English...depending if you are teaching 'you pl.' as a seperate one). Each team sits in a row. The first student in each row is #1, the second #2, etc.
Give all number ones a piece of paper. Then you pick a verb from the vocabulary that you are studying (eg. Eat) and all number ones write "I eat" and then pass the paper to the student behind them. The second studnets write "you eat" and pass the papers back.
This continues until all subject pronous and verb forms have been written. Then the last student passes the paper to the first student and the first student runs to the board to write all the answers on the board. The first team to get their answers on the board in the correct order and correctly conjugated ( I eat, you eat, he eats, we eat, they eat) gets a point.
If you have several students in your class, you can expand the game by adding she and it as seperate entries. Then the students shift places, so 1 moves to spot 2, etc. and the last student in each row becomes student 1. Continue until each student in the row has had a chance to write on the board.
This game gets quite rowdy! My kids love it! They don't gets point for messy board writing! If one team gets the answers up there first but is too messy to read, then the point goes to the next fastest team. Good luck!
Divide your class into teams of equal number (no more than 5-6 students per team as that is how many subject pronous there are in English...depending if you are teaching 'you pl.' as a seperate one). Each team sits in a row. The first student in each row is #1, the second #2, etc.
Give all number ones a piece of paper. Then you pick a verb from the vocabulary that you are studying (eg. Eat) and all number ones write "I eat" and then pass the paper to the student behind them. The second studnets write "you eat" and pass the papers back.
This continues until all subject pronous and verb forms have been written. Then the last student passes the paper to the first student and the first student runs to the board to write all the answers on the board. The first team to get their answers on the board in the correct order and correctly conjugated ( I eat, you eat, he eats, we eat, they eat) gets a point.
If you have several students in your class, you can expand the game by adding she and it as seperate entries. Then the students shift places, so 1 moves to spot 2, etc. and the last student in each row becomes student 1. Continue until each student in the row has had a chance to write on the board.
This game gets quite rowdy! My kids love it! They don't gets point for messy board writing! If one team gets the answers up there first but is too messy to read, then the point goes to the next fastest team. Good luck!
ACtivities
This game takes a lot of explanation, which can be good to test your students' listening skills. KILLER! is like a basic "interview game" where the students ask each other questions that review whatever pattern you choose (ex. "did you ~ yesterday?" "can you ?").
The difference is that this is a contest (whoever gets the most answers wins), and that there are killers in the room.
To decide who the killers are, at some point during your explanation, tell the students to close their eyes and put their heads down. The students you tap on the shoulder will be killers. During the 5 min. the students have to ask each other questions, the killers will try to "kill" other students by winking at them.
The way this works is that killers try to ask / answer questions to / from other students, and during this exchange wink at them once. "Dead" students return to their seats and can't ask any more questions. After the 5 min. are up, ask the killers to raise their hands. Then ask the "dead" students to raise their hands.
Finally, have the students raise their hands according to how many other students they asked. The student with the most answers (names written down) wins. You can play this several times with different grammar patterns in the same lesson--some of the students get really into it. When I played it, I had students who chased each other, yelling their questions, and students who carried around books in front of their smiling faces so that they couldn't be blinked at (and killers doing the same to fake them out).
RULES (hopefully this will make the process clearer):
1) everyone has to write their own question
2) everyone has 5 min. to ask the question to as many people as they can. the person who asks the most people wins.
3) when everyone puts their heads down and closes their eyes, the students I touch on the shoulder are "killers."
4) during the game, the "killers" try to "kill" as many students as possible by winking at them.
5) if a student is "killed" he has to go back to his seat and sit down. he is "dead"
6) after the 5 min. are over, the student who asked her question to the most people wins.
GOT IT? GOT QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? e-mail me.
The difference is that this is a contest (whoever gets the most answers wins), and that there are killers in the room.
To decide who the killers are, at some point during your explanation, tell the students to close their eyes and put their heads down. The students you tap on the shoulder will be killers. During the 5 min. the students have to ask each other questions, the killers will try to "kill" other students by winking at them.
The way this works is that killers try to ask / answer questions to / from other students, and during this exchange wink at them once. "Dead" students return to their seats and can't ask any more questions. After the 5 min. are up, ask the killers to raise their hands. Then ask the "dead" students to raise their hands.
Finally, have the students raise their hands according to how many other students they asked. The student with the most answers (names written down) wins. You can play this several times with different grammar patterns in the same lesson--some of the students get really into it. When I played it, I had students who chased each other, yelling their questions, and students who carried around books in front of their smiling faces so that they couldn't be blinked at (and killers doing the same to fake them out).
RULES (hopefully this will make the process clearer):
1) everyone has to write their own question
2) everyone has 5 min. to ask the question to as many people as they can. the person who asks the most people wins.
3) when everyone puts their heads down and closes their eyes, the students I touch on the shoulder are "killers."
4) during the game, the "killers" try to "kill" as many students as possible by winking at them.
5) if a student is "killed" he has to go back to his seat and sit down. he is "dead"
6) after the 5 min. are over, the student who asked her question to the most people wins.
GOT IT? GOT QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? e-mail me.
CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT
CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT
How can you assess the progress your students are making? Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter offer practical advice.
Some teachers are suspicious of continuous assessment. 'Doesn't it take lots of time?' they ask. Well, compared to devising regular progress tests, preparing answer keys, fixing marking schemes and marking a class's pile of tests every few weeks, not really. The way the work comes, though, is different. With continuous assessment you spend less time preparing evaluation materials outside class time, but more time evaluating in class. This is because you are assessing each student a little and often, rather than testing rarely and intensively.
'But isn't continuous assessment subjective?' ask other doubters. Well, isn't a formal written test subjective? Selecting test activities, deciding what are correct answers, and allocating marks to different areas are all subjective decisions taken by the test writer, whether it is the teacher him/herself or the author of his/her chosen coursebook.
Regular commitment
For sure, continuous assessment requires a commitment from the teacher to spend a regular amount of time not only teaching, but also evaluating students' classwork. This is not hard to organise in a classroom where there is plenty of pairwork and groupwork. While student groups are simultaneously discussing questions or performing a roleplay, the teacher can move round evaluating oral and listening skills, or noting the range and accuracy of students' vocabulary and grammar. To help the pure logistics we offer you a ready-made but adaptable chart to photocopy.
Even with more traditional whole class teaching, homework can provide a useful opportunity to evaluate each student's knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and writing skills on a regular basis, instead of relying on one end-of-course test.
Why use continuous assessment?
There are four main reasons for using continuous assessment instead of, or in addition to, formal tests:
1 Because of nerves, some students are bad at tests, though they may work well during class. Test results do not truly reflect such students' abilities, whereas continuous assessment gives a global and more accurate picture.
2 Formal tests emphasise a 'product' rather than a 'process' approach to learning. Strong students, for example, who usually perform well in tests, may become lazy, selfish and uncooperative in class because they know that their final grade depends on their test performance.
Continuous assessment emphasises 'process' rather than 'product', encouraging complacent students not to rely on a final test, but to contribute regularly in class.
We should remember that some mistakes students make in class indicate 'learning in progress'. For example, in a lesson introducing regular past tenses, a stronger student may produce an experimental, though incorrect, sentence like *I goed home at 6 o'clock yesterday. A traditional test would deduct marks for such 'intelligent' mistakes, whereas some means of rewarding this ingenuity, which is clearly a step on the road to correct English, may be made in contiuous assessment.
3 Some learning skills that we think are useful, and that we may want to encourage in our classes, are difficult to test. We cannot, for example, test the fact that a student regularly and punctually does homework, that they have a positive and enthusiastic attitude towards English, that they try hard in class, that they work well on their own, or that they co-operate well with other students in pair or group work activities. We can, however, include these things in a continuous assessment scheme.
We should of course bear in mind that some of the tasks we set in class - such as prediction before listening or reading - are not tests, but warming-up stages designed to awaken interest in a listening or reading text to follow. There are no right or wrong answers in such tasks, and we should not react to wilder guesses as if they were 'wrong'. If we do, we will discourage participatory behaviour and originality of thought in our students, and we should be actively promoting these qualities in our classes.
4 Although many teachers are convinced of the value of teaching English communicatively, 'communicative' tests are difficult to design. As a result, we use more traditional tests and so we may end up testing students on accuracy and form when we have taught them with an emphasis on fluency and meaning. When using continuous assessment, on the other hand, the way we evaluate is part of the way we teach.
Using continuous assessment when you teach communicatively means that you will naturally evaluate students' communication skills along with everything else.
Some do's
Tell students at the start of the course if you plan to use continuous assessment on its own, or in conjunction with formal testing, to calculate their final marks. If you are going to use a mixture of formal tests and continuous assessment, explain how much each component will be worth in the final mark. Will it be 50/50 or 60/40, or what?
Explain to students at the start of the course why you have decided to use continuous assessment. You may find the following explanations useful: 'Because learning a language is a slow process and I want to check your progress regularly.' 'Because what you do in every class is important, not just what you do in the final test.'
Tell students at the start of the course exactly what you will include in your continuous assessment. Possible areas are: projects and homework; participation in pairwork, groupwork and whole class work; autonomy in individual work; effort and progress; completion of extra remedial or extension tasks, whether done as homework or in self-study time in class.
For a remedial task which is easy to organise, underline students' mistakes in homework without writing in the correct version yourself. After students get their underlined homework back, they correct the underlined parts. Another time-efficient way to review homework in class is to tell each student to hand their finished work to a classmate who marks it from a blackboard answer key before they return it.
Consider using a month's continuous assessment at the start of a course instead of a formal diagnostic test. Everyone agrees that it is useful to gauge students' starting level, so that you can accurately judge the progress they have made by the end of the course. A formal diagnostic test at the start of a course can, however, be very intimidating.
Continuous assessment of a diagnostic period of classwork is therefore a useful alternative. It gives you the opportunity to gauge students' previous knowledge and abilities without having a negative initial effect on the relaxed class atmosphere that you may want to establish.
Prepare a written list of the areas in your continuous assessment scheme - with the marks for each category - to give to students at the start of the course. Tell students to keep this list. You may want to refer to it later when discussing continuous assessment grades with individual students.
With younger students, prepare a one-page description of why you are using continuous assessment - and a list of what you will look for in each class - in the students' mother tongue. Students can take this page home to show to their parents. If, later on, you need to discuss why you are using continuous assessment with parents, or to explain to them how it works, you will have a useful document to refer to. Prepare this list by referring to the teacher's assessment chart on page 18, designed for you to photocopy.
Some don'ts
Don't feel that you must assess every student in the class on everything within one lesson. With a class of thirty this would be physically impossible to achieve. Instead set yourself an assessment period of a month and aim to assess each student once on each area within that period. (With a class of thirty this means focusing on about seven students per week.) If you find this target unrealistic, set yourself a longer assessment period of six or eight weeks.
Don't feel that you must abandon formal testing. It can be useful to combine continuous assessment with formal tests to get a fuller picture of students' learning. The photocopiable chart on page 18 provides a suggestion of how to combine continuous assessment with an end-of-month test.
If you want to give greater emphasis to testing, use the same grid, but raise the value of the end-of-month test to 60% and reduce the value of the continuous assessment to 40% (or use an 80% versus 20% split if you are a more conservative teacher).
Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter have taught English as a foreign language and trained English teachers in Belarus, Britain, Canada, Hungary, Italy and Spain. They are currently living and working in Alicante, Spain, where they are writing a new secondary school English course for Oxford University Press.
CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT GRIDOne grid each month for every ten students
CLASS: ....................................................................STARTINGDATE: ......................................................FINISHINGDATE: ......................................................
IIIIINAMES OF STUDENTS
CONTINUOSASSESSMENT60MARKS
LANGUAGE (15 marks)
GRAMMAR/FUNCTIONS
VOCABULARY
AVERAGE
SKILLS (15 marks)
READING
WRITING
LISTENING
SPEAKING
PRONUNCIATION
AVERAGE
LEARNING SKILLS (15 marks)
CLASSWORK
GROUPWORK
PAIRWORK
INDIVIDUAL WORK
EFFORT
AVERAGE
OTHER WORK (15 marks)
HOMEWORK
PROJECTS
EXTRA TASKS
AVERAGE
END OF MONTH TEST (15 marks)
WRITTEN
SPOKEN
AVERAGE
TOTAL % MARK
COMMENTS
- on progress
- on need for extension work
- on need for remedial work
Note: The end of the month test consists of a group roleplay for oral evaluation (marked for fluency, pronunciation, use of vocabulary, grammatical accuracy and participation) and a written test that covers grammar, vocabulary, listening, reading and writing (marked for spelling/punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction and content).
How can you assess the progress your students are making? Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter offer practical advice.
Some teachers are suspicious of continuous assessment. 'Doesn't it take lots of time?' they ask. Well, compared to devising regular progress tests, preparing answer keys, fixing marking schemes and marking a class's pile of tests every few weeks, not really. The way the work comes, though, is different. With continuous assessment you spend less time preparing evaluation materials outside class time, but more time evaluating in class. This is because you are assessing each student a little and often, rather than testing rarely and intensively.
'But isn't continuous assessment subjective?' ask other doubters. Well, isn't a formal written test subjective? Selecting test activities, deciding what are correct answers, and allocating marks to different areas are all subjective decisions taken by the test writer, whether it is the teacher him/herself or the author of his/her chosen coursebook.
Regular commitment
For sure, continuous assessment requires a commitment from the teacher to spend a regular amount of time not only teaching, but also evaluating students' classwork. This is not hard to organise in a classroom where there is plenty of pairwork and groupwork. While student groups are simultaneously discussing questions or performing a roleplay, the teacher can move round evaluating oral and listening skills, or noting the range and accuracy of students' vocabulary and grammar. To help the pure logistics we offer you a ready-made but adaptable chart to photocopy.
Even with more traditional whole class teaching, homework can provide a useful opportunity to evaluate each student's knowledge of grammar, vocabulary and writing skills on a regular basis, instead of relying on one end-of-course test.
Why use continuous assessment?
There are four main reasons for using continuous assessment instead of, or in addition to, formal tests:
1 Because of nerves, some students are bad at tests, though they may work well during class. Test results do not truly reflect such students' abilities, whereas continuous assessment gives a global and more accurate picture.
2 Formal tests emphasise a 'product' rather than a 'process' approach to learning. Strong students, for example, who usually perform well in tests, may become lazy, selfish and uncooperative in class because they know that their final grade depends on their test performance.
Continuous assessment emphasises 'process' rather than 'product', encouraging complacent students not to rely on a final test, but to contribute regularly in class.
We should remember that some mistakes students make in class indicate 'learning in progress'. For example, in a lesson introducing regular past tenses, a stronger student may produce an experimental, though incorrect, sentence like *I goed home at 6 o'clock yesterday. A traditional test would deduct marks for such 'intelligent' mistakes, whereas some means of rewarding this ingenuity, which is clearly a step on the road to correct English, may be made in contiuous assessment.
3 Some learning skills that we think are useful, and that we may want to encourage in our classes, are difficult to test. We cannot, for example, test the fact that a student regularly and punctually does homework, that they have a positive and enthusiastic attitude towards English, that they try hard in class, that they work well on their own, or that they co-operate well with other students in pair or group work activities. We can, however, include these things in a continuous assessment scheme.
We should of course bear in mind that some of the tasks we set in class - such as prediction before listening or reading - are not tests, but warming-up stages designed to awaken interest in a listening or reading text to follow. There are no right or wrong answers in such tasks, and we should not react to wilder guesses as if they were 'wrong'. If we do, we will discourage participatory behaviour and originality of thought in our students, and we should be actively promoting these qualities in our classes.
4 Although many teachers are convinced of the value of teaching English communicatively, 'communicative' tests are difficult to design. As a result, we use more traditional tests and so we may end up testing students on accuracy and form when we have taught them with an emphasis on fluency and meaning. When using continuous assessment, on the other hand, the way we evaluate is part of the way we teach.
Using continuous assessment when you teach communicatively means that you will naturally evaluate students' communication skills along with everything else.
Some do's
Tell students at the start of the course if you plan to use continuous assessment on its own, or in conjunction with formal testing, to calculate their final marks. If you are going to use a mixture of formal tests and continuous assessment, explain how much each component will be worth in the final mark. Will it be 50/50 or 60/40, or what?
Explain to students at the start of the course why you have decided to use continuous assessment. You may find the following explanations useful: 'Because learning a language is a slow process and I want to check your progress regularly.' 'Because what you do in every class is important, not just what you do in the final test.'
Tell students at the start of the course exactly what you will include in your continuous assessment. Possible areas are: projects and homework; participation in pairwork, groupwork and whole class work; autonomy in individual work; effort and progress; completion of extra remedial or extension tasks, whether done as homework or in self-study time in class.
For a remedial task which is easy to organise, underline students' mistakes in homework without writing in the correct version yourself. After students get their underlined homework back, they correct the underlined parts. Another time-efficient way to review homework in class is to tell each student to hand their finished work to a classmate who marks it from a blackboard answer key before they return it.
Consider using a month's continuous assessment at the start of a course instead of a formal diagnostic test. Everyone agrees that it is useful to gauge students' starting level, so that you can accurately judge the progress they have made by the end of the course. A formal diagnostic test at the start of a course can, however, be very intimidating.
Continuous assessment of a diagnostic period of classwork is therefore a useful alternative. It gives you the opportunity to gauge students' previous knowledge and abilities without having a negative initial effect on the relaxed class atmosphere that you may want to establish.
Prepare a written list of the areas in your continuous assessment scheme - with the marks for each category - to give to students at the start of the course. Tell students to keep this list. You may want to refer to it later when discussing continuous assessment grades with individual students.
With younger students, prepare a one-page description of why you are using continuous assessment - and a list of what you will look for in each class - in the students' mother tongue. Students can take this page home to show to their parents. If, later on, you need to discuss why you are using continuous assessment with parents, or to explain to them how it works, you will have a useful document to refer to. Prepare this list by referring to the teacher's assessment chart on page 18, designed for you to photocopy.
Some don'ts
Don't feel that you must assess every student in the class on everything within one lesson. With a class of thirty this would be physically impossible to achieve. Instead set yourself an assessment period of a month and aim to assess each student once on each area within that period. (With a class of thirty this means focusing on about seven students per week.) If you find this target unrealistic, set yourself a longer assessment period of six or eight weeks.
Don't feel that you must abandon formal testing. It can be useful to combine continuous assessment with formal tests to get a fuller picture of students' learning. The photocopiable chart on page 18 provides a suggestion of how to combine continuous assessment with an end-of-month test.
If you want to give greater emphasis to testing, use the same grid, but raise the value of the end-of-month test to 60% and reduce the value of the continuous assessment to 40% (or use an 80% versus 20% split if you are a more conservative teacher).
Bill Bowler and Sue Parminter have taught English as a foreign language and trained English teachers in Belarus, Britain, Canada, Hungary, Italy and Spain. They are currently living and working in Alicante, Spain, where they are writing a new secondary school English course for Oxford University Press.
CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT GRIDOne grid each month for every ten students
CLASS: ....................................................................STARTINGDATE: ......................................................FINISHINGDATE: ......................................................
IIIIINAMES OF STUDENTS
CONTINUOSASSESSMENT60MARKS
LANGUAGE (15 marks)
GRAMMAR/FUNCTIONS
VOCABULARY
AVERAGE
SKILLS (15 marks)
READING
WRITING
LISTENING
SPEAKING
PRONUNCIATION
AVERAGE
LEARNING SKILLS (15 marks)
CLASSWORK
GROUPWORK
PAIRWORK
INDIVIDUAL WORK
EFFORT
AVERAGE
OTHER WORK (15 marks)
HOMEWORK
PROJECTS
EXTRA TASKS
AVERAGE
END OF MONTH TEST (15 marks)
WRITTEN
SPOKEN
AVERAGE
TOTAL % MARK
COMMENTS
- on progress
- on need for extension work
- on need for remedial work
Note: The end of the month test consists of a group roleplay for oral evaluation (marked for fluency, pronunciation, use of vocabulary, grammatical accuracy and participation) and a written test that covers grammar, vocabulary, listening, reading and writing (marked for spelling/punctuation, vocabulary, grammar, sentence construction and content).
TEACHER TRAINING, TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
TEACHER TRAINING, TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
Distinctions & Dichotomies explores pairs of linguistic and pedagogic terms. Penny Ur wonders whether teachers are trained or developed.
Teacher training refers to the preparation of teachers for professional practice through formal courses, usually university or college based, and usually resulting in accreditation (BATEFL, PGCE, RSA Dip.TEFLA, etc). Teacher development, on the other hand, is learning carried out by practitioners already working in the classroom, and implies informal learning either individually or in collaboration with colleagues.
The distinction has developed further than this. The term 'teacher development' (hereafter TD) was coined in the 1980s as something separate and different from 'teacher training' (TT), and in reaction against over-rigid, over-behaviouristic models of teacher training. The distinction is not just one of initial pre-service (training) versus continuing in-service (development). Today, the two terms are often used with more specific, contrasting meanings, implying differing approaches to the nature of professional learning, and carrying socio-political connotations.
Pre-set structure versus developmental process TT is based on a set syllabus and has a course structure and system of assessment. In TD there is no pre-set syllabus, time-structure or external assessment. The teachers themselves decide what and how they want to learn, get together to do research and share experience and knowledge, and they evaluate the results themselves.
Transmission versus personal processing of knowledge In TT, teaching/learning is based on a transmission model: the trainer informs, models and advises, and the trainees take on board the information and skills they are taught. In TD, the starting point is the teachers' own experience; new information is sought and shared rather than being imposed; it is then learnt by being reflected on, tried out, processed in terms of personal experience and finally 'owned' by the teachers in whatever form they find appropriate.
Professional function versus whole person TT stresses the cognitive development of trainees and their knowledge and skills as professionals. In TD there is considerable stress on the development of the 'whole person' rather than just the 'teacher'.
One-off versus ongoing TT takes the form of one-off courses, beginning and ending at predetermined times and taking place at pre-set locations. TD is more flexible, and is an ongoing, even lifelong process.
Authoritarian versus democratic TT implies an authoritarian regime: the trainee is told what to do by the trainer or institutional authorities. TD on the other hand implies a democratic regime: the teachers are involved in decision-making.
Thus TT disempowers the individual teacher/trainee and places authority in the hands of the 'experts'; TD empowers the individual.
Oversimplified?Note that the above definitions are over-simplified in order to make their point clearly. Certainly in TT there is room for input from the trainees based on their own experience; certainly there is room for input from 'experts' even within a TD framework. But I believe I have fairly described the general thrust of the distinction.
Satisfactory? Neither model on its own, of course, is entirely satisfactory. TT provides a structure, systematic syllabus and clear criteria for evaluation, but it may be over-rigid and out of touch with participants' needs. It ensures that incoming teachers do not have to 'reinvent the wheel' and that they benefit from the contribution of more experienced and knowledgeable practitioners and academics; but it under-uses the teachers' own experience and reflection. TD has other advantages.
It gives teachers the choice of what and how to study, and thereby ensures the learning of meaningful and relevant content; it also stresses the importance of reflection on experience, and the ongoing, cumulative nature of professional pride and confidence. But its flexibility and stress on participant initiative and input may also cause lack of organisation and a 'pooling of ignorance', at the expense of genuine professional/personal progress.
Useful? In my opinion, the distinction today has outlived its usefulness. It has certainly been helpful in sharpening our thinking about how teachers learn best, in the same way as Krashen's 'acquisition/learning' dichotomy sharpened our thinking about how people learn languages. But the issue today is not the difference between the two, but rather their integration. We need to evolve a model which combines the best of both in order to design optimally effective professional courses, both initial and continuing.
Finocchiaro, M. Teacher Development - a developmental process English Teaching Forum (26/3, 2-3) 1988
Freeman, D. Teacher training, development and decision making: a model of teaching and related strategies for language teaching education, TESOL Quarterly (23/1, 27-46) 1989
Freeman, D. and Richards, J.C. Teacher Learning in Language Teaching Cambridge University Press 1996
Lange, D.L. A blueprint for a teacher development program, in Richards, J.C. and Nunan, D. (eds) Second Language Teacher Education Cambridge University Press 1990
Wallace, M.J. Training Foreign Language Teachers: A Reflective Approach Cambridge University Press 1990
Distinctions & Dichotomies explores pairs of linguistic and pedagogic terms. Penny Ur wonders whether teachers are trained or developed.
Teacher training refers to the preparation of teachers for professional practice through formal courses, usually university or college based, and usually resulting in accreditation (BATEFL, PGCE, RSA Dip.TEFLA, etc). Teacher development, on the other hand, is learning carried out by practitioners already working in the classroom, and implies informal learning either individually or in collaboration with colleagues.
The distinction has developed further than this. The term 'teacher development' (hereafter TD) was coined in the 1980s as something separate and different from 'teacher training' (TT), and in reaction against over-rigid, over-behaviouristic models of teacher training. The distinction is not just one of initial pre-service (training) versus continuing in-service (development). Today, the two terms are often used with more specific, contrasting meanings, implying differing approaches to the nature of professional learning, and carrying socio-political connotations.
Pre-set structure versus developmental process TT is based on a set syllabus and has a course structure and system of assessment. In TD there is no pre-set syllabus, time-structure or external assessment. The teachers themselves decide what and how they want to learn, get together to do research and share experience and knowledge, and they evaluate the results themselves.
Transmission versus personal processing of knowledge In TT, teaching/learning is based on a transmission model: the trainer informs, models and advises, and the trainees take on board the information and skills they are taught. In TD, the starting point is the teachers' own experience; new information is sought and shared rather than being imposed; it is then learnt by being reflected on, tried out, processed in terms of personal experience and finally 'owned' by the teachers in whatever form they find appropriate.
Professional function versus whole person TT stresses the cognitive development of trainees and their knowledge and skills as professionals. In TD there is considerable stress on the development of the 'whole person' rather than just the 'teacher'.
One-off versus ongoing TT takes the form of one-off courses, beginning and ending at predetermined times and taking place at pre-set locations. TD is more flexible, and is an ongoing, even lifelong process.
Authoritarian versus democratic TT implies an authoritarian regime: the trainee is told what to do by the trainer or institutional authorities. TD on the other hand implies a democratic regime: the teachers are involved in decision-making.
Thus TT disempowers the individual teacher/trainee and places authority in the hands of the 'experts'; TD empowers the individual.
Oversimplified?Note that the above definitions are over-simplified in order to make their point clearly. Certainly in TT there is room for input from the trainees based on their own experience; certainly there is room for input from 'experts' even within a TD framework. But I believe I have fairly described the general thrust of the distinction.
Satisfactory? Neither model on its own, of course, is entirely satisfactory. TT provides a structure, systematic syllabus and clear criteria for evaluation, but it may be over-rigid and out of touch with participants' needs. It ensures that incoming teachers do not have to 'reinvent the wheel' and that they benefit from the contribution of more experienced and knowledgeable practitioners and academics; but it under-uses the teachers' own experience and reflection. TD has other advantages.
It gives teachers the choice of what and how to study, and thereby ensures the learning of meaningful and relevant content; it also stresses the importance of reflection on experience, and the ongoing, cumulative nature of professional pride and confidence. But its flexibility and stress on participant initiative and input may also cause lack of organisation and a 'pooling of ignorance', at the expense of genuine professional/personal progress.
Useful? In my opinion, the distinction today has outlived its usefulness. It has certainly been helpful in sharpening our thinking about how teachers learn best, in the same way as Krashen's 'acquisition/learning' dichotomy sharpened our thinking about how people learn languages. But the issue today is not the difference between the two, but rather their integration. We need to evolve a model which combines the best of both in order to design optimally effective professional courses, both initial and continuing.
Finocchiaro, M. Teacher Development - a developmental process English Teaching Forum (26/3, 2-3) 1988
Freeman, D. Teacher training, development and decision making: a model of teaching and related strategies for language teaching education, TESOL Quarterly (23/1, 27-46) 1989
Freeman, D. and Richards, J.C. Teacher Learning in Language Teaching Cambridge University Press 1996
Lange, D.L. A blueprint for a teacher development program, in Richards, J.C. and Nunan, D. (eds) Second Language Teacher Education Cambridge University Press 1990
Wallace, M.J. Training Foreign Language Teachers: A Reflective Approach Cambridge University Press 1990
WHAT IS A GOOD TASK?
WHAT IS A GOOD TASK?
Andrew Littlejohn compares tasks that cast the teacher in the role of ‘language policeman’ with those that have a wider educational value and produce a ‘unique classroom’.
The importance of ‘tasks’
Two types of task
Different roles for teachers and learners
TASK 1: A visit to the museum
TASK 2: A question poster
The various tasks and exercises that students do, based on material in their coursebook, are the students’ main interaction with the language in the classroom. Many teachers often find it difficult to select or decide how to adapt activities for their own classes. In this article, I want to describe some of the ways I use as a teacher and materials writer to identify and choose the most effective task.
I use the word ‘task’ here to refer to any language learning activity that the students do in their classes, whether it is a language game, a drill, comprehension questions, a gap-fill exercise, a simulation, or a project.
The importance of ‘tasks’
In most English language classes, the amount of time that teachers and students spend communicating directly with each other is usually quite low. Often, this is limited to ‘management’ language (e.g. ‘Have you got your book?’) or brief exchanges about the teacher’s or student’s personal life (‘Are you feeling better today?’).
Most of what teachers and students say to each other is shaped by the tasks that they are doing. We can say then, that tasks are an ‘interface’ between teachers and students; it is through a task that they communicate with each other.
To take an example, imagine that a teacher sets the following task for the class:
‘Read the text on page 64. Don’t worry about difficult words, just read it all the way through without stopping.’
If, when the class begins reading, one student keeps asking the meaning of vocabulary items, the teacher will consider those questions inappropriate at that moment. Rather than reply to the student’s questions, the teacher might say, ‘Don’t worry about that now. Just read it. We can look at individual words later’.
Clearly, tasks are important in determining what students are permitted to say, and in shaping who teachers and students can be in the classroom. This means that it is very important to look closely at what tasks require teachers and students to perform. In order to do this, we can compare two very different types of tasks. The first type of task is, I am sure, a familiar one. The second type, perhaps less so.
Two types of task
TASK 1: A trip to the museum
For this first type of task, imagine that the students have just been learning about Present Simple question forms. The teacher now divides the students into pairs. One student in each pair is A and the other B. Each student is then given a role card, shown in Figure 1.
Does it look familiar? In the modern day ‘communicative’ classroom, this is probably one of the most common types of task: ‘the information gap’. Students begin working in pairs, asking and answering questions guided by their role cards. On completion, they exchange roles and begin again. Through the task, the students get plenty of practice with question forms and in answering questions. To this extent, the task is very successful. But is it completely satisfying? Before we discuss this question, let’s look at a very different type of task.
TASK2: A question poster
Imagine that the class of secondary-school-aged learners has just been working through a unit in their coursebook on the theme of animals.. They have learned the names of some animals, talked briefly about what animals they can see in the pictures and then listened to some sounds on the cassette, guessing which animal makes that sound.
The teacher then sticks a large piece of paper on the wall, draws a large circle on it, writes ‘Animals’ in the centre, and adds a question on a line from the circle, ‘What do whales eat?’ The teacher then says to the class:
‘Look at the pictures in your book. What questions do you have about the animals? What would you like to know about them?’
Students then begin suggesting questions. Initially, many of these come in their mother tongue, but as the teacher writes them up in English, the students start suggesting their own questions in English. The teacher points to the use of ‘do’ and ‘can’ and question words in the questions on the board, and encourages the students to form their own questions in a similar way. Figure 2 shows an example. When quite a few questions are on the board, students copy them into their files and the teacher says:
‘During the next few weeks, we will be doing a lot of work about animals. Look at these questions. I want you to try to find the answers. Ask your friends, look in books, ask your parents, ask your other teachers. See what you can find out. At the end of every lesson we can spend five or ten minutes to see what answers you have found.’
Over the next few lessons, the teacher asks the students what answers they have. Individual students write these answers in simple English on a piece of paper, and stick them next to the question on the question poster.
Different roles for teachers and learners
As you can see, the tasks are very different.
How would you answer these questions about each task?
What is the aim of the task?
Where do the ideas and language come from?
How personally involving is the task?
What happens to what the students produce?
You might like to think about your answers before you read my own.
TASK 1: A visit to the museum
There is no doubt that information gap tasks such as the ‘museum’ example are very useful. They provide good opportunities for language work and allow students to progress at their own pace. They do have some important limitations. The aim of the task is purely a language one: to provide practice in question forms. Once the students are already fairly proficient in using question forms, the task will have little or no value.
The task is also quite tightly structured and all of the ideas in it are provided by the role cards. The language too, mainly comes directly from the role cards; students simply have to apply the grammatical rule they have been learning in order to construct questions around it. Once the task is over, the precise details of it can be forgotten; its sole purpose is to practise question forms.
It would be very unlikely, for example, that the teacher would begin the next lesson with the question, ‘What time does the museum open?’ The level of prolonged personal involvement is quite low. If you were to do the task with different classes, even in different countries, the result would be almost identical in each case. We can say then, that the task produces a ‘standardised classroom’.
TASK 2: A question poster
If we think about the question poster task in terms of the same four questions, we get a very different set of answers. We can see immediately that the aim of the task goes beyond language learning. While the students get exposure to and practice in using question forms (as in Task 1) they are also developing wider educational abilities: drawing on their own knowledge, formulating genuine questions, and researching.
The task therefore will continue to have value even when students become proficient in question forms. They are more personally involved in what is going on; the questions all come from them.
This places the teacher in a different role. In the ‘museum task’, we can say that the teacher’s role is mainly what I call ‘the language policeman’, checking that the students are producing language correctly. In the question poster task however, the teacher’s role is one of supporting the students, helping them to say what they want to say. This means then, that every time a class does the task, the outcome will be different: the task produces a ‘unique classroom’, shaped by the unique individuals who are in it.
By comparing these two tasks, we can see some key elements that we can use to judge how much ‘value’ a task has. When I look at tasks then, I ask myself the following questions:
Does the task have value beyond language learning?
Are students personally involved?
Is the student’s personal contribution significant?
Will the task produce ‘a unique classroom’?
If the answer to most, or all, of these questions is ‘Yes’, then I know that I have a task that is often preferable to another task that practises the same language point.
Does this mean that tasks such as ‘A trip to the museum’ have no value? Not at all, because with a little bit of imagination, it is possible to make simple changes to ‘standardised’ tasks that will turn them into ‘unique’ tasks.
In a future article, I want to show you how I think we can do this. It will give you many more practical examples of tasks which provide language practice and incorporate wider educational values.
Andrew Littlejohn compares tasks that cast the teacher in the role of ‘language policeman’ with those that have a wider educational value and produce a ‘unique classroom’.
The importance of ‘tasks’
Two types of task
Different roles for teachers and learners
TASK 1: A visit to the museum
TASK 2: A question poster
The various tasks and exercises that students do, based on material in their coursebook, are the students’ main interaction with the language in the classroom. Many teachers often find it difficult to select or decide how to adapt activities for their own classes. In this article, I want to describe some of the ways I use as a teacher and materials writer to identify and choose the most effective task.
I use the word ‘task’ here to refer to any language learning activity that the students do in their classes, whether it is a language game, a drill, comprehension questions, a gap-fill exercise, a simulation, or a project.
The importance of ‘tasks’
In most English language classes, the amount of time that teachers and students spend communicating directly with each other is usually quite low. Often, this is limited to ‘management’ language (e.g. ‘Have you got your book?’) or brief exchanges about the teacher’s or student’s personal life (‘Are you feeling better today?’).
Most of what teachers and students say to each other is shaped by the tasks that they are doing. We can say then, that tasks are an ‘interface’ between teachers and students; it is through a task that they communicate with each other.
To take an example, imagine that a teacher sets the following task for the class:
‘Read the text on page 64. Don’t worry about difficult words, just read it all the way through without stopping.’
If, when the class begins reading, one student keeps asking the meaning of vocabulary items, the teacher will consider those questions inappropriate at that moment. Rather than reply to the student’s questions, the teacher might say, ‘Don’t worry about that now. Just read it. We can look at individual words later’.
Clearly, tasks are important in determining what students are permitted to say, and in shaping who teachers and students can be in the classroom. This means that it is very important to look closely at what tasks require teachers and students to perform. In order to do this, we can compare two very different types of tasks. The first type of task is, I am sure, a familiar one. The second type, perhaps less so.
Two types of task
TASK 1: A trip to the museum
For this first type of task, imagine that the students have just been learning about Present Simple question forms. The teacher now divides the students into pairs. One student in each pair is A and the other B. Each student is then given a role card, shown in Figure 1.
Does it look familiar? In the modern day ‘communicative’ classroom, this is probably one of the most common types of task: ‘the information gap’. Students begin working in pairs, asking and answering questions guided by their role cards. On completion, they exchange roles and begin again. Through the task, the students get plenty of practice with question forms and in answering questions. To this extent, the task is very successful. But is it completely satisfying? Before we discuss this question, let’s look at a very different type of task.
TASK2: A question poster
Imagine that the class of secondary-school-aged learners has just been working through a unit in their coursebook on the theme of animals.. They have learned the names of some animals, talked briefly about what animals they can see in the pictures and then listened to some sounds on the cassette, guessing which animal makes that sound.
The teacher then sticks a large piece of paper on the wall, draws a large circle on it, writes ‘Animals’ in the centre, and adds a question on a line from the circle, ‘What do whales eat?’ The teacher then says to the class:
‘Look at the pictures in your book. What questions do you have about the animals? What would you like to know about them?’
Students then begin suggesting questions. Initially, many of these come in their mother tongue, but as the teacher writes them up in English, the students start suggesting their own questions in English. The teacher points to the use of ‘do’ and ‘can’ and question words in the questions on the board, and encourages the students to form their own questions in a similar way. Figure 2 shows an example. When quite a few questions are on the board, students copy them into their files and the teacher says:
‘During the next few weeks, we will be doing a lot of work about animals. Look at these questions. I want you to try to find the answers. Ask your friends, look in books, ask your parents, ask your other teachers. See what you can find out. At the end of every lesson we can spend five or ten minutes to see what answers you have found.’
Over the next few lessons, the teacher asks the students what answers they have. Individual students write these answers in simple English on a piece of paper, and stick them next to the question on the question poster.
Different roles for teachers and learners
As you can see, the tasks are very different.
How would you answer these questions about each task?
What is the aim of the task?
Where do the ideas and language come from?
How personally involving is the task?
What happens to what the students produce?
You might like to think about your answers before you read my own.
TASK 1: A visit to the museum
There is no doubt that information gap tasks such as the ‘museum’ example are very useful. They provide good opportunities for language work and allow students to progress at their own pace. They do have some important limitations. The aim of the task is purely a language one: to provide practice in question forms. Once the students are already fairly proficient in using question forms, the task will have little or no value.
The task is also quite tightly structured and all of the ideas in it are provided by the role cards. The language too, mainly comes directly from the role cards; students simply have to apply the grammatical rule they have been learning in order to construct questions around it. Once the task is over, the precise details of it can be forgotten; its sole purpose is to practise question forms.
It would be very unlikely, for example, that the teacher would begin the next lesson with the question, ‘What time does the museum open?’ The level of prolonged personal involvement is quite low. If you were to do the task with different classes, even in different countries, the result would be almost identical in each case. We can say then, that the task produces a ‘standardised classroom’.
TASK 2: A question poster
If we think about the question poster task in terms of the same four questions, we get a very different set of answers. We can see immediately that the aim of the task goes beyond language learning. While the students get exposure to and practice in using question forms (as in Task 1) they are also developing wider educational abilities: drawing on their own knowledge, formulating genuine questions, and researching.
The task therefore will continue to have value even when students become proficient in question forms. They are more personally involved in what is going on; the questions all come from them.
This places the teacher in a different role. In the ‘museum task’, we can say that the teacher’s role is mainly what I call ‘the language policeman’, checking that the students are producing language correctly. In the question poster task however, the teacher’s role is one of supporting the students, helping them to say what they want to say. This means then, that every time a class does the task, the outcome will be different: the task produces a ‘unique classroom’, shaped by the unique individuals who are in it.
By comparing these two tasks, we can see some key elements that we can use to judge how much ‘value’ a task has. When I look at tasks then, I ask myself the following questions:
Does the task have value beyond language learning?
Are students personally involved?
Is the student’s personal contribution significant?
Will the task produce ‘a unique classroom’?
If the answer to most, or all, of these questions is ‘Yes’, then I know that I have a task that is often preferable to another task that practises the same language point.
Does this mean that tasks such as ‘A trip to the museum’ have no value? Not at all, because with a little bit of imagination, it is possible to make simple changes to ‘standardised’ tasks that will turn them into ‘unique’ tasks.
In a future article, I want to show you how I think we can do this. It will give you many more practical examples of tasks which provide language practice and incorporate wider educational values.
LANGUAGE TEACHING FOR THE MILLENNIUM
LANGUAGE TEACHING FOR THE MILLENNIUM
Andrew Littlejohn discusses the role of language teachers in a 'futures curriculum'.
The prospect, it seems, of a 'new millennium' has captured our imagination. In Britain, as elsewhere, there have been great discussions about how we should celebrate this historically significant event. Like the onset of a new year, however, a new millennium also marks a moment when it is appropriate to think about what we have done in the past, where we are now, and how we should plan for the future.
By all accounts, we are in a period of rapid change, socially, politically, technologically, environmentally and culturally. It is likely, for example, that people who are now in their twenties, thirties or forties will experience significant changes in their working lives in the years ahead. Younger people who will be around sixty by the middle of the next century will grow up into a world quite unlike the one we inhabit now.
The significance of these changes has led many educationalists to call for a 'futures curriculum', a curriculum which actively discusses the future and prepares students for their lives ahead. So what is our role as language teachers in all this? What might it mean to talk of 'language teaching for the future'? My aim is to stimulate discussion, even to be provocative, by discussing two related questions:
What will the future be like?
What should we be doing now to prepare our students for the future?
Future trends
Predicting the future is always a hazardous business. Natural occurrences, catastrophes, sudden unexpected events, all make it impossible to reliably describe what the future will be like. But we can make reasonable predictions. The future won't just suddenly happen. The nature of the future exists in our present. It is here that history can help us.
If we look back at our recent past, we can identify trends which are likely to characterise the nature of future society. Social scientists working in this area have identified a number of aspects which they suggest will typify future 'post modern' society ('post modern' being what comes after 'modern' times). These characteristics refer principally to the West, but with the advent of 'globalisation' they will be increasingly relevant everywhere.
Some of the more significant aspects are:
a fragmented society
A society divided into smaller communities which extend across national borders. The notion of a culture (shared by all) will be replaced by cultures in which meanings, customs, habits, and references will vary considerably, even within the same geographical area.
decline of national governments
Globalisation as a dominant feature, limiting the power and relevance of national governments. Supranational governments and businesses will exercise greater influence.
rapid (dis)appearance of jobs
Technology will cause the disappearance of many types of jobs and the emergence of new ones. In a lifetime, an individual may expect to have ten or more different occupations. Learning to adapt and make choices and decisions will become more and more essential.
spread of the market
The force of 'the market' (advertising, consumer products, cost/profit analysis, etc) will be evident in all spheres of life: education, health care, religion, the family, and so on. Globalisation will lead to standardisation in the market; all the same products will be available everywhere.
influence of electronic media
Electronic media (television, computers, interactive video) will dominate as the principal means by which people receive information and spend their leisure time. Electronic media will far outweigh the influence that school may have. Already estimates suggest that by the time most students have finished high school in the USA, they have spent 11,000 hours in class, but over 22,000 in front of a television.
endlessly eclectic
An emerging characteristic of many societies now is the manner in which the elements from very different areas of life are combined. Images from traditional life in Africa are used to advertise fashion clothes. Individuals can decorate their homes to look like houses from hundreds of years ago. Pop stars sing and politicians speak at the funerals of royalty. At the same time, the limits on what is expected are breaking down, with the result that it is becoming increasingly difficult to be really shocked. 'Expect anything' is the best advice.
Each of these trends, social scientists suggest, are likely to become more evident in the years ahead. Whether they are good or bad depends, of course, upon your point of view. What is clear, however, is that there are dangers. The increasing dominance of electronic media, globalisation and multinational organisations all pose dangers for democracy and individual freedom.
Similarly, the growing importance of market forces may threaten the integrity of social services such as education, where economic efficiency may not always be compatible with educational goals. We need to be aware of what is happening, so that instead of simply drifting forward, we can make the future as we would like it to be.
Preparing students for the futureThe description of emerging characteristics of a future society may seem very remote from the day to day moments of language teaching. In reality, however, language teaching is a part of society as much as anything else. It is not difficult to see signs of a post modern society already present in contemporary language teaching practices.
A review of published coursebooks for school-aged students can expose some significant characteristics. You may or may not agree with the following which are based on my own observations.
Language learner as consumer
The language exercises are often centred around performing commercial transactions (e.g. ordering hamburgers and cola in a restaurant) or expressing preferences about consumer items (fashion clothes, pop music, popstars, and videos).
Fragmented, eclectic content
A unit of materials may be composed of seemingly random content linked perhaps by an underlying grammatical thread. A newspaper article about a protest may be followed by a listening passage on UFOs, which may in turn be followed by a role play to solve a murder - all intended to present examples of the Past Simple tense. 'Expect anything' is also suitable advice to a language student.
Significance
Meaning has long been important in language teaching, but beyond this there is also the matter of significance. On the one hand, much of the content of language teaching appears to focus on what is essentially trivia. On the other hand, the true significance of something may be disregarded in the pursuit of a syllabus item.
A text about the first tests of a nuclear bomb, potentially one of the most significant events in modern history, may be the focus of classwork simply for the form it exemplifies: What were the journalists doing when the bomb exploded? Similarly, a storyline about a boy stealing cigarettes from a shop may be used to practise language forms: What was the boy doing when the girl saw him? without questioning the morality of the action.
Standardised lessons
Although teaching practices and materials have become much more interesting for the learner in recent times, this has been accompanied by the growth in standardisation of teaching practices. Superficially, part of the cause of this has been the emergence of global coursebooks which propose similar classroom work in diverse situations and cultures.
Additionally, global teaching qualifications are potentially leading to a standardised definition of 'good teaching'. I say 'superficially' because it is not the fact of globalisation that is important here, but what global coursebooks and global teaching qualifications actually propose. My own view is that there is an increasing tendency towards the scripting of lessons - standard lessons and lesson formats that are re-enacted all over the world. Students and teachers on opposite sides of the planet, in widely differing contexts, end up working on exactly the same language, through the same standard closed tasks, producing more or less the same outcome.
A futures curriculum in language teaching
A futures curriculum for language teaching, then, will be based not only on what our students are likely to need, but also on a vision of how we would like the future to be - how we need to guard against dangers and shape the way we wish to live. This is of course a subjective matter which will vary from individual to individual and culture to culture, but I have set out six principles that I think could underpin developments in language teaching. As a set of desirable characteristics, they may also function as a means of evaluating what we are doing now, so I have added questions which we can use to review our present practices.
As an educational activity, language teaching bears a particular responsibility. On the one hand, we need to think about how we can help prepare our students for the very different demands the future will make, the need to make rapid decisions and adapt, for instance. On the other hand, we need to look beyond the concerns of the language syllabus, and not simply drift with the flow of post-modern development.
We need to think about the content and significance of our materials, the values and attitudes we project, the kinds of mental states we are fostering in our classrooms - how, indeed, we contribute to the way that people see themselves. Now is the time to be shaping the future.
Some characteristics of a 'futures curriculum'
1. Coherence
The use of themes, topics and projects to bind lessons together and provide coherence and a deeper focus and understanding.
Ask: Is there a coherent topic over a lesson or series of lessons?
2. Significant content
The selection of content that is worth learning and thinking about, dealt with in appropriate ways, which does not, on the one hand, trivialise significant issues or, on the other hand, make trivial things seem important. A key topic could itself be 'the future' in an attempt to raise students' awareness of future developments and discuss their own hopes, aspirations, worries and personal action.
Ask: Is the lesson content worth knowing or thinking about? Is significant content treated appropriately?
3. Decision-making in the classroom A structured plan for actively involving students in making decisions in the classroom and taking on more responsibility for what happens in their lessons.
Ask: What decisions are students required to make? How do they help to shape lessons to make each lesson unique?
4. Use of students' intelligence The use of types of exercises which require thinking, beyond memory retrieval or repetition, and which involve students in hypothesising, negotiating, planning, and evaluating.
Ask: Do classroom tasks require thought?
5. Cultural understanding
Tasks and texts which require students to look through the eyes of others, to learn the relative nature of values, to understand why people in different contexts think and do different things.
Ask: Do texts and tasks promote cultural understanding?
6. Critical language awareness
To view all language critically, that is, to look beyond the surface meaning and ask oneself questions such as, Why are they saying that? What is not being said? and Who benefits from what is being said? We might for example ask students to think about deeper reasons for why the passive voice is used in a newspaper headline or why particular adjectives are used to describe a consumer product and what effect they have.
Ask: Are students asked to think about why language is used in particular ways?
Andrew Littlejohn discusses the role of language teachers in a 'futures curriculum'.
The prospect, it seems, of a 'new millennium' has captured our imagination. In Britain, as elsewhere, there have been great discussions about how we should celebrate this historically significant event. Like the onset of a new year, however, a new millennium also marks a moment when it is appropriate to think about what we have done in the past, where we are now, and how we should plan for the future.
By all accounts, we are in a period of rapid change, socially, politically, technologically, environmentally and culturally. It is likely, for example, that people who are now in their twenties, thirties or forties will experience significant changes in their working lives in the years ahead. Younger people who will be around sixty by the middle of the next century will grow up into a world quite unlike the one we inhabit now.
The significance of these changes has led many educationalists to call for a 'futures curriculum', a curriculum which actively discusses the future and prepares students for their lives ahead. So what is our role as language teachers in all this? What might it mean to talk of 'language teaching for the future'? My aim is to stimulate discussion, even to be provocative, by discussing two related questions:
What will the future be like?
What should we be doing now to prepare our students for the future?
Future trends
Predicting the future is always a hazardous business. Natural occurrences, catastrophes, sudden unexpected events, all make it impossible to reliably describe what the future will be like. But we can make reasonable predictions. The future won't just suddenly happen. The nature of the future exists in our present. It is here that history can help us.
If we look back at our recent past, we can identify trends which are likely to characterise the nature of future society. Social scientists working in this area have identified a number of aspects which they suggest will typify future 'post modern' society ('post modern' being what comes after 'modern' times). These characteristics refer principally to the West, but with the advent of 'globalisation' they will be increasingly relevant everywhere.
Some of the more significant aspects are:
a fragmented society
A society divided into smaller communities which extend across national borders. The notion of a culture (shared by all) will be replaced by cultures in which meanings, customs, habits, and references will vary considerably, even within the same geographical area.
decline of national governments
Globalisation as a dominant feature, limiting the power and relevance of national governments. Supranational governments and businesses will exercise greater influence.
rapid (dis)appearance of jobs
Technology will cause the disappearance of many types of jobs and the emergence of new ones. In a lifetime, an individual may expect to have ten or more different occupations. Learning to adapt and make choices and decisions will become more and more essential.
spread of the market
The force of 'the market' (advertising, consumer products, cost/profit analysis, etc) will be evident in all spheres of life: education, health care, religion, the family, and so on. Globalisation will lead to standardisation in the market; all the same products will be available everywhere.
influence of electronic media
Electronic media (television, computers, interactive video) will dominate as the principal means by which people receive information and spend their leisure time. Electronic media will far outweigh the influence that school may have. Already estimates suggest that by the time most students have finished high school in the USA, they have spent 11,000 hours in class, but over 22,000 in front of a television.
endlessly eclectic
An emerging characteristic of many societies now is the manner in which the elements from very different areas of life are combined. Images from traditional life in Africa are used to advertise fashion clothes. Individuals can decorate their homes to look like houses from hundreds of years ago. Pop stars sing and politicians speak at the funerals of royalty. At the same time, the limits on what is expected are breaking down, with the result that it is becoming increasingly difficult to be really shocked. 'Expect anything' is the best advice.
Each of these trends, social scientists suggest, are likely to become more evident in the years ahead. Whether they are good or bad depends, of course, upon your point of view. What is clear, however, is that there are dangers. The increasing dominance of electronic media, globalisation and multinational organisations all pose dangers for democracy and individual freedom.
Similarly, the growing importance of market forces may threaten the integrity of social services such as education, where economic efficiency may not always be compatible with educational goals. We need to be aware of what is happening, so that instead of simply drifting forward, we can make the future as we would like it to be.
Preparing students for the futureThe description of emerging characteristics of a future society may seem very remote from the day to day moments of language teaching. In reality, however, language teaching is a part of society as much as anything else. It is not difficult to see signs of a post modern society already present in contemporary language teaching practices.
A review of published coursebooks for school-aged students can expose some significant characteristics. You may or may not agree with the following which are based on my own observations.
Language learner as consumer
The language exercises are often centred around performing commercial transactions (e.g. ordering hamburgers and cola in a restaurant) or expressing preferences about consumer items (fashion clothes, pop music, popstars, and videos).
Fragmented, eclectic content
A unit of materials may be composed of seemingly random content linked perhaps by an underlying grammatical thread. A newspaper article about a protest may be followed by a listening passage on UFOs, which may in turn be followed by a role play to solve a murder - all intended to present examples of the Past Simple tense. 'Expect anything' is also suitable advice to a language student.
Significance
Meaning has long been important in language teaching, but beyond this there is also the matter of significance. On the one hand, much of the content of language teaching appears to focus on what is essentially trivia. On the other hand, the true significance of something may be disregarded in the pursuit of a syllabus item.
A text about the first tests of a nuclear bomb, potentially one of the most significant events in modern history, may be the focus of classwork simply for the form it exemplifies: What were the journalists doing when the bomb exploded? Similarly, a storyline about a boy stealing cigarettes from a shop may be used to practise language forms: What was the boy doing when the girl saw him? without questioning the morality of the action.
Standardised lessons
Although teaching practices and materials have become much more interesting for the learner in recent times, this has been accompanied by the growth in standardisation of teaching practices. Superficially, part of the cause of this has been the emergence of global coursebooks which propose similar classroom work in diverse situations and cultures.
Additionally, global teaching qualifications are potentially leading to a standardised definition of 'good teaching'. I say 'superficially' because it is not the fact of globalisation that is important here, but what global coursebooks and global teaching qualifications actually propose. My own view is that there is an increasing tendency towards the scripting of lessons - standard lessons and lesson formats that are re-enacted all over the world. Students and teachers on opposite sides of the planet, in widely differing contexts, end up working on exactly the same language, through the same standard closed tasks, producing more or less the same outcome.
A futures curriculum in language teaching
A futures curriculum for language teaching, then, will be based not only on what our students are likely to need, but also on a vision of how we would like the future to be - how we need to guard against dangers and shape the way we wish to live. This is of course a subjective matter which will vary from individual to individual and culture to culture, but I have set out six principles that I think could underpin developments in language teaching. As a set of desirable characteristics, they may also function as a means of evaluating what we are doing now, so I have added questions which we can use to review our present practices.
As an educational activity, language teaching bears a particular responsibility. On the one hand, we need to think about how we can help prepare our students for the very different demands the future will make, the need to make rapid decisions and adapt, for instance. On the other hand, we need to look beyond the concerns of the language syllabus, and not simply drift with the flow of post-modern development.
We need to think about the content and significance of our materials, the values and attitudes we project, the kinds of mental states we are fostering in our classrooms - how, indeed, we contribute to the way that people see themselves. Now is the time to be shaping the future.
Some characteristics of a 'futures curriculum'
1. Coherence
The use of themes, topics and projects to bind lessons together and provide coherence and a deeper focus and understanding.
Ask: Is there a coherent topic over a lesson or series of lessons?
2. Significant content
The selection of content that is worth learning and thinking about, dealt with in appropriate ways, which does not, on the one hand, trivialise significant issues or, on the other hand, make trivial things seem important. A key topic could itself be 'the future' in an attempt to raise students' awareness of future developments and discuss their own hopes, aspirations, worries and personal action.
Ask: Is the lesson content worth knowing or thinking about? Is significant content treated appropriately?
3. Decision-making in the classroom A structured plan for actively involving students in making decisions in the classroom and taking on more responsibility for what happens in their lessons.
Ask: What decisions are students required to make? How do they help to shape lessons to make each lesson unique?
4. Use of students' intelligence The use of types of exercises which require thinking, beyond memory retrieval or repetition, and which involve students in hypothesising, negotiating, planning, and evaluating.
Ask: Do classroom tasks require thought?
5. Cultural understanding
Tasks and texts which require students to look through the eyes of others, to learn the relative nature of values, to understand why people in different contexts think and do different things.
Ask: Do texts and tasks promote cultural understanding?
6. Critical language awareness
To view all language critically, that is, to look beyond the surface meaning and ask oneself questions such as, Why are they saying that? What is not being said? and Who benefits from what is being said? We might for example ask students to think about deeper reasons for why the passive voice is used in a newspaper headline or why particular adjectives are used to describe a consumer product and what effect they have.
Ask: Are students asked to think about why language is used in particular ways?
MiniMAX
MiniMAX
Who should do the work in the language classroom? Jon Taylor is in no doubt that it's the students.
A call for increased teacher efficiency would probably provoke a cry of exasperation followed by a riot! Yet efficiency is not about working harder - indeed it may involve working less. Efficiency is the ratio between input and output; in this case teacher input (or lesson preparation) and student output (language production).
Preparation is an essential and creatively satisfying part of teaching, although it is not the amount of time invested which counts, but its effectiveness. It may be possible to reduce the preparation and still see positive results in student output, and I would go so far as to say that a transfer from 'teacher input energy' to 'student input energy' would almost certainly bring about a rise in productive output.
Do any of the scenarios in the box below sound familiar?
One common feature of such situations is that the teacher is over-loaded and the students under-loaded. Often, considerable effort is required for learning to take place, but that effort needs to be made by the student. Teachers who hog the whole burden consequently deprive students of an integral part of the learning process.
Furthermore, disruption is much more likely when the going is light. So the teacher who spares the students any effort is digging his or her own grave as regards controlling the class. These issues, amongst others, form part of an approach to teaching I call 'Minimax': getting the maximum reward from the minimum investment of time.
Perhaps you have already guessed the minimax principles from the examples of the struggling teachers.
Do you recognise yourself?
John is conscientious, creative ... and under stress. There just isn't enough time for everything. He is in the staffroom designing a handout. Above him is a poster for a seminar on cutting down preparation, but with four more handouts to do, he's not sure he can afford the time …
Mary is creating a puzzle for her teenagers. Last time they finished in five minutes, so she still has the rest of the lesson to plan.
Jack has made some beautiful flashcards. He's done six but needs 20 for this afternoon.
Helen is preparing a roleplay by writing instructions on slips of paper, distributing attitudes and opinions evenly amongst the class. As she writes, a shadow of doubt creeps in. Last time they refused to argue for beliefs they didn't hold, it took ages to explain the vocabulary on the role cards and the whole activity fizzled out in minutes …
Roy needs a handout. He came up with a great one last year. Pity he binned it.
Jane realises that she's learning far more about the English language, and far faster, than her students. Designing worksheets has really helped (even her spelling has improved), though the students barely seem to look at them.
Sally has got some great quizzes. She writes the questions, divides the teams, explains the rules, asks the questions, decides if the answers are correct, writes on the board and keeps the score. And the students? Well, they get excited about winning, of course, and answer the questions, if they can …
Adam prepares extra material for the faster students in his mixed-ability class, but it never seems enough. He exhausts himself keeping them occupied, while they get restless waiting for the others, who are trying to catch his attention …
MiniMAX principles
The minimax approach aims to put the hard work needed for learning squarely on the shoulders of the students, freeing the teacher for more effective roles such as guiding, facilitating, monitoring.
1 If you cut your own wood, it warms you twice.A great deal of the work that goes into pre-lesson preparation would be far more effective as part of the lesson plan. What for the teacher may be useless donkey-work, for the student becomes valuable practice or revision. Who would benefit more from designing a crossword?
Which of the steps involved would help the student: looking back over past vocabulary sources, choosing important words, checking spellings, fitting them together, making up definitions, presenting their crossword puzzles to test other groups? As well as being fun, the preparation is probably more effective practice than merely completing the answers.
2 Mixed ability
If students work in groups designing activities or exercises for their peers, they not only derive pleasure and motivation by challenging their classmates, they also help each other to revise. In a mixed-ability class, the work can be divided so everybody is involved in the creation of tasks. Students rely on each other and assist each other to meet the time deadlines.
3 Better than the book
Which house is a student most likely to enjoy describing? The one on page X of the coursebook, or their own? Or their ideal house? Or their idol's? Are parents more at home describing their own children or the people in the flashcard you have made? In which have they more control over the content, and in which is there a real information gap?
Personalisation can provide meaningful content for lessons and frees the teacher to shape what students want to say. It is realistic practice - things close to the students are likely sources of communication in the real world.
4 Let there be creation
There are many activities in which the student is encouraged to imagine, think, dwell and ponder. You don't always need to lay your hands on a picture - just ask the students to close their eyes and dream one up, or conceal a blank card and get them to guess what's on it. There is a party game where a volunteer tries to find out what has happened by asking questions; the others simply answer 'Yes' or 'No' according to whether the question sentence ends in a consonant or a vowel. The students use a lot of language in a fun way.
5 Real play or roleplay?
How often do we try and tell our students what to think? It is one thing to have pairs taking turns in being shop assistants and customers so that they both practise certain functions. It is quite another thing to persuade students to hold certain views or play devil's advocate merely to practise expressions of agreeing and disagreeing. In a real discussion it is improbable that they would all be of the same opinion anyway, and surely it is more beneficial to help them express their true feelings?
6 Keep a dog and bark yourself
Who's the worst player on the World Cup winning team? Answer: the trainer. You may be the best English-speaker in the class, but that just shows that you don't need the practice as much as your students do. They will improve by doing, especially if they speak in a meaningful fashion, rather than only listen to you.
7 Go with the flow
Sometimes it happens that you have your own plan but the students want to steer the lesson in a different direction. This may be an indication of positive feedback, in that they are enjoying an activity and would like to devote more time to it, or perhaps an interesting topic has come up and they would like to discuss it.
In such cases, it may be worthwhile diverging from the schedule and making the most of their interest. Similarly, the need for some remedial work might come to light during an activity, in which case it may be advisable to strike while the iron is hot. This means you can save your prepared material for a later lesson, and save yourself some time in the process.
8 The devil makes work for idle hands
I owe this tip to my first headmaster in Secondary School teaching. Leaving aside its rather heavy overtones, its application is simply that you need to engage students in activity to avoid wasted energy and negative vibes. It's even better, of course, if that activity is inspiring, challenging, motivating and fun, and if they can see that progress is being made.
9 Keep it simple
Materials are often too meticulously prepared. Loose cut-out photos have a number of advantages over mounted laminated cards. They are lighter and less bulky, and easier to carry and store. Also, they are smaller, you can fit more onto the table. Adding to them is quick and keeps the collection fresh. If they get torn or lost, they are not difficult to replace and you can be consoled in the knowledge that you didn't spend hours producing them.
10 Milk it
Many great ideas can be extended and adapted, revised and recycled. So think about how many other uses there could be for the materials and techniques you have created. An activity you have used for a grammar point may be suitable for vocabulary or pronunciation areas. Don't throw resources away. Slips of paper with lexis on them (prepared by the students, naturally) have multiple uses, and should be stored and frequently reused.
11 Focus away from the teacher
Encourage the students to participate while you direct proceedings. Rather than carve your way through a stony silence with the pressure of all eyes and ears on you, put the ball in their court early and get them working with each other as well as with you. A squash coach is a 'minimax' artist: one or two steps, and the learner is running all over court. The novice wouldn't learn half as much just by watching.
12 Avoid number paranoia
Why is it that we are obsessed with finishing a list on a round number? How much time have you spent racking your brains for a tenth example on a handout when your nine are perfectly adequate? Why must we push on to make it 12,15, 20, or at least an even number? What is all this discrimination against prime and odd numbers? Is it because they are 'odd'? This may seem trivial, but without it the list of 'Minimax' principles would feel somehow incomplete
.
13 Number paranoia revisited
There isn't really a number thirteen, but I didn't want to end on an even number (see previous point).
MiniMAX activities
There are no special secrets or techniques in the minimax approach. You are probably already a practising member of the club. Any activity which entails little preparation and yet generates effective language practice qualifies. This is to encourage efficiency not teacher laziness.
Group participation
The seeds of some of these ideas have come from teachers I have worked with or whose seminars I have attended, particularly on Pilgrims summer courses. One effective writing activity I call Crazy Biographies can work with any group once they know the Past Simple. Each student writes a past tense autobiographical paragraph, but in the third person, and (optionally) writes a related 'comprehension question' on a separate sheet.
The next student continues the account from his or her own imagination or experience (and writes another question). It is then passed on again, and again, and so on. Completed biographies are pinned on the wall for enjoyment (or as the source material for answering the questions).
Rumour is a similar activity for speaking practice. Each student concocts a simple tale and tells someone else, who adds new details on retelling it to another student. In both activities the whole class is engaged, and they take part in the creation of numerous texts, rather than just one, which gives them more motivation to listen or read, and more interest when they hear or see their adapted contributions.
Brainstorm and pass-it-onIn pairs, students brainstorm a list of recently studied words, eg house vocabulary. They pass their list to the next pair, who draw a scene including all the items. This drawing is then passed to another pair, who have to identify the original list. A fourth group checks the work of the previous groups.
Meanwhile, the original writers draw someone else's picture, and then recreate a third group's wordlist, etc. Everyone takes part in four different lists. Obviously, the more times it goes round, the more students see the words recycled.
An entertaining conclusion is to cut the pictures into quarters and without showing their portion, students describe their picture and find partners holding the other parts of the same original.
Speaking activities
A lovely 'warmer' is to ask the class to stand on an imaginary line (or in 'no-man's-land' in a large class). In response to a choice of words from you, they move to one side or the other and chat to the nearest person about the theme which prompted their choice. For example, you could say 'tea or coffee', indicating right or left respectively, and so they would stand on one side and say why they chose 'coffee' instead of 'tea'.
Theme choices might include 'beach or mountain', 'film or book', or something related to recent lessons.
Questionnaires
Students can conduct surveys by preparing and asking each other a series of questions. Even with reading and listening texts, they can be encouraged to challenge each other's comprehension. Remember (and remind students) that while some questions merely test factual understanding or recognition, others go beyond and include the students' experience, tastes and imagination.
Given an authentic column of holiday advertisements, for example, which of the following questions require factual answers, and which involve the student's 'self' more?
a Where does the Kenyan safari start?
b Which countries would you visit if you went on the trekking expedition?
c Would you consider going on the Caribbean cruise? Give reasons.
d Have you ever been to Tunisia? Did you see the same things as those described in the advertisement?
You can appreciate that the last two questions encourage both searching for information and the chance to personalise, to be involved in the content. As monitor, therefore, you can encourage groups to write questions along these lines.
Using songs
It is not always necessary to have a complete copy of the lyrics to use a song effectively in class. For these activities, it is enough for you to know the words fairly well. A good deal of vocabulary work can be done before listening, for example finding the opposites of given words, or tabling parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) of words in the text, then listening to the song to see if they are correct or to see which possibility they hear.
Some songs lend themselves to the idea of 'draw what you hear', after which the students can compare drawings and revise the language by remembering it together.
Revision lessons
Every now and then you might favour the idea of an informal progress test. Students come to expect them, and I suspect that some of them enjoy them, and welcome the chance to express what they have learnt. Normally, which of these steps do you do, and which do your students do?o look back at language coveredo prepare the testo do the testo correct the testo give feedback
A minimax purist would have the students doing all five steps. The first two steps are invaluable for revision, and the last two are useful for fine-tuning and paying attention to detail. The teacher can suggest possible exercises (see list above) and offer assistance and suggestions. You are in the passenger seat, but you have dual controls if you need them.
None of the above activities is rigid or fixed. This approach is more a way of thinking which can be adapted to any level or group size, and you as teacher can direct the techniques appropriate to your class. Whenever you catch yourself preparing activities or materials, ask yourself, 'Could students do this?'
REVISION LESSON
Prepare a 'test' for another group of students to do. Please write clearly, preferably in black, so that it may be photocopied. Make a separate list of the correct answers.
Translation Translate five sentences which illustrate a language point we have studied.
Crossword Design a crossword using vocabulary we have studied. Make up appropriate clues.
Categories Jumble up 20 words which can then be sorted into four groups. (You decide on the groups.)
Gapfill Write five sentences, each with one gap (eg prepositions).
Mix 'n' match Choose up to ten pairs (eg opposites, collocations), and jumble them up.
Odd-one-out Produce five lists of four words. Three have something in common; one is different.
Spot the error Write five sentences, each with one grammatical error.
Picture it For five words or expressions we have studied, draw pictures which illustrate their meaning.
'Name three things you can …' CATCH / SPEND / MISS (Offer five verbs, eg CATCH: a cold, a ball, a bus; SPEND: a weekend, a fortune, an hour; MISS: a person, a target, a film, etc.)
Definitions For two words or expressions we have studied, write out three definitions, two of which are wrong.
Design a quiz Ask five factual questions from themes we have studied in the coursebook.
Gapfill text Take a text we have studied, photocopy it, then blank out 10 important words.
Who should do the work in the language classroom? Jon Taylor is in no doubt that it's the students.
A call for increased teacher efficiency would probably provoke a cry of exasperation followed by a riot! Yet efficiency is not about working harder - indeed it may involve working less. Efficiency is the ratio between input and output; in this case teacher input (or lesson preparation) and student output (language production).
Preparation is an essential and creatively satisfying part of teaching, although it is not the amount of time invested which counts, but its effectiveness. It may be possible to reduce the preparation and still see positive results in student output, and I would go so far as to say that a transfer from 'teacher input energy' to 'student input energy' would almost certainly bring about a rise in productive output.
Do any of the scenarios in the box below sound familiar?
One common feature of such situations is that the teacher is over-loaded and the students under-loaded. Often, considerable effort is required for learning to take place, but that effort needs to be made by the student. Teachers who hog the whole burden consequently deprive students of an integral part of the learning process.
Furthermore, disruption is much more likely when the going is light. So the teacher who spares the students any effort is digging his or her own grave as regards controlling the class. These issues, amongst others, form part of an approach to teaching I call 'Minimax': getting the maximum reward from the minimum investment of time.
Perhaps you have already guessed the minimax principles from the examples of the struggling teachers.
Do you recognise yourself?
John is conscientious, creative ... and under stress. There just isn't enough time for everything. He is in the staffroom designing a handout. Above him is a poster for a seminar on cutting down preparation, but with four more handouts to do, he's not sure he can afford the time …
Mary is creating a puzzle for her teenagers. Last time they finished in five minutes, so she still has the rest of the lesson to plan.
Jack has made some beautiful flashcards. He's done six but needs 20 for this afternoon.
Helen is preparing a roleplay by writing instructions on slips of paper, distributing attitudes and opinions evenly amongst the class. As she writes, a shadow of doubt creeps in. Last time they refused to argue for beliefs they didn't hold, it took ages to explain the vocabulary on the role cards and the whole activity fizzled out in minutes …
Roy needs a handout. He came up with a great one last year. Pity he binned it.
Jane realises that she's learning far more about the English language, and far faster, than her students. Designing worksheets has really helped (even her spelling has improved), though the students barely seem to look at them.
Sally has got some great quizzes. She writes the questions, divides the teams, explains the rules, asks the questions, decides if the answers are correct, writes on the board and keeps the score. And the students? Well, they get excited about winning, of course, and answer the questions, if they can …
Adam prepares extra material for the faster students in his mixed-ability class, but it never seems enough. He exhausts himself keeping them occupied, while they get restless waiting for the others, who are trying to catch his attention …
MiniMAX principles
The minimax approach aims to put the hard work needed for learning squarely on the shoulders of the students, freeing the teacher for more effective roles such as guiding, facilitating, monitoring.
1 If you cut your own wood, it warms you twice.A great deal of the work that goes into pre-lesson preparation would be far more effective as part of the lesson plan. What for the teacher may be useless donkey-work, for the student becomes valuable practice or revision. Who would benefit more from designing a crossword?
Which of the steps involved would help the student: looking back over past vocabulary sources, choosing important words, checking spellings, fitting them together, making up definitions, presenting their crossword puzzles to test other groups? As well as being fun, the preparation is probably more effective practice than merely completing the answers.
2 Mixed ability
If students work in groups designing activities or exercises for their peers, they not only derive pleasure and motivation by challenging their classmates, they also help each other to revise. In a mixed-ability class, the work can be divided so everybody is involved in the creation of tasks. Students rely on each other and assist each other to meet the time deadlines.
3 Better than the book
Which house is a student most likely to enjoy describing? The one on page X of the coursebook, or their own? Or their ideal house? Or their idol's? Are parents more at home describing their own children or the people in the flashcard you have made? In which have they more control over the content, and in which is there a real information gap?
Personalisation can provide meaningful content for lessons and frees the teacher to shape what students want to say. It is realistic practice - things close to the students are likely sources of communication in the real world.
4 Let there be creation
There are many activities in which the student is encouraged to imagine, think, dwell and ponder. You don't always need to lay your hands on a picture - just ask the students to close their eyes and dream one up, or conceal a blank card and get them to guess what's on it. There is a party game where a volunteer tries to find out what has happened by asking questions; the others simply answer 'Yes' or 'No' according to whether the question sentence ends in a consonant or a vowel. The students use a lot of language in a fun way.
5 Real play or roleplay?
How often do we try and tell our students what to think? It is one thing to have pairs taking turns in being shop assistants and customers so that they both practise certain functions. It is quite another thing to persuade students to hold certain views or play devil's advocate merely to practise expressions of agreeing and disagreeing. In a real discussion it is improbable that they would all be of the same opinion anyway, and surely it is more beneficial to help them express their true feelings?
6 Keep a dog and bark yourself
Who's the worst player on the World Cup winning team? Answer: the trainer. You may be the best English-speaker in the class, but that just shows that you don't need the practice as much as your students do. They will improve by doing, especially if they speak in a meaningful fashion, rather than only listen to you.
7 Go with the flow
Sometimes it happens that you have your own plan but the students want to steer the lesson in a different direction. This may be an indication of positive feedback, in that they are enjoying an activity and would like to devote more time to it, or perhaps an interesting topic has come up and they would like to discuss it.
In such cases, it may be worthwhile diverging from the schedule and making the most of their interest. Similarly, the need for some remedial work might come to light during an activity, in which case it may be advisable to strike while the iron is hot. This means you can save your prepared material for a later lesson, and save yourself some time in the process.
8 The devil makes work for idle hands
I owe this tip to my first headmaster in Secondary School teaching. Leaving aside its rather heavy overtones, its application is simply that you need to engage students in activity to avoid wasted energy and negative vibes. It's even better, of course, if that activity is inspiring, challenging, motivating and fun, and if they can see that progress is being made.
9 Keep it simple
Materials are often too meticulously prepared. Loose cut-out photos have a number of advantages over mounted laminated cards. They are lighter and less bulky, and easier to carry and store. Also, they are smaller, you can fit more onto the table. Adding to them is quick and keeps the collection fresh. If they get torn or lost, they are not difficult to replace and you can be consoled in the knowledge that you didn't spend hours producing them.
10 Milk it
Many great ideas can be extended and adapted, revised and recycled. So think about how many other uses there could be for the materials and techniques you have created. An activity you have used for a grammar point may be suitable for vocabulary or pronunciation areas. Don't throw resources away. Slips of paper with lexis on them (prepared by the students, naturally) have multiple uses, and should be stored and frequently reused.
11 Focus away from the teacher
Encourage the students to participate while you direct proceedings. Rather than carve your way through a stony silence with the pressure of all eyes and ears on you, put the ball in their court early and get them working with each other as well as with you. A squash coach is a 'minimax' artist: one or two steps, and the learner is running all over court. The novice wouldn't learn half as much just by watching.
12 Avoid number paranoia
Why is it that we are obsessed with finishing a list on a round number? How much time have you spent racking your brains for a tenth example on a handout when your nine are perfectly adequate? Why must we push on to make it 12,15, 20, or at least an even number? What is all this discrimination against prime and odd numbers? Is it because they are 'odd'? This may seem trivial, but without it the list of 'Minimax' principles would feel somehow incomplete
.
13 Number paranoia revisited
There isn't really a number thirteen, but I didn't want to end on an even number (see previous point).
MiniMAX activities
There are no special secrets or techniques in the minimax approach. You are probably already a practising member of the club. Any activity which entails little preparation and yet generates effective language practice qualifies. This is to encourage efficiency not teacher laziness.
Group participation
The seeds of some of these ideas have come from teachers I have worked with or whose seminars I have attended, particularly on Pilgrims summer courses. One effective writing activity I call Crazy Biographies can work with any group once they know the Past Simple. Each student writes a past tense autobiographical paragraph, but in the third person, and (optionally) writes a related 'comprehension question' on a separate sheet.
The next student continues the account from his or her own imagination or experience (and writes another question). It is then passed on again, and again, and so on. Completed biographies are pinned on the wall for enjoyment (or as the source material for answering the questions).
Rumour is a similar activity for speaking practice. Each student concocts a simple tale and tells someone else, who adds new details on retelling it to another student. In both activities the whole class is engaged, and they take part in the creation of numerous texts, rather than just one, which gives them more motivation to listen or read, and more interest when they hear or see their adapted contributions.
Brainstorm and pass-it-onIn pairs, students brainstorm a list of recently studied words, eg house vocabulary. They pass their list to the next pair, who draw a scene including all the items. This drawing is then passed to another pair, who have to identify the original list. A fourth group checks the work of the previous groups.
Meanwhile, the original writers draw someone else's picture, and then recreate a third group's wordlist, etc. Everyone takes part in four different lists. Obviously, the more times it goes round, the more students see the words recycled.
An entertaining conclusion is to cut the pictures into quarters and without showing their portion, students describe their picture and find partners holding the other parts of the same original.
Speaking activities
A lovely 'warmer' is to ask the class to stand on an imaginary line (or in 'no-man's-land' in a large class). In response to a choice of words from you, they move to one side or the other and chat to the nearest person about the theme which prompted their choice. For example, you could say 'tea or coffee', indicating right or left respectively, and so they would stand on one side and say why they chose 'coffee' instead of 'tea'.
Theme choices might include 'beach or mountain', 'film or book', or something related to recent lessons.
Questionnaires
Students can conduct surveys by preparing and asking each other a series of questions. Even with reading and listening texts, they can be encouraged to challenge each other's comprehension. Remember (and remind students) that while some questions merely test factual understanding or recognition, others go beyond and include the students' experience, tastes and imagination.
Given an authentic column of holiday advertisements, for example, which of the following questions require factual answers, and which involve the student's 'self' more?
a Where does the Kenyan safari start?
b Which countries would you visit if you went on the trekking expedition?
c Would you consider going on the Caribbean cruise? Give reasons.
d Have you ever been to Tunisia? Did you see the same things as those described in the advertisement?
You can appreciate that the last two questions encourage both searching for information and the chance to personalise, to be involved in the content. As monitor, therefore, you can encourage groups to write questions along these lines.
Using songs
It is not always necessary to have a complete copy of the lyrics to use a song effectively in class. For these activities, it is enough for you to know the words fairly well. A good deal of vocabulary work can be done before listening, for example finding the opposites of given words, or tabling parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb) of words in the text, then listening to the song to see if they are correct or to see which possibility they hear.
Some songs lend themselves to the idea of 'draw what you hear', after which the students can compare drawings and revise the language by remembering it together.
Revision lessons
Every now and then you might favour the idea of an informal progress test. Students come to expect them, and I suspect that some of them enjoy them, and welcome the chance to express what they have learnt. Normally, which of these steps do you do, and which do your students do?o look back at language coveredo prepare the testo do the testo correct the testo give feedback
A minimax purist would have the students doing all five steps. The first two steps are invaluable for revision, and the last two are useful for fine-tuning and paying attention to detail. The teacher can suggest possible exercises (see list above) and offer assistance and suggestions. You are in the passenger seat, but you have dual controls if you need them.
None of the above activities is rigid or fixed. This approach is more a way of thinking which can be adapted to any level or group size, and you as teacher can direct the techniques appropriate to your class. Whenever you catch yourself preparing activities or materials, ask yourself, 'Could students do this?'
REVISION LESSON
Prepare a 'test' for another group of students to do. Please write clearly, preferably in black, so that it may be photocopied. Make a separate list of the correct answers.
Translation Translate five sentences which illustrate a language point we have studied.
Crossword Design a crossword using vocabulary we have studied. Make up appropriate clues.
Categories Jumble up 20 words which can then be sorted into four groups. (You decide on the groups.)
Gapfill Write five sentences, each with one gap (eg prepositions).
Mix 'n' match Choose up to ten pairs (eg opposites, collocations), and jumble them up.
Odd-one-out Produce five lists of four words. Three have something in common; one is different.
Spot the error Write five sentences, each with one grammatical error.
Picture it For five words or expressions we have studied, draw pictures which illustrate their meaning.
'Name three things you can …' CATCH / SPEND / MISS (Offer five verbs, eg CATCH: a cold, a ball, a bus; SPEND: a weekend, a fortune, an hour; MISS: a person, a target, a film, etc.)
Definitions For two words or expressions we have studied, write out three definitions, two of which are wrong.
Design a quiz Ask five factual questions from themes we have studied in the coursebook.
Gapfill text Take a text we have studied, photocopy it, then blank out 10 important words.
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