Here are some helpful tips we've compliled about teaching. We hope they prove useful. If you have any other suggestions of comments, please contact us.
A quick warmer
Lost for a warmer first thing in the morning? Well, with zero preparation you can walk into the classroom, ask students to give you ten words from memory from the last lesson, which are then put onto the board, then in groups of two, they must put the words together in a sentence that makes grammatical sense. Give marks for the most succinct, the funniest etc. For example,
famous
holy
cabbage
church
therefore
penguin
perfume
fill
assume
ready
Example sentence: The penguin thought the cabbage was holy. It therefore assumed it was ready to fill the famous church with its perfume.
You can adjust the difficulty level of the exercise by giving students a time limit, or saying they only have to use 3, 4 or 5 words, for example.
Another quick warmer
A warmer with no preparation time needed, and which always gets a few laughs is the non-stop speaking game. Write the students' names on the board, and borrow a digital watch off one of the students. Then, give out the instructions. Each student in turn will be given a topic, which they must speak about for a minute without pausing or hesitating at all, and without using er, um, doodah etc. They are timed by you and you will put their relative scores on the baord to see who's the winner. Now you can weight each student's difficulty level by choosing the category. For a weak or shy student they might be asked to talk about their family, or their favourite music; for the know-it-all student by contrast, ask them to talk about wallpaper or orange trousers. Needless to say, the one who lasts the longest is the winner!
Coping with dominant students in speaking activiti
Sorry about the long-winded title! Okay, so you want to have a speaking activity, maybe a debate or at least something where students express their opinions and disagree with others in the class. You also have one or more students who like the sound of their voice too much, and others for whom "Good Morning" is a major undertaking in itself, not because of language ability but just because they are quite happy to let the dominant ones do the talking. Instead of interrupting all the time when the students are debating, and trying to shut some people up and let others speak, you should hand out five pieces of paper, bits of Lego, rods, etc. These are their speaking tools. They cannot speak without them and when they do speak they must give one of them up to you. This is explained to the students at the beginning of the discussion, and then, every time a student wants to express an opinion they must give up one of their five pieces of paper etc. Students will soon realise that to interrupt another student with simply, "I am not agree!" and to say nothing more, is a big waste of their valuable speaking resources. They must therefore use their resources wisely, and make up a (hopefully) cogent argument with their time. Once a dominant student has used up their rods, you can either, if you are strict, say "tough" and the student must keep quiet, or give a time limit and re-issue resources every five minutes. You'll soon find that the quieter students come out of their shells more once they have nothing to fear from the silent dominants.
Stories from nothing
Here's a nice 'trick' to play on a student, which also gets a good story from a class. You choose a student and take him/her out of the room. You tell them that the class has a story that this student must guess by asking questions. The class can only say yes or no, so the questions must start with auxiliary verbs. Go back into the classroom and tell the class what you've told the student. The only thing is, there is no story. The questions will be asked round the class, and the response of each student depends entirely on the last letter of the question. If the last letter of the last word of the question ends in a consonant, the answer must be yes; if the last letter of the last word of the question ends with a vowel, the answer given must be no. The poor student is now brought into the class, given a board pen and the whiteboard to make notes, and begins to ask the questions. This may seem a rather cruel trick to play on a student, and it's true that you should choose a student who doesn't mind being the centre of attention. The interesting thing is that you actually end up with a story. The last time I tried this we came up with an octopus that had a party because his girlfreind had left him, and a bus crashed into the party although no-one was driving it! There you go, where else will you find a story like that without the aid of illegal substances to aid creativity!
Giving and receiving blind instructions
Most students will use their English over the telephone, and using a foreign language over the telephone is so much harder than face-to-face, as body language and gesticulation cannot be seen or utilised (you should try listening to me speak to my Mexican father-in-law!) and yet most speaking activities are undertaken face to face. There are two ways to get round this, using the same example activity. Get hold of a lego set (every language school should have one!) and put students in two groups in different corners of the classroom, or in different classes if you have the room. They must construct something using the lego, preferably something abstract. Give them a couple of minutes only. Then one student from each group must meet in the middle, put on blindfolds and give instructions about a small part of what they have constructed to the other student, who listens, but doesn't take notes (obviously!) for example, "Get two blue rectangles and put a square red block in the middle". The other student then reciprocates and returns to the group and sets about following the instructions given in the middle, while the second pair meet in the middle and give other instructions, whilst blindfolded. What then happens is that each group must try to follow the instructions of the other group exactly to form a clone of the lego shape created by the other group. Your role is simply to monitor and take notes on language errors and on expressions that would come in useful, but which they might not need to use when talking face to face (many prepositions of place can be demonstrated when face to face). If you don't have blindfolds, or believe your Swiss-German business executives might object to the idea of using them, simply place them opposite each other and make them give the instructions over their shoulders so they can't see their opposite number.
Picture differences
You know when you were young and you had these puzzles where there were two pictures, identical, except for eight differences, and you have to find the differences and circle them, well, that's a great way of making students talk to each other. The diffference, of course is that each student mustn't be able to see the other student's piece of paper. Arrange the class into pairs, and get them to sit back to back with their partner. Then, give out the two pictures, one to each student. They must either describe their picture to the other person and isolate the differences, or ask questions about their partner's picture until a difference if found. This is a great way of practising asking questions, asking for the confirmation of ideas and speaking clearly. The only thing to think about is vocabulary. As they will invariably have to describe everything in the picture, it may be an idea to pre-teach some of the vocabulary that will come up. The length of time the activity will take depends on level of detail in the pictures ("I've got 2396 leaves on the third tree in my picture; how many have you got?") and the number of differences you decide to include.
Picture ordering
Get a cartoon story made up ideally of as many pictures as there are people in your class, or of at least six different pictures (use photocopies so more than one student can have the same piece of paper) and cut it up so that each of the pieces of paper just contains one picture. Give each student one piece of paper each for thirty seconds. They must look at the picture and try and memorise everything they see, without writing anything down. After thirty seconds take the pictures back. Give each of the students a letter for their picture. Now put the class together, and explain to them that they've got different parts of a story which they must put in the right order. Write the numbers (1-11) on the board; they must act together, describing their picture to the class and debating where it comes in the story. The teacher's role is to do absolutely nothing, except help with vocabulary and keep a note of errors. If they come to a standstill, don't do anything; they will start trying again, I assure you! After a while, one of the class will assume the role of leader and go up to the board and try to organise things. Eventually, they will make some kind of order of the information they've given. They will then write down a letter next to each number in what they hope is the right order. Once they've finished, stick up any pictures that they've got correct next to the correct numbers, then sit down again. They then continue until they believe they've got the right order again. Then do the same.
This is a great activity for a number of reasons:
1. Class bonding. By making it a class activity, you are essentially pitting the students against you, which helps group identity.
2. Genuine communication. I think this is a more useful task than closely controlled drills that often bear little relation to what happens outside the class. Here the students have to use whatever communication skills they possess to put over their message, just as they would in the real world.
3. Multi-level. By careful choosing of the cartoon, you can make the activity easier or more difficult. You can also help with the amount of assistance you offer the students.
4. Class dynamics. You get to know what the key relationships of the class are, because you essentially disappear into the corner of the room and observe.
Television adverts
These can be used in a number of ways with classes. I approach them as part of an advertising 'theme', with radio adverts and newspaper/magazine adverts. Get the students to write down and discuss their favourite advert (they invariably say Coca-Cola, for some reason?), and why it is their favourite; this will lead in to your TV adverts. A certain amount of previewing is required and you'll generally need to sit though ten adevrts before you find one that you can use. The two ways that I use them is:
- An advert where it is not clear the product or service that is being advertised. Play the advert and freeze frame it at the vital moment. Students in groups try to guess what the product or service is that is being advertised.
- play an advert where it is clear what is being advertised, but freeze the action before the caption comes up. Students, again in groups, have the task of coming up with a concise, witty or catchy caption, which they write on a piece of paper cut up into the shape of a raindrop. That is then stuck to the screen (the static will ensure that it stays on!), the sharp part coming out of the person's mouth, or from the product, and a winner is chosen. This is then compared to the original.
Of course this then leads in to the production of a televsion advert by groups in the class.
