Back in January, I came across a post by Shaun Sweeney, in which he was inviting all fellow teachers to a new Facebook group he’d created, called TD Lab Staffroom.
The group is meant for English teachers who’d like to use authentic listening but don’t want to spend ages trying to find a recording suitable for their class. The idea is that you post a topic and fellow English teachers record very short monologues about these topics. Alternatively, post an article or a short YouTube video and fellow teachers record their responses.
All recordings made so far are being collected in a dedicated Google drive folder, along with the transcripts. The topics so far have included ‘tell about your commute’ (with elementary learners in mind), your take on New Year resolutions (and an update on those resolutions in June), Would you delete Facebook?, your take on news and media, and more than a dozen more.
I’ve been meaning to use this material, but the chance aroze only last week. The topic was What frustrates you? (posted by Daniel Christopher), and here’s a lesson plan that I wrote based on two recordings. When I listened to the two recordings, what struck me was how similarly they were structured: both contained plenty of hedging devices to avoid sounding too negative – things like ‘I should sort of relax about this I suppose, but…‘ and ‘This is just a little thing people do, but I just think..’, so I included a focus on that in the materials.
The (editable) materials are available in this Dropbox folder (the .pdf can also be downloaded from the SlideShare below) – but this is really just an example of what could be done using the recording shared in the group, so do join if you like the idea of the group. 🙂
One of the things we do for professional development in the school where I work are so-called ‘experimentation cycles’, where the team chooses a topic, we pool resources (books, resource packs and blog posts with all sorts of activities on the topic), after which everyone who is interested in the topic picks a few activities and tries them out in class. Finally, we organize a workshop to share the activities we liked.
This post is a summary of one of these workshops, which was focused on Vocabulary revision activities.As I mentioned above, the activities mostly came from books and the Internet, and I’m sure you’ll see here quite a few ideas that you’ve tried too – so if you have a variation that you love, could you share it?
‘Vocabulary revision’ is a very broad term and activities could be very different in terms of what the learners need to do with the words:
am I given something or do I need to retrieve something from memory?
am I given / need to retrieve the meaning or the word itself?
how many times?
Based on these questions, the activities here can be roughly categorized (with some overlap) into four groups (ordered according to how cognitively demanding they are):
recalling the meaning of an item
recalling the item(to be more exact, these are mostly pairwork activities in which one person recalls the meaning of the item and explains the item and/or uses it in an isolated sentence and the second person recalls the item)
Elena Wilkinson shared an activity in which the learners review lexical items learned previously and sort them into three categories: I know, I’m not sure that I know, I have no idea. They then discuss the words in pairs, with people who know words explaining them to those who are not sure / have no idea. The pairs then get combined into groups of four and so on. A variation is to do this activity with the lexical items on slips of paper.
Source: Elena Wilkinson
Vocabulary auction
In this activity the learners review a list of words and expressions and discuss what they mean (a variation: they come up with a definition and an example sentence). Depending on how certain they are, they place a bet on each definition – the bets should add up to $1200.
Once that’s done, the whole class goes through the list word by word. For each word, the team that placed the highest bet explains the word. If the definition is correct, they gain their bet. If it’s wrong, they lose their bet and the chance to define the word is given to a team with the second highest bet. However, if this second team gets the definition correct, it gains the amount the first team bet (e.g. if Team A bet $150 on a word and got the meaning incorrect, Team B, which bet $100 and explained the meaning correctly, will get $150, not $100).
Source: Olga Akimkina
I think this game could work especially well with easily confused words, false friends and lexical mistakes commonly made by the learners in the group.
Recalling the item
Memo (tried out by Olga Akimkina)
In this simple activity the learners look at a list of words/expressions on the board for 30 seconds. Then the list gets erased and the learners try to recall as many expressions as they can (for one minute). They check in pairs – the pair that has recalled the most words is the winner.
Tip. Explain to the learners that they’ll need to recall the words before you display them.
Vocabulary die (tried out by Olga Akimkina and Irina Dubovitskaya)
For this activity you need a set of vocabulary to revise for each pair/small group of learners and a die with tasks (you can create your own dice using this free dice maker). Alternatively, use standard dice and write the tasks on the board (1 = give definition; 2 = draw it, etc).
Tip. Both teachers who tried out this activity found that it worked quite well with ‘concrete’ verbs (see sample images produced by the learners below), but didn’t really work with more abstract concepts like ‘stagnation’.
Source: Olga Akimkina
Crosswords
Polina Safronova shared a nice crossword maker that automatically creates half-crosswords for pairwork guessing games. In this type of crossword student A’s version contains only the horizontal words, while student B’s version contains only the vertical words. The students need to complete their crosswords by listening to their partner’s explanations.
The tool requires registration. Once you’ve registered, the process of creating a crossword is very simple: choose Pairwork crossword and tick I want to make my own:
Type your words (for some reason the words without clues didn’t show up in the crossword, so I simply typed dots for clues) and click ‘Make my crossword‘: Here’s what the resulting crosswords look like – you can print it into a pdf document in order to keep the worksheet for future use:
Banana
In this guessing game (tried out by Evgenia Antonova and Irina Dubovitskaya) the learners pick a slip with a word and say an example sentence, substituting ‘banana’ for the target word. Here are some examples:
Source: Evgeniya Antonova
Walk and swap
This is a variation of the Banana activity which requires only one set of cards for the group and allows the learners to stretch their legs. At the beginning each learner is given one or two cards with words. They get up and mingle to play banana. Each time someone guesses a word on their card, they give the card to that person. The aim of the activity is to swap cards as many times as possible.
Hot Seat
Another well-known simple activity that requires no preparation at all is Hot Seat. The class is split into two teams. Two learners (one from each team) sit with their back to the board. The teacher boards a word. The team explain the word to the person on the chair – the first team to guess gets a point.
Tying out of class revision with classroom activities
One thing that has really grown on me in the past couple of years is using Quizlet for vocabulary learning and revision. Quizlet is a free web service that allows you to create sets of flash cards and then share them with the learners by link. The learners can play a number of games with the flash cards (moreover, if they install the mobile app, they’ll be able to access them even when they’re offline).
The beauty of it is that the site also allows you to print out two-sided cards based on the sets that the learners worked with for homework. For example, here’s a worksheet generated from this set. This makes it possible to play a whole range of games in class based on exact same cards that the learners studied at home, without any extra preparation apart from cutting up the cards and printing the game boards. For a set of game templates that could be used with any set of cards, see this post (where you’ll find nice tic tac toe templates, dots and boxes, variations of snakes and ladders, battleship, blockbusters, Game of the Goose and a few other templates).
Revising multi-word items
Collocation cards
One really simple way to revise collocations is to prepare a set two-sided cards: a word on one card and 3-5 collocations taken from the collocations dictionary on the second side. Each turn, a learner takes a card, looks at the collocations and guess the word. Again, these cards can be prepared using Quizlet – in fact, see here for more examples of Quizlet sets that help learners practice collocations (created by Leo Selivan).
Source: Olga Akimkina
Tic tac toe
Another activity is to put gapped multi-word items on a Tic Tac Toe grid. The goal might be simply to recall the expression or to use it in a sentence to say a truthful fact or opinion.
Tips. If you’d like the learners to be able to check their answers, provide them with empty grids and two-sided cards. A no-cut alternative is to do the activity in groups of three, with one learner checking the players’ answers using a cheat sheet.
Source: Olga Lifshits
Discussion gapfills
Another suggestion, also shared by Olga Lifshits, was to provide the learners with a gapfill in which each sentence is a question. Gapfills can be done with any vocabulary, but they work particularly well with multi-word items where only part of the item is gapped out.
After the learners do the gapfill, they pick 3-5 questions they’d like to discuss with their partner – this won’t necessarily make them use target lexical items in speech, but it will help them to process their meaning more deeply.
Here’s a sample set of questions:
Source: Olga Lifshits
Pelmanism
Pelmanism is a game that allows one to revise two-part expressions (e.g. two-word collocations such as ‘meet + the deadline’, dependent prepositions, such as ‘interested + in’, two-word compound nouns, such as traffic lights, and so on).
Prepare a set of cards for each pair of learners (each expression should be split across two cards). The players spread the cards on the board, blank sides up. Each turn one player turns over two cards – if they form an expression, the player keeps the cards. If the cards belong to different expressions, the player puts them back.
Compound nouns (pelmanism). Source: Olga Lifshits
A lot of teachers avoid this game because it seems too time-consuming and because it focuses only on form without any emphasis on the meaning of the expressions. Here are a couple of modifications that may make it less time-consuming and more useful in terms of language practice:
each turn, a player turns over one card – if they can remember the whole expression, they’re allowed to look for the second card (or, to keep the element of chance, they are allowed to turn over, say, up to seven cards);
each time a player finds an expression, they need to either use it in a sentence (again, telling a true fact or stating an opinion) or ask their partner a question that contains the expression.
Domino
Another activity that allows one to practice two-part multi-word items is dominoes, which can easily be created in a Word document (see a sample Word table below). The players work in pairs or small groups. The learners need to arrange the dominoes on the desk in such a way that they form a circle.
Again, Dominoes is primarily a form-focused activity, but it can be adapted to focus on meaning by asking the learners to make a statement or ask their group a question with an expression each time put two dominoes together..
Collocation dominoes. Source: Olga Lifshits
Using lexis in extended speech
For all activities in this category you need a set of vocabulary cards to revise – these can be prepared by the teacher or pooled by the learners – simply give them 5 minutes to flip their notebooks and coursebooks and put on cards any words and expressions they’d like to start using but haven’t started using yet.
Guess my word
Prepare a set of discussion questions and a set of cards for each pair / small group. Each turn, one learner picks a vocabulary card and a discussion question. Their objective is to talk for a minute about the question and to use the word on their card at some point. The objective of their partner / group is to guess which word was on the card.
A by-product of this activity is that it encourages the learners to use more ‘interesting’ vocabulary, so that the ‘fancy’ word on their card isn’t too obvious. Another reason I liked this activity is that it can be used when each person has their individual set of cards (e.g. I used it with a group of teens who did out-of-class reading and accumulated their own vocabulary sets based on the books they were reading).
Picture-based story (tried out by Evgenia Antonova)
Prepare a set of target expressions, a picture and an opening line of a story (here’s a nice ‘first line generator’). Learners work in pairs or groups of three. Each team picks about 7 cards with vocabulary and a picture. They have about 10 minutes to create a story based on their pictures that uses the words they picked. Here are sample materials that were used with a group of advanced learners (but the activity worked equally well with a pre-intermediate group):
Source: Evgenia Antonova
Gotcha!
The learners work in pairs. One person picks a slip with a word. They ask their partner a question trying to get them to use the word in the answer. The important thing is that their conversation should be as natural as possible: they shouldn’t give the definition or reply with just one word.
Here are some examples of questions that the learners asked to elicit vocabulary items:
Source: Evgenia Antonova
4-3-2 Speed dating
This is an activity that I actually learned only today from Julia Galichanina, another colleague of mine, and I really look forward to trying it out.
Part 1. Give the learners a list of expressions and a list of categories (e.g. ‘Hobbies’, ‘Things I do every day’, ‘Things that aren’t related to work’, etc). Get the learners to decide which words could relate to which category (e.g. ‘occasionally’ could work everywhere, but ‘golf’ is more like a hobby)/ After that, each learner writes several sentences related to each category using target lexis.
Part 2. Split the group into interviewers and interviewees. The learners stand in two circles, with the interviewers in the inner circle.
During the first round (4 minutes) interviewers ask one interviewee any questions related to the categories, and the interviewees need to reply using as many target expressions as possible. The interviewers tick the expressions that the interviewee used. Conduct quick group feedback asking which expressions were used.
The learners go to the next partner and repeat the procedure in 3 minutes.
Finally, with a new partner, an interviewee gives a monologue summarizing their answers to the two interviewees questions.
The interviewers and interviewees swap roles and the 4-3-2 cycle is repeated.
Improv
Finally, here is another nice activity which was shared by Christina Rebuffet-Broadus at her conference workshop at IATEFL Poland:
Going through my notes from the workshop while writing this post, I realized that while I learned a few very useful activities that have since become my favourites, I completely forgot about some of the others. In particular, I’ll definitely be trying out picture-based stories and vocabulary dice.
Are there any great vocabulary revision activities that you’d add to this list?
A couple of weeks ago Irina Dubovitskaya, a colleague of mine at EPAM Systems, told me about an activity that worked really well with her students. I loved the idea behind this activity and asked Irina to write a guest post about it. The activity is highly adaptable, very personalized and uses a very simple, visually appealing tool that the learners can access from their own devices. See for yourself:
If it weren’t for Russell Stannard’s webinar “Key tools for quick collaboration between students” (an LPM’s Globinar organized by Jürgen Wagner), I would probably have never learnt about AnswerGarden, a convenient “feedback + word cloud” tool that can be used in teaching English. “Plant a question and invite participants to your AnswerGarden. Their answers will instantly form a growing word cloud!” says the promo, not mentioning that the growing word cloud can then blossom into a very engaging communicative task.
I decided to use the tool to prepare a warm-up activity focused on drilling Conditional II with my B1+ group of adult learners. The objective of the task was to engage them in a discussion and encourage using Conditional II as much as possible. Here’s what I did.
Before class:
1. Think of a question. In order to revise Conditional II I prepared two questions:
“What would you change about your working conditions?”;
“If you had more spare time, how would you spend it?”.
2. Get answers from participants.
As there are four students in my class (2m/2f) I paired them up and gave each team one question. To share the question with the students, I opened AnswerGarden, clicked on ‘Create an AnswerGarden’ at the top of the page and inserted my question. This created a link to a dynamically updated word cloud that I could send to my students – here’s what it looked like for them:
3. Print the word cloud. Ss’ answers formed word clouds that I corrected and printed.
NB. I decided to set this idea generation stage for homeworkas my students sometimes have problem with what can be called “spontaneous imagination” in class. However, the whole activity can also be done in class, provided that the students have some technology to access the internet, to type their answers. Also, since each cloud has a unique URL, instead of printing the clouds you can simply share the links.
In class:
Warm-up. Part 1. In class, I handed out the word clouds. Each group received their partners’ clouds. The first task was to reconstruct the original question. The only requirement should be met – the question should be formulated using Conditional II. It took the Ss about 3 minutes to guess the initial questions.
Warm-up. Part 2.
Then the Students were asked to discuss the answers and decide which of their classmates gave them. As the groups were gender equal (a male and a female), they relied not only on the facts they knew about their classmates, but also on some gender stereotypes that proved to be totally misleading. In order to check their guesses, the Ss had to ask another team questions using the second conditional:
“Ilya, would you add more monitors?”
“Maria, would you get married if you had more free time?”
Surprisingly, it was Andrey who would get married and Olya who would add more monitors. 🙂
Reflection
I really liked the task because of its power to generate an engaging discussion. Not only did my students use Conditional II every now and then, but also they extended both their answers and questions to get more information about their classmates and to get to know each other a bit better.
Here’s a quick activity that might be great for the festive season. It comes from a lecture by Matt Abrahams, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who teaches strategic communication.
In this activity, the learners work in pairs. They give each other imaginary boxes with gifts. They don’t say what’s in the box. The person who got the gift ‘opens’ the box, looks inside and says what they see. They should say the first thing that comes to mind. Then the gift giver should improvise to explain why they thought the gift receiver needed this gift.
This is the video extract in which Matt Abrahams explains the activity: (26:00 till 29:00)
You could get your learners to watch the video or, if you’re pressed for time or if your learners would find a three minute authentic extract difficult to follow, explain the activity yourself.
I’ve also written an editable worksheet to go with the activity and a Slideshare pdf document if you don’t have Microsoft Word:
When faced with a difficult question, especially in a stressful situation like a job interview or a product presentation, some learners of English tend to fall silent and fail to let the other person know that they’re thinking.This might be especially problematic if the conversation takes place over the phone or Skype, i.e. when the person they’re talking to can’t see them and doesn’t know how to interpret their silence. Here’s a short lesson that I designed to help my learners deal with this problem.
Lesson Overview Level: B1 – B2 Learner type: Business English or General English/Teens. Time: 30-45 minutes Target expressions: Materials: a Microsoft Word worksheet (you can download a .pdf file from Slideshare below):
Very happy to win this month’s onestopenglish Lesson Share competition! I wanted to take part in this competition for ages, but only got the guts to send in a worksheet when I was doing the iTDi course on Creating ELT Materials (I wrote about the course back in June). The lesson is on work-related emailing, so if you teach this topic, you can check it out on their website.
Ever since I read the great Listening in the Language Classroomby John Field, the book on developing listening skills, I became quite passionate about the need to consistently help learners cope with high frequency grammar structures in authentic speech, incorporating authentic listening work into grammar work. In the previous lesson on this blog the focus was on the way modals are pronounced.
In this new video-based lesson based on an interview with Leonardo DiCaprio, the learners practice their speaking, grammar for story-telling and again practice listening decoding, focusing on target grammar.
More specifically, the learners
[listening: gist] listen to scary stories that happened to Leonardo Dicaprio;
[grammar] explore the ways Present Perfect, Past Simple and Continuous are used in stories (Present Perfect typically comes at the beginning of the story to describe or ask about general life experience; Past Simple is used to describe a sequence of events; Past Continuous, for background information);
[listening: decoding skills] notice the way these tenses sound in authentic speech (some sounds get dropped from the verbs and linkers, which might make this grammar problematic for listeners);
[speaking] tell each other stories about the scariest/funniest/saddest things that have happened to them;
[spoken grammar, optional] explore using Present Simple/Continuous in stories to achieve a dramatic effect and using ‘He goes’ to report what someone said.
Videos used in the lesson:
Story 1 (Tasks 1 – 8)
Story 2 (Optional task 10)
Level: Intermediate/Upper-Intermediate (B1/B2)
Time: 90-120 minutes
Materials:
an editable Microsoft Word worksheet (docx). If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can download the .pdf file from Slideshare:
[for listening decoding work] A power point presentation (zip) where the words problematic for listeners are isolated, so that the learners can really hear what sounds are dropped. To play the audios, unpack the archive.
One of the questions that my learners (who are IT people) are very likely to be asked during interviews and promotion reviews is ‘Tell us about your favourite technology’. But, whatever their profession, Business English learners need to learn to speak fluently and persuasively when presenting the advantages of products, tools and options.
Here’s a ‘geeky’ lesson plan in which the learners
watch a video of a developer talking about the features of his favourite browser (activities: gist listening, listening decoding skills)
analyze linkers used for listing ideas
briefly revise modal verbs (could, (don’t) have to)
talk about their favourite tools, apps and technologies
It worked very well with my learners, who spent more than fifteen minutes discussing the relative merits of file managers and development environments. For learners who are less geeky, I included a range of other websites and apps to talk about, e.g. social networks, messengers and and to-do list apps.
Level: Intermediate (B1)
Time: 90 minutes
Materials: an editable Microsoft Word worksheet. If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you could download the .pdf file from Slideshare:
Today I’m sharing a lesson based on four video snippets with Google employees describing their career paths and how they got to Google. Although this topic is covered extensively in every Business English course, I wanted to give my group (which is a very strong Pre-Intermediate group about to finish the course) exposure to authentic speech, and this material seemed both interesting linguistically and not too challenging. The learners revise past simple and present perfect (time adverbials used with those tenses), practice listening decoding skills (listening to verbs in past simple and present perfect), focus on vocabulary to talk about educational background and career paths, and finish the lesson by speaking about their own career paths.
I must admit I was very unsure that the learners would cope well with the listening tasks, because my previous attempts to introduce (tiny bits of) authentic listening in that group had caused a lot of frustration. But this time they did all right. Apart from Task 2, all they needed to do was to discriminate between Past Simple and Present Perfect – the ‘secret reason’ for the task was to get them to notice how Past Simple is pronounced (very often it sounds very close to Present Simple, as the ending /t/ is barely pronounced, which might be confusing for the learners). NB For the tasks in which the students listen to sentences one by one to check their answers, it’s better to open the videos on youtube and use the interactive transcript feature to replay sentences.
One thing that I noticed while working on this worksheet that I had never noticed before was that speakers tend to use vague language with periods of time (‘a little over a year ago’, ‘for about four and a half years’, ‘for a bit’ – other examples that didn’t make it into the worksheet were ‘for quite a number of years’, ‘for close to six years’). This definitely sounds a lot more natural, but I’d never thought to teach this little trick to my students who were preparing for exams.
Anyway, here’s the worksheet – let me know if you use it or if you see how it could be improved.
Level: Intermediate (B1) Time: 90 minutes Materials:a worksheet (feel free to edit and adapt).
If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can download a .pdf file from Slideshare:
In this post I’m sharing a video-based lesson on Performance reviews that I taught today. It’s based on a fragment from a QA session by career analyst Dan Pink, who you might have heard of, as his TED talk on The puzzle of motivation features among top 10 most watched TED talks.
Levels: B1+ up to B2
Length: 90 minutes
Activities: the s/s watch an authentic video on alternatives to traditional performance reviews, develop their listening skills by focusing on features of connected speech, learn vocabulary from the video and finish the lesson with a discussion
Materials: an editable worksheet. If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can download a .pdf from Slideshare:
Features of connected speech
In one of the listening activities in this lesson the learners transcribe several sentences from the video. Here are some common English words and expressions that my students found problematic, due to the fact that they sound quite different from their dictionary form.
Overview:
Elision of /ʊ/ from the diphthong /aʊ/ (e.g. ‘out’ and ‘how’ sound more like ‘ut’ and ‘har’)
Weak form of ‘are you’ and ‘you are’ (you are /ju ɑː/ -> /jə /)
Elision of ‘t’ and ‘d’ the end of words (either disappear e.g. don’t_ask, or get replaced with a glottal stop, as the air isn’t released, e.g. it)
Frequent chunks: at_the/at the end of the month; and_then
r_vowel linking (e.g. more_among)
1. Elision of /ʊ/ from /aʊ/
set out /ˈaʊt/ your goals
set out /ˈaʊt/
set them out /ˈaʊt/
of how /ˈhaʊ/ you’re doing
how /ˈhaʊ/ you’re
maybe think about /ə.baʊt/ this
2. Weak form of ‘are you’ and ‘you are’
you are /ju ɑː/ >> /jə /
of how you’re /jə / doing
are you /ə ju/ > /(ə)jə/
where are you /weər(ə)jə/ making progress
are you making
where are you /weər(ə)jə/ falling behind
3. Elision of /d/ /t/ (or replacement with glottal stop)
and_meet monthly
and say
Elision of /t/ in negative forms: question that we don’t ask
don’t ask
that
Elision of /t/ in negative forms: I didn’t quite make those
Here’s what the resulting crosswords look like – you can 
When faced with a difficult question, especially in a stressful situation like a job interview or a product presentation, some learners of English tend to fall silent and fail to let the other person know that they’re thinking.This might be especially problematic if the conversation takes place over the phone or Skype, i.e. when the person they’re talking to can’t see them and doesn’t know how to interpret their silence. Here’s a short lesson that I designed to help my learners deal with this problem.
Materials: a Microsoft Word 
Olya Sergeeva's ELT blog 