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):
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.
I’m enjoying a Saturday lie-in with Corpus Linguistics for ELT: Research and Practice by Ivor Timmis, a great new book which arrived in my mail just yesterday. It made me think of a quick exercise that can be used as a follow-up to any reading or listening activity. It’s really simple, but since it takes a bit of technology to create it quickly, I thought I’d write a quick post.
The book overviews the insights into language achieved by corpus linguistics and discusses their implications for the ELT classroom. I’m currently reading the chapter called Corpus research and grammar, and one of the main topics of the chapter is to what extent the frequency of a linguistic feature should influence the amount of time devoted to teaching that feature. The author gives a number of very interesting examples of frequent features that tend to be underrepresented, over-represented or misrepresented in coursebooks (examples include ‘though’, which is often used in speaking to signal soft disagreement, and conditionals, which more often than not do not fall under ‘the zero, first, second and third’ two-part conditional structures, which most coursebooks almost exclusively focus on).
One striking fact mentioned in this chapter comes from an article by Biber and Reppern. Apparently, just 12 lexical verbs (say, get, go, know, think, see, make, come, take, want, give, and mean) account for 45% of lexical verbs used in conversation.Biber and Reppern suggest that, since they are so frequently used in speech, these verbs require more attention in class than they currently do, judging by the coursebooks that they reviewed, and that these verbs should be used more to exemplify various grammar structures.
I’m thinking of giving my students an occasional gap-fill exercise based on the reading and listening texts that we are working on, with these verbs gapped out (their frequency is said to be higher in conversation than fiction, news and academic texts, so probably the task will work best with listening transcripts and informal writing, e.g. forum posts).
Finding and replacing the various forms of these verbs could be time-consuming, but there are tools in which one can make such a gap-fill exercise in one click. The first one is a free nifty little text editor called Notepad++.
The trick is that the editor uses so-called ‘regular expressions’ to allow you to search for more than one expression at once. So, if you open your text file in Notepad++ and type in (some|any) in the search box, you’ll see all occurrences of both words in your file and will be able to replace them with gaps in one click. The following search will find all verb forms of the 12 verbs mentioned above:
(If you want to know why this expression matches all forms of those verbs, scroll to the bottom of the post).
Here’s how to create a gap-fill using Notepad++ in a bit more detail:
Insert your text into Notepad++, select the text (on my system, by pressing CTRL+A), and open the search window by pressing CTRL+H.
In the search window, click the ‘Mark’ tab. Ensure that Search mode is set to ‘Regular expressions’ and that the ‘in selection’ check box is checked. Insert this into the ‘Find what’ box:
\b(say|said|get|got|go(e)?|went|gone|know|knew|known|think|thought|see|saw|seen|mak(e)?|made|com(e)?|came|tak(e)?|took|taken|want|giv(e)?|gave|given|mean|meant)(ed|ing|s)?\bClick ‘Mark all’ to highlight all occurrences of these words, so that you can look through them and check how many there are and how they’re used, and that nothing unrelated was accidentally found. In the example below there are 14 matches.
Go to the ‘Replace’ tab, type in ‘________’ into the ‘Replace with’ box and click ‘Replace all’.
Finally, insert the gap-filled text alongside the initial text into a word document. Voilà!
As an alternative to installing Notepad++, use the web-based Find and Replace tool – thanks to Mura Nava for the heads up! It’s even quicker and you don’t have to install it on your computer (one possible drawback is that you can’t highlight and check what you’re going to replace).
I’ve tried this activity with a few transcripts from youtube, and I found it doable and enjoyable. I think I want to try to use it on a regular basis with my Upper-Intermediate students, encouraging them to note down interesting chunks with those verbs.
Let me know what you think.
References
Biber, D. and Reppern, R. (2002) What does frequency have to do with grammar teaching? Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24/2: 199-208
Timmis, I. (2015) Corpus Linguistics for ELT: Research and Practice. Routledge
A bit on regular expressions
If you want to create your own regular expression searches, you might like to figure out how the one in this post works.
| stands for ‘or’. So (say|said) will return all present/past/past participle forms of ‘say’.
? stands for ‘this part is optional’. So, (say|said)(s|ing)? will return all the forms from the previous example, plus ‘says’, ‘saying’, ‘saids’, and ‘saiding’. Only the first two words exist, but that doesn’t matter.
Some instances might be ‘false positives’. For example, ‘essays’ contains ‘say’, but that’s clearly not what we need. So, we need a way to show the tool that we’re only looking for full words. This is done by wrapping the search expression into ‘\b’ tags (they stand for ‘word boundary’).
So, in order to find all verb forms, I list all present and irregular forms, separating them by ‘or’, add possible endings (ed|ing|s)?, account for the fact that (e) will disappear before ing (hence, mak(e)?) and add \b at the beginning and the end:
What I want to share in this post happened quite a while ago. It wasn’t anything new in terms of teaching methodology and I’m sure a lot of people reading this post will recognize what they do in the classroom. But nevertheless, the experience keeps popping up in my head and I wanted to share it, because it was one of the most positive experiences in my early years of teaching.
This happened when I was teaching in a secondary school. At some point, when my first ever group reached strong B1 level, I bought lots of graded readers, brought the better half of my personal library of English books to the school and launched an extensive reading programme, asking the students to read graded readers and unabridged books three or four times a year. As a follow-up to each round of reading, we did various activities, ranging from book fairs to informal chats, but one thing that stayed the same was that I asked the students to give the book they’d read a rating and write a short review. Another thing that stayed the same was that the majority of students hated writing those reviews.
I was taking British Council Learning Technologies for the Classroom course at the time, and so we started experimenting with some (pretty basic) technology and ended up with an approach to writing which was a whole lot more enjoyable and productive.
1. Creating the sense of audience
The first step was to migrate all writing to the class group on a social network. Instead of asking the students to hand in the reviews in handwritten form, I started creating a dedicated thread where all reviews were to be posted before the deadline (the evening before a lesson). This gave the students a sense of audience and made the activity a lot more authentic. We used a social media site (a Russian analogue of Facebook) because all students had accounts there, but as far as I know, many teachers use other free alternatives, e.g.
class blogs (P2 wordpress theme that mimics social networks seems to be particularly interesting)
2. Immediate feedback
Since I now got all the reviews before the lesson, I could print them out, mark them in the morning, and then in class the students worked in pairs to edit their contributions on the group page. Apart from the satisfaction of getting feedback immediately after submitting their piece of writing, there were a number of added benefits:
This gave the students a good reason to submit their work on time, and in general the proportion of students who did writing assignments increased as a result. Also, in my experience with teens, the very fact that everyone in the group can see who has submitted homework encourages students to do it.
Since I was working with a print-out, I felt at liberty to mark the students’ work more extensively without the fear of ruining it – I now not only used error correction codes to hint at mistakes, but also highlighted all nice turns of phrase that I liked in the students’ writing – so the feedback they received looked a lot more positive.
Editing itself became a lot easier – no need to rewrite anything and there were no teacher’s comments in the final draft.
3. Autonomous vocabulary learning
One more important tweak was using amazon reviews as a source of language. We did this using scrible– a wonderful tool that allows the user to save any html page to an online library and then annotate it, changing font sizes, highlighting and adding notes:
_) read a book and give it a rating
a) find a book in a similar genre (google ‘top detective novels’, for instance)
b) read reviews on amazon that give that book the same rating
c) highlight relevant expressions with scrible, _save the page_ and create a permalink to share it
d) write your review using these expressions and _underscoring_ them. Post the review along with the permalink here.
In general, amazon reviews are very well written and are a pleasure to read, and the whole group ended up hunting down some great expressions. Those students who chose to use those expressions (around 75%) were able to use them very aptly in their writing. Here are a couple of samples of my students’ work (big thanks to Ivan Syrovoiskii and Danila Borovkov for allowing me to share them here):
On the prowl forsomething interesting, I happened on Bram Stocker’s Dracula. And when I took an abridged book I actually expected that it wouldl be shortened and generally quite tamein comparison to the original. But what struck me was how they’d oversimplified the whole plot.
I guess almost everyone basicly knows the story – it starts with Jonathan Harker’s arrival to the castle of Count Dracula, the very powerful vampire who’s intimidating the whole of Transylvania. But this edition was so shortened that the whole story of how Jonathan, Arthur and Professor Van Helsing struggled to locate and destroy their nemesis turned just in several pages and the life of vampires which original plot concerns – into several plotlines written in simple English.
In general, I want to say that while I was reading this book I was imbued with the notion that I’m reading just a summary of the original Dracula. On reflection, I reckon I need to add that it might be good as a book for studying English, and it should be treated just as a textbook, without looking at plot. My overall impression is that if you want to read something interesting – read the original book or don’t read Dracula at all – but don’t bother with abridged books, especially with intermediate level.
First of all I have to thank Graham Poll for sharing “Seeing Red” with us. It’s very interesting and a times funny read for people who know something about football and you just can’t put it down.
Every day there are some news about players and managers in the media, but nothing about referees. “Seeing Red” allows you to look behind the scenes of refereeing and to look inside the game.This book shows how young boy, linesman in his father’s match, became the best, world popular referee. I’m sure you will find out something new about referees’ regime, training and how refereeing affects privacy. It also includes many details about famous football players and managers, such as John Terry or David Beckhem or David Moyes. With this book you can participate in famous football matches in many tournaments like World Cup, Premier League or Champions League. After reading I understand how much pressure referees are under, how difficult this thankless but absolutely necessary job is and I have gained a whole bunch of respect for them.
Later on we used all the scrible pages produced by the students to analyze the overall structure of a typical review and put together a google document with useful expressions for talking about characters, plot, the author and so on (a great thing about google documents is that a lot of people can edit the same document simultaneously, so the students worked in pairs, each pair researching a particular aspect of essay writing across everybody’s scribble pages).
While I’m at it, here are some ideas what other genres this approach could be used for:
writing other types of reviews, e.g. reviewing hotels / gadgets / restaurants / travel destinations / apps (also, specific apps to target a certain vocabulary topic, e.g. apps for health and fitness)/ zoos
researching vocabulary or linkers for exam essays (see an example for ’cause and effect’ and lexical cohesion here: http://scrible.com/s/6f7O0)
researching vocabulary for comparing trends and describing graphs for IELTS Writing task 1 (e.g. here’s an article on Economist.com packed to the brim language for describing graphs and comparing trends – found by running a quick search using some graph description key words: “plummeted” “rose to” site:economist.com
Closing remarks
As I said at the beginning of this post, a lot of what we ended up doing is standard practice in many language teaching classrooms. However, I still really wanted to share the experience, because for me and my class those tweaks made a lot of difference at the time. They transformed writing assignments from a frustrating chore that the students used to moan about to something that felt good and was a lot more authentic and enjoyable.
And on that note, I must ask: What were some rewarding, happy experiences in your early years of teaching?
A couple of weeks ago I was doing a diagnostic test with one of my Business English groups to establish how well they answered interview questions. One of the questions was Have you ever worked with someone who it was difficult to work with? The students came up with lots of stories of difficult colleagues, but two things became evident from their replies. First, they didn’t really understand what to include in the answer, so they mostly focused on the description of the situation, and at least half of them didn’t even mention how the situation was resolved. And second, their replies were so long-winded that it was difficult to see structure in them even when they were structured.
So here is a video-based lesson plan that we did with that group today. The main aim of this lesson was to help the students structure their speech when talking about past experiences and decisions using the STAR framework for impromptu speaking. They listen to an extract from a workshop in Stanford Graduate School of Business in which the framework is presented, focus on vocabulary (talking about deadlines) and grammar (cleft sentences) in the video and then practice using the framework in their own speech.
In the second lesson (or for homework), the students analyze an example of a business person using a variation of the technique in her presentation:
Language level: B2 (Upper-Intermediate) Learner type: adults (Business English) Activity: listening (gist and decoding work), vocabulary, speaking strategies (STAR framework), cleft sentences (optional) Length: ideally, two lessons (either 60 or 90 minutes, as communicative activities are flexible in length)
To do the lesson in 90 minutes, skip the task focusing on cleft sentences (see the procedure in the Teacher’s notes at the end of the worksheet). Materials: editable .docx worksheet (tasks, transcripts, teacher’s notes). If you don’t have Microsoft Word, download a .pdf file from Slideshare:
A couple of days ago I came across a video that could be used as a nice springboard for an ice-breaking activity at the beginning of a course.
Levels: strong Intermediate / Upper-Intermediate
Lesson type:
[option 1] students watch a video and do an ice breaker activity; length: 30 minutes
[option 2] students watch a video, explore ways in which they can react naturally while making small talk, and then do an ice breaker activity; length: 60 minutes
Materials: Option 1 is a materials-free lesson – you’ll only5 slips of paper for each pair of students in class; for option 2, print out the first two pages of the worksheet:
Procedure: Project the following image, elicit what this is called (a ball pit) and ask the students if they’ve ever been in one.
Tell the group that they’re going to watch a video about people sitting in a ball pit discussing some questions. First time the students watch the video, ask them to note down the questions (after they’ve watched the video, let the students check in pairs, then go through the questions together, replaying and boarding them; the questions are at 0:43, 1:13, 1:53, 2:23, 3:00 and 3:44); second time they listen, the students take notes about the replies people give (s/s compare in pairs / brief class feedback).
[Optional] Do tasks 2 and 3 in the worksheet to explore the way people show their reactions – both verbally and through body language
[option 1] S/s simply discuss the questions from the video in pairs. [option 2] Assign each of the questions on the board to a pair of students and ask them to write it on a slip of paper. Ask each pair to brainstorm 3-4 more questions that would be good for a ball pit and write their questions on separate slips of paper. Alternatively, print out and cut up some ice-breaker questions beforehand, e.g. from here or here . Collect and redistribute the slips. The students mingle, talking about the questions they’ve got on their slips. Each time two students have discussed the questions on their slips, they swap the slips.
This is part of a series of posts on teaching listening comprehension. In the previous post I outlined the procedure that I’ve been using in my listening lessons.
I ‘landed’ on this procedure back in March when, halfway through another listening course, which I was really struggling with, I came to class with an authentic interview, a transcript and only a vague idea for how I wanted to work with them. There was only one student in class, I supported him as best I could and at the end of the class he said he felt that he’d achieved great progress over those 90 minutes. So I reused the procedure again and again and eventually ended up using it as the basis for a whole new listening course (which I’ve really enjoyed teaching, as the students’ progress and the feedback I’ve been getting are just great).
Here’s that initial lesson that worked – I’ve taught it 3 more times since then. The lesson is based around this video:
Levels: B2/C1 (B1+ students who feel the need to understand Australian accent will cope with this lesson too)
an outline of the features of connected speech which make this video challenging for language learners, along with
suggestions for how to explain these features to your learners
a listening lesson plan. In this lesson the students will get a chance to notice these features of connected speech and get used to the way they ‘distort’ some high-frequency words
This section outlines the most prominent features of connected speech in this speaker’s accent (all audio samples exemplifying the feature come from the video). As I said above, I’ve taught this lesson four times, at a variety of levels, and I’ve invariably found that these were the features that consistently make it difficult even for C1 students to catch some very high frequency words and expressions (e.g. ‘like’ or ‘and then’).
NB If for some reason the audio samples here are not displayed, you’ll find all of them on my audioboo page.
p/k/t /d (so-called plosive consonants) disappearing or getting almost inaudible at the end of words: qui[te], u[p], li[ke], las[t], jus[t], etc
The following extract from the video contains quite a few examples of this feature:
0:16 As part of the tour grou[p] you go along an[d] they offer you extra
0:19 activities a[t] each differen[t] location.
0:20 Tha[t] was one tha[t] popp ed_up an[d]_I though[t], “Why no[t]?”
Here you can listen to individual words in isolation:
tour group
an[d]_they offer you
a[t]
a[t] each differen[t] location
tha[t] (in ‘that was one’)
one_tha[t]
ed_up (in ‘popped up’)
popped_up
tha[t] was one tha[t] popped_u[p]
an[d]_I
thought
Why not?
an[d]_I_thought[t] why_no[t]
Explaining this feature to students:
I ask the students to pronounce the word ‘that’, and then say it again but not release the air at the end. Then they repeat the same with ‘up’ and with ‘like’.
2. ‘weak’ form of ‘was’ : /wz/
originally I was
3. Adverbs
Some frequently used adverbs get shortened: ash (actually), orignlly (originally), etc
originally I was
and actually looked over the edge
Listen to ‘actually’ in isolation:
4. Frequent chunks
Highly frequent chunks pronounced as one word, very fast and somewhat differently from their dictionary form:
‘I was like‘ for reporting thoughts pronounced ‘uwzli[ke]’;
‘and then‘ (pronounced ‘[a]nthen’)
‘soft of’
He’s like, ‘Right, have you got any last words?’
I was like, ‘Bubbles are going this way, follow the bubbles.’
I was like, ‘Who would be calling me from Canberra?’
and then (when you)
you sort of
your brain sort of flicks
5. Tongue gymnastics (juncture)
When followed by /j/, /s/ and /z/ can be replaced with sh and zh: this year -> thish year; cause you -> cauzh you, etc
as_you go off
cause you’re going really quickly
As_you run out of oxygen
Explaining this feature to the students:
I ask the students to say ‘as’ and ask them where their tongue touches the roof at ‘s’ (near the teeth). I demonstrate the position of the tongue with my hands, like this:
After that, I ask them to say ‘you’ and ask them where the tongue touches the roof at ‘y’ (closer to the throat). I demonstrate the position of the tongue with my hands and then show with my hands the transition from s to y, which looks like a jump – like some kind of ‘gymnastics’. I say that it’s difficult to do this sort of gymnastics when you’re speaking fast and demonstrate with my hands the ‘midway’ position of the tongue, where zh and sh are pronounced.
Lesson plan
Preparation:
if you want to play the video on your computer, you’ll need to download tbe video and the subtitles from youtube and install Aegisub
you don’t need to read anything other then this post to teach this lesson, but if you need support downloading the video, using the interactive transcript on youtube and/or Aegisub, or if you’d like to adapt this procedure to use it with a different video, check out this post in which I explain in detail how to do this
Procedure (task numbers refer to the corresponding tasks in the worksheet):
Stage: Warm-up (Task 1)
Tell the students that they’re going to work on their listening skills in this lesson and that they’re going to watch an interview with a student. Ask them to brainstorm the topics she might talk about (my students normally suggest: studying, parties, relationships, travel, etc).
Stage: pre-teaching vocabulary (Tasks 2 – 4)
Project the following word cloud or refer the students to Task 2 in the worksheet; tell the students that this word cloud was produced from the transcript of the interview and that the words that were used more times are bigger. Ask the students to look at the word cloud and guess which of the topics they’d predicted will come up in the interview. Reply to any queries about vocabulary.
Vocabulary that is very useful for understanding the interview and so worth clarifying (Task 3): cord (a thick rope); be stuck (can’t be moved); snap (break into pieces); yank on something (pull something sharply); bubbles
With stronger groups (B1+ and higher), I play the video twice: first time without showing the video; the second time, with the video.
The students watch the interview and discuss in pairs what they caught. I listen in and then conduct brief feedback (3 mins), establishing the main facts and the main points the students are still uncertain about, but without spending too much time, without correcting anything the students have misheard or letting the students listen for the second time. I also ask the students how challenging they found the speaker (all my students, even those ad Advanced level, found this speaker very challenging).
The following several stages are done without the projector – the students won’t need the video, which would only be distracting.
Students listen to the first part of the interview line by line, filling in gaps in the transcript
At the end of the stage, the students listen to the part that they have just transcribed again, just to overview what they’ve done and experience understanding the speaker. This ministage takes little time but it’s crucial for the students’ motivation and sense of progress.
Use either Aegisub or the interactive transcript on youtube to replay the lines.
Aegisub (www.aegisub.org)
Youtube interactive transcript
Varying the level of challenge
The worksheet for lower level students (B1/B1+) indicates where and how many words are missing, whereas the worksheet for more advanced students (B2/B2+) does not. C1 students can be asked to transcribe the extract without the support of a gapped text.
The task for B1/B1+ students
The task for B2/C1 students
The transcript
0:02I’d __________ finished uni.
0:02I’d finished uni.
0:02I’d just finished uni.
0:03__________ I __________ __________ __________ going to Europe __________ __________ I remembered __________ __________ __________ cold over there so decided
0:03I going to Europe I remembered cold over there so decided
0:03Originally I was looking at going to Europe and then I remembered that it’s actually cold over there so I decided
0:07__________ __________ somewhere __________ __________ __________. I started off in Egypt – so I spent two weeks
0:07somewhere. I started off in Egypt – so I spent two weeks
0:07I’d head somewhere a bit warmer. I started off in Egypt – so I spent two weeks
Giving feedback
The goals of this stage are
for the teacher to identify what features of connected speech really do pose difficulty for the students in the group and to collect some highly frequently used words that students in the group fail to catch
for the students to (a) discover that some very high frequency English words are difficult to catch (b) to hear how these words are really pronounced in fast speech and gain an insight into why this happens
Therefore, it’s very important to
make sure that everyone in the groups says what they caught and not just the strongest listeners in the group. I normally remind the students that we’re diagnosing their listening difficulties at this stage and insist that I want to board every single version of what’s in the gap
whenever the students fail to catch some words/chunks that are distorted due to the features of connected speech outlined above, play the line again, elicit how these words/chunks sound, explain why the word undergoes those changes
to help the students to make sense of various features of connected speech, set aside a section of the board to build up a list of words that get distorted in a similar way . Halfway through this stage my board looks something like this:
NB Don’t forget to play this part of the video again before going on to the next stage (Task 7)!
Stage: Intensive training with specific words and expressions (20 minutes) (Task 8)
Say that you’re going to play more examples of the problematic expressions collected on the board.
Here are the features of connected speech and corresponding examples that I focus on working on this video (play only examples that come up after 0:49, because the earlier examples will have come up during the transcription stage):
glottal stop/elision
Word/expression: just (pronounced ‘js’) – 3 lines; that (pronounced ‘tha[t]’); what; out (often pronounced ‘ut’); it (this one is very challenging so only do it with a strong group
weak ‘was’ + chunks was like (after that I also play a few examples of ‘like’ without ‘was’); I was
frequent chunks and then
reduced adverbs actually
/z/ sound replaced with zh: as you, cause you (3 samples)
Work with each feature of connected speech in the following way:
pick a word/chunk that exemplifies the feature – ideally it should be one of the words collected at the previous stage (e.g. to focus on the weak was, you could choose was like)
direct the group to this word on the board
ask the class to remind him/her what the expression should sound like in fast speech (/wzlaɪ’/)
ask them to listen to just one line that contains this word/chunk and catch just that word/expression (‘listen and catch just /wzlaɪ’/). Use the interactive transcript feature on youtube or Aegisub if you’re playing the video locally to find and play the relevant lines (again, see this post if you’re not sure how to do that).
those students who have caught it, should try and catch the words around the expression (do board the task!)
Each time, I play the line two or three times, making sure that everyone in the group has caught the expression. If someone says they haven’t, I normally
react to that enthusiastically (Cool, that’s the reply I was expecting!) to encourage weaker students to signal their difficulties
help the students who haven’t caught the expression by, e.g., playing the line again, stopping it right before the word, saying it the way the speaker is going to say it and then playing the word (alternatively, you can play the word in isolation – again, see below for details how to do that
After that, I encourage the stronger students to supply what’s around the expression (sometimes new features of connected speech get identify and immediately make it to the corresponding part of the boards).
Stage: Transcribing (Task 9)
Do one more short transcribing task to allow the students to use the skills trained in the previous stage.
Stage: Listening line by line, listening for the meaning – 15 minutes (Task 10)
Ask the students to cover the transcript (I hand out colour paper :)). The students practice listening to a sentence or more from the text once and trying to understand the meaning. Stress that their task here is not to transcribe word for word / remember the sentence verbatim but to catch the meaning.
The students listen to the sentence once and, in pairs, discuss what they caught (I usually assign them letters – student A and student B – and ask them to take turns to report what they’ve heard, to encourage weaker students to pull their weight). Through that the students scaffold each other and you get a chance to assess how much they understood.
No feedback is necessary here – after the students have talked about what they caught for 20 seconds or so, tell them that they are about to hear the sentence again. Ask them not to discuss it this time (although in my experience some pairs will) but instead to read the line right after they’ve heard it, underlining everything they didn’t catch.
After that, ask them to play the line again in their head (Prepare to listen to it again and understand it without looking at the text). Before playing one more time, remind the students that you want them to listen without reading.
Repeat with the next line. If the students find the task too easy, play longer stretches (two lines, then three lines at a time).
Stage: Watching the same extract again (Task 11)
This stage is pretty straightforward: switch the projector on and let the students watch the entire extract again – having worked with the video, they will understand more or less every word.
Stage: Revision – 5 minutes (Task 12)
Ask the students to mentally go through what they did in the lesson, what features of connected speech they’d focused on and what else they learnt (any new insight into what makes listening difficult? new vocabulary? strategies for developing listening skills?); encourage them to remember specific examples; having thought for a minute, the students share in pairs.
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If you use these materials, please let me know how it went! As always, I’ll also be very grateful to hear any suggestions how to improve this lesson.
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Wondering what to read next? Check out this list of links to youtube channels in a variety of genres that have subtitled videos – you can use any of those videos to give listening lessons similar to the one described in this post, with minimal preparation (I recommend using interviews and not films or other video types, though). By the way, I’m still looking for more youtube channels to add to my list, so if you know of some channels that have subtitled videos, please do share!
Levels: B1 and higher (some activities are suitable for pre-intermediate students) Type of course: General English/Business English; some activities suitable for IELTS students Length: Depending on what activities you choose – altogether, there’s material for around two 90-minute classes. Materials: all activities and pictures are available in a Microsoft Word document (shared under attribution sharealike licence, so feel free to adapt them); you’ll need a projector to project the infographic.
This is a language point that I decided to introduce at all levels I’m teaching this semester: the elementary group studied it at the same time as they studied comparatives (adding a modifier seemed like a very teachable point, and now, two weeks later, they are actually using the modifiers very confidently! I also noticed that at least some of the times they say something like ‘more cheaper’ they actually mean a lot cheaper, so seeing that they’re trying to convey this meaning anyway, why not teach it immediately?) My Upper-Intermediate+ group, on the other hand, was still not using any modifiers with comparatives, as the warm-up activity below revealed.
I like presenting the four ways to compare (-er/more/less/exceptions) with ‘circles’ – the visual ‘mnemonics’ is that the circles do not intersect, so you never use two ways at the same time, and thus ‘less cheaper’ or ‘more better’ is not allowed.
Stage one: Intro. In order to introduce this grammar point to B1 groups and higher, I asked my students whether they’d ever bough a gadget to replace an older one (e.g. a smart phone to replace a mobile phone) and asked them to chat about
in what ways the new gadget was different and
whether the old one was still better in some respects.
I listened in and boarded some comparative structures they’d used – some examples that came up were ‘longer battery life’, ‘more durable’, etc. I then told my students that they weren’t using a bit of language I’d hoped to hear, showed them the first part of the infographic above and asked them what information is present in the pictures but missing from the sentences (How much more expensive?); I then elicited a few examples of how to modify the sentence to say how much more expensive the present was (my students came up with ‘much’ and ‘a (little) bit); I boarded the remaining adverbs, i.e. a lot, somewhat, way, and asked them to rank the adverbs (with my Upper-Intermediate group, we also focused on infinitely, marginally and far). I then pointed out the samples of their language on the board in which they didn’t qualify the comparatives.
Stage Two. Focus on form. After that, in order to encourage the students to study the infographic closely, I handed out sentences with typical mistakes for them to correct (page 2 of the .docx worksheet) – show only the middle part of the infographic at this stage, hiding the examples.
Level: Elementary/pre-intermediateSome of these sentences contain mistakes. Find and correct them.
I find shopping online lot more convenient.
I like this laptop a lot less.
My new laptop has more better design.
This trip lasts two weeks more longer then that one.
The box of chocolates costs 50 per cent less.
This trip is more cheaper.
My day just got a lot better!
My new phone is a bit easier to use then my old phone.
Key: 1 a lot more convenient
2. OK
3. Has better design
4. two weeks longer than5. OK
6. is cheaper
7. OK
8. than
Level: Intermediate/Upper-IntermediateSome of these sentences contain mistakes. Find and correct them.
I find shopping online a way more convenient.
Men generally find easier to read maps.
I like this laptop a lot less.
This trip lasts two weeks more longer then that one.
The box of chocolates costs 50 per cent less.
My day just got a lot better!
1. way more2. find it easier3. OK4. longer than5. OK6. OK
Having checked the answers, we used the correct sentences to model/drill sentence stress and intonation.
Stage 3. Refined production After that, the students went back to their conversations about gadgets (in new pairs), to find out how much longer the battery life was/how much more durable the new gadget was and so on.
We then briefly revised the rules how the comparative forms of adjectives are formed (alternatively, you could cut up a worksheet with adjectives – there are some in the .docx file – for the students to sort them into four groups) and went on to play a couple of games.
Game 1 (drill) – adapted from Intermediate Communication Games by Jill Hadfield, Pearson P T R (2000) – worked like a spell in all groups! Course type: any Levels: Pre-Intermediate – Upper-Intermediate
Materials: a set of cut-up cards for each pair/group of 3 (download a .pdf file from here or use the corresponding pages from the word document linked to at the beginning of the post); ideally, a dice for each pair Time: 15-25 minutes
Every player takes 6 cards. The first player places one card on the desk and ‘boasts’ (‘my robot is very smart‘). After that, each turn players place one of their cards on the board, comparing the new object to the previous one (e.g. ‘my cat is way friendlier than your robot‘) and then takes one more card from the stack.
Rules: (a) They have to use a modifier – I drew 6 facets of a dice on the board, each one with a corresponding modifier, and each time a player boasted, they had to roll the dice to determine what modifier should be used
(b) Adjectives can’t be reused
Image courtesy: my colleague Eleonora Popova, who’s a white board magician. =)
Variation 1: players draw the cards directly from the stack and have to find a way to compare the last two objects Variation 2: each turn, each player in the pair puts one of their cards on the desk; after that each player comments in what way their object is better than the other player’s object
Game 2 A board game in which students share opinions on a range of topics
Target structure: find [sth] [modifier] [comparative] (I find it a lot easier to… than to …)
Levels: Pre-Intermediate – Upper-Intermediate
Course type: General English or Business English (can be used with exam students, but does not replicate exam format)
Materials: a board with adjectives, for Variation 1 a cut-up set of discussion propts (see below)
Time: 30-40 minutes (more time with higher level students, as they launch into discussions, especially if discussion prompts are used)
Rules: The students work in pairs. Each turn, a player throws a coin (heads = one step forward, tails = two steps forward) and states a true opinion using a modified comparative form of the adjective on the field (possibly giving a reason – again, a dice could determine the number of reasons); their partner either agrees or disagrees (providing reasons) and/or asks follow-up questions – again, this could be decided by a roll of a dice. I made two board games for this game, one for pre-intermediate students, another for higher levels.
Example: I find it a lot less stressful to get to work by car than to use public transport, because I really dislike the underground. There are just too many people on the train in the morning. What about you?
Alternatively, the students can ask questions instead of stating their opinions (see Variation 1).
Setting the game up:
It’s better to give the students patterns for questions and answers (I boarded a jumbled question and a jumbled answer and asked the students to unjumble them). In a pre-intemediate group, it’s better just to teach the statements (I find it + modifier + comparative to … than to…), whereas higher levels will cope with questions too.
Board one scrambled question (examples here are for ‘would’): would what you to be find easier so working in a big team in a small team or?Allow students to unscramble individually and then check in pairs, elicit and board the correct question: So what would you find to be [easier], working in a big team or in a small team?
Board the sentence frame under the unscrambled question: So what would you find to be [comparative structure], verb-ing or verb-ing?) (alternatively, make a few mistakes in the frame and ask the students to correct them)
Elicit and board a reply (first the structure, but then elicit the reason – I put ‘because’ on the board and circled it in red (Sample reply:I’d find it a lot easier to work in a small company because you always know who is doing what. )
Again, board the frame under the reply: I’d find it [a comparative structure] to [verb] [than to verb] because..)
Game 2 Variation 1. A board game in which students talk about topics given on discussion prompts
Materials: one of the above boards, cut-up discussion questions (either General English or Business English – see below).
The players shuffle the cut-up discussion prompts and take 6 promtps each. Having landed on a field, a player asks their partner a question using an adjective on the field and one of their cards (e.g. What would you find to be easier, working in a big company or in a small company?)
Non-cut alternative: Each pair gets the sheet with discussion prompts. Having landed on a field, a player picks a question that fits the adjective (possibly, crossing it over).
Discussion prompts for General English:
Business English:
Game 3 Students talk about topics given on discussion prompts using a wider range of adjectives provided on cards; the game is played in pairs or in groups of three.
Course type: General English, Business English or IELTS
Level: Intermediate and higher
Materials:
cut-up discussion prompts – see above (for GE and BE see above; for IELTS download IELTS ‘difference’ questions),
cut-up adjectives; an uncut worksheet with adjectives for each student
Time: up to 60 minutes as there are a lot of discussion questions
Procedure
check that the students know all the adjectives: hand out an uncut copy to each student and set a few simple tasks, e.g. >>> tick all adjectives you know; check with your partner – is there something you don’t know and they do? class feedback >>> in pairs, for each adjective brainstorm two people, things, places or activities that fit this adjective (e.g. elicit examples for useful, e.g. reading news every day). Rules: 1) ask the pair to write their examples down 2) if they can’t come up with two examples in 10 seconds, they should move on (why not tell them you’re going to snap your fingers every 10 seconds?) 3) at the end of the activity, group the students into groups of four so that they ask the other pair for ideas for the examples they couldn’t come up with 4) finish with a group game in which one pair gives their examples and the group guesses the adjective >>> focus on grammar: the students go through the table and count how many comparatives in each row are formed with ‘er’ and not with ‘more’
The game. The students deal the adjectives (6-8 per player). Each turn, one student picks two questions, chooses one (discarding the other) and asks the other players which alternative they’d prefer (Would you rather [verb] or [verb]). All players in the group discuss the question using as many of their adjectives as they can. These are adjectives that are often used with the structure ‘I find it [modifier] [comparative], so they are fairly easy to use in this activity.
Adjectives for intermediate learners:
Adjectives for advanced learners (edit the Microsoft Word file to choose only those you’d like to focus on – alternatively, let the students choose!):
As a follow-up, the students could pick a few of these questions and discuss them in new pairs/groups – this time without being forced to use any specific adjectives/structures. They could also choose a few cards and write about them for homework.
As I said at the start of the post, if you’d like to adapt these games, here’s a Microsoft Office document with all materials. Also, I’d be grateful if you let me know if you’ve got any suggestions how to improve this, ideas how to extend these activities or if you find typos.
Update. Thanks for stopping by! I was delighted to hear that this post has been shortlisted for TeachingEnglish blog award! =) If you like it, you can vote for it on Teaching English – British Council Facebook page.
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Just a short addition to the previous post in which I described how my B1-C1 students work on fluency by mining texts for related expressions, organizing them into mind maps and retelling the texts several times to different classmates.
I use a very similar procedure with my group of pre-intermediate 7 graders to help them remember functional expressions used in social encounters (and generally in ‘Conversation Strategies’/’Everyday English’ sections of coursebooks).
[gist] Students listen to a dialogue from the coursebook and answer gist questions
[analysis] The teacher helps them to analyze what kind of expressions are present in the dialogue and sketches a mind map on the board; the students copy the mind map and use the transcript to find expressions in the dialogue to add to the mind map.
Usually I try to set up the gist questions so as to guide the group towards the structure of the mind map (e.g. ‘How many speakers are there? Who are they?’ or ‘How many questions do the speakers discuss’?)
[pronunciation] The teacher models & drills the natural pronunciation of the expressions; students practice pronunciation in pairs, challenging each other to pronounce expressions as fast and naturally as they can; a fun variation is to challenge the students to say each expression on their map twice in under 60-120 seconds – the goal here is to encourage the students to pronounce fixed chunks of language fluently.
[practice] The students act out the dialogue from the coursebook without looking at the text, using their mind map instead
[recreating the map ] They turn their mind maps over and try to recreate them from memory; after a few minutes, they listen to the dialogue again and add the missing expressions. The students will need lots of support and encouragement the first time they do it – I don’t expect them to remember more than 1/3 of the map when they first reproduce it, but this stage does prime them to notice language while they re-read/re-listen the dialogue and does encourage them to use the expressions during the production stage
[improvisation] The students act out similar dialogues (e.g. if the topic is ‘buying clothes’, they change the items/colours/sizes/prices either based on verbal or visual cues)
The students repeat the map recreation +improvisation stages once or twice or, time permitting , three times, each time with a new partner. This can be done in an ‘onion’ activity: the students are seated in two circles, those from the inner circle pairing up with students from the outer circle; the inner circle rotates between the stages so that each time each student works with a new partner; the level of challenge can be increased by introducing increasingly tight time constraints
They do it again for homework and, finally, again in a later class.
A few tips:
[source]Use complete dialogues. It sounds tempting to organize all functional expressions used in a particular situation into a mind map, but in my experience unless there’s a text to organize the map, it becomes impossible to remember and reproduce. The only thing I add is alternative answers (E.g. ways to say ‘yes’ if the person in the dialogue said ‘no’).
[personal experience]Try the procedure out on your own before the lesson.
[preparation]Mind-map the coursebook dialogue before the lesson. Choose gist questions to direct the students towards the structure you’ve chosen.
[minimal preparation]For the improvisation stage, have students produce the prompts: bring in slips of coloured paper, ask them to brainstorm alternative items that can be used in the dialogue and write them on the slips (e.g. types of clothing on blue slips, sizes on green ones, prices on yellow ones etc), redistribute the slips
Alternatively, brainstorm situations for students to adapt the dialogue to – board them and ask the student initiating the dialogue to choose one
(e.g. for ‘buying clothes’: brainstorm ‘how you might spend a day off’ – e.g. in the forest/at home/at the beech/in the opera etc; the students initiating the dialogue choose a situation and buy clothes appropriate for the situation;
for ‘buying food’ brainstorm a list of animals/meals; students buy food for the animal/ingredients for the meals; etc
for ‘at the doctor’s’, brainstorm reasons why people get ill or, again, types of vacation
for ‘having friends over’, brainstorm famous visitors, etc)
[personalizing]For some topics, to personalize the improvisation stage, ask the students to think about their favourite item of clothing/dish/place so that they buy a replacement for that item/order that dish/book a ticket to that place.
[fueling imagination] Use picture prompts for the improvisation stage: project a picture of a person in a difficult situation and ask the students to buy/order/book something for that person. Compassion is very memorable!
[revision] Insist on revision. Take a photo of a good mind map and upload it to the class blog. Tell the students that you’re going to ask them to reproduce the mind map from memory at the beginning of a next class. In my experience, when these two ingredients are in place (there’s a course blog/file where the learners know they can find the language dealt with in class and there’s a test, even a short and informal one, coming up), this does encourage at least around 60% both teenage students and adult Business English learners to revise.
I like this activity more than the more traditional sequence suggested in some coursebooks, in which learners just read the dialogue a few times substituting individual items and then act out their own dialogue using functional expressions given on the page, because when they mind map, it gets much less mechanical (as they are forced to think about the structure of the dialogue and process the functional language deeply), it challenges them and strains their memory and helps them to memorize the expressions much better, as well as giving them the confidence that they do remember them – having tested themselves a number of times. I’ve noticed that when the students improvise, they use the expressions that they put on their maps quite confidently and fluently, but if they choose not to write something down deeming it ‘obvious’, they might have problems with that language.Here are a few examples of mind maps my group has produced and used.
Example 1. This was the very first mind map we tried. It was at the very start of the course and the students really struggled with this one.
We used the following dialogue from our coursebook:
From Touchstone Level 2 by Michael McCarthy, Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford (CUP)
Based on Touchstone Level 2 by Michael McCarthy, Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford (CUP)
Example 2
A few months later – the students coped much better with this one although it’s pretty huge!
Example 3.
The latest one that we’ve been using this week:
Based on Touchstone Level 2 by Michael McCarthy, Jeanne McCarten and Helen Sandiford (CUP)
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Update 07/05/2014 Since writing this post, I’ve been experimenting with this technique more, trying it with my Business English groups. Here’s a 45-minute lesson for an A2+ group focusing on talking about advantages and disadvantages.
St. Valentine’s day is approaching so here’s a lesson plan on the topic of love and friendship. Students warm up by playing a word game (stages 4-5) that
encourages them to think deeper about what they read into a range of concepts related to love and friendship and
pushes them to recall vocabulary on these topics
The lesson ends in a discussion activity (stage 6).
Level: B1-C1 Length: 30-60 min (depending on whether you do the discussion activity) Focus: speaking (a conversation class) Materials: Worksheet
Stage One. Tell the students that you’re going to show them several photos and that you found all of these photos with one search on Google. Ask them to guess the search term. Board all their suggestions. (My search term was ‘St. Valentine’s day’, but anything topic-related will do.)
(Collage produced using http://www.fotor.com/features/collage.html)
[Optional] If the students came up with the topic of St. Valentine’s day and it seems to be relevant, ask them, ‘What other words do you associate with this topic?’ (board all suggestions, positive ones alongside negative ones, e.g. ‘commercialized’).
Say ‘I’m thinking of one of these pictures. I’ll tell you my associations – guess which picture I’m thinking about (this is the picture of three hands).
Associations:
unity
support
friendship
vow (for a B2-C1 class)
Get the students to quiz each other in new pairs: one person chooses a picture and says their associations, the second guesses which picture is being described; listen in an board some of the students’ associations. FB: By this point there should be more than 20-30 words on the board (some possible associations: stained glass/ saint/ candies/ newborn/ aisle/ unity/ loyalty/ smooch/ swans/ merchandise). Refer the s/s to the board and ask them which words can be associated with more than one picture.
Stage Two.
Tell the students that you’re going to play an extract from a song. Tell them that the title of this song is an emotion and that their task is to guess the title. Play one or two times without the video (black out the projector by pressing B); when the s/s understand that the title is ‘love’ either cirle it if it’s already on the board or board it. Say: the title is spelled incorrectly now. How to spell it right? Play one more time if necessary (the singer says how he interprets each letter in the word ‘love’, so it should be spelled L.O.V.E.)
Stage Three. Board and ask the student to copy the following 4 lines (alternatively, print them out beforehand)
L ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ look at me
O ______ ______ ______ only one ______ ______
V ______ ‘very very ______’
E ______ ‘even more ______ ______ ______ ______ ______’
Ask them to try and remember what goes into the gaps; and then play the first line and ask them to predict what should be in the second line; play the rest of the extract. Say that you’re going to interpret the rest of the words on the board in the same way. At this point, add full stops in some of the words in a different colour.
Stage Four. Say that you’re going to give the students an example: that you’re thinking of a word and that you’re going to give them letters from that word in random order but that you’ll say how you interpret each letter. The students should try and guess the word before all letters have been revealed (allow 30 seconds thinking time after giving each letter & its interpretation – use a timer. If the class guesses the word (‘smile’) earlier than all letters have been revealed, encourage them to come up with associations for the remaining letters.
L is for ‘universal language‘
S is for the way it can start a friendship
E is for emotion and positive energy that you share // add ‘encouragement’ with advanced students
M is for mouth
I is for intrigue, inspiration and interaction
Tell the students that now they are going to challenge each other in the same way. Ask them to work in pairs or groups of 3 and choose more words from the ones listed on the board. Their objective is to find associations they both share and, if they come up with more than one association for the same letter, they should discuss which association is more interesting. Allow 10 minutes – or more if the discussion is lively.
You could play the song while they’re working.
Stage Five. Students play the guessing game – either as a whole group/ in groups consisting of two pairs from stage five / in new pairs.
Stage Six.
Project/print out questions for students to discuss. Ask each person to pick 4-5 questions. Optionally, after some of the pairs have finished, regroup the students.
What do you look for in friends? Do all your friends have something in common or are some of them very different from others?
Do you think your friends who don’t know each other would get along? Why/why not?
Tell your partner about two friends who you think wouldn’t get along/would get along especially well.
What was your best friendship? Are you still friends with him or her? What is your first memory of that person? What is your happiest memory of that person?
What qualities do you admire in other people?
What behavior of others hurts you most? When you have upset someone by your actions, what do you try to do?
Who are the best/the most inspiring/ the most unlikely couples/friends you know?
What’s your attitude towards Valentine’s Day?
Do you think it makes single people feel lonely?
Do you think Valentine’s Day is too commercial or consumerist?
Do you remember giving someone a very heartfelt gift? Who did you give it to? Why did you feel so strongly about this gift?
Have you received any gifts that you still keep and would be very upset to lose? Who and when gave them to you?
Monitor to collect instances of topic-related language that could be corrected/upgraded; content feedback; language feedback.
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If you’re short of time, you can skip Stage 1 and prepare words for stage five yourself. Cut them up into unique slips if you want to conduct stage six as a whole-class activity, or print a list for each pair (two different lists in total) if you’d like to re-group the students.
Here are some suggested words:
Intermediate:
Pair A:
F.R.I.E.N.D.
G.I.F.T.
B.E.A.U.T.Y.
F.A.M.I.L.Y.
S.E.L.L.
Links to the photos used in the collage above:
http:// upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/ff/THREE_BEST_FRIENDS.JPG
http:// fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2010/179/3/3/Love_by_abbachibi.png
http:// farm8.staticflickr.com/7056/6879313937_8d870f75a4_o.jpg
http:// upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ae/Smooches_(baby_and_child_kiss).jpg
http:// farm5.staticflickr.com/4011/4318704741_66b9f68e3d.jpg
http:// farm4.staticflickr.com/3485/3277822794_e241b513dd_o.jpg
http:// upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Valentines_Candy.jpg
http:// farm5.staticflickr.com/4074/5444493797_bc43115ce4_o.jpg
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 worksheet (you can download a .pdf file from Slideshare below):
Example: I find it a lot less stressful to get to work by car than to use public transport, because I really dislike the underground. There are just too many people on the train in the morning. 
Olya Sergeeva's ELT blog 
