Once in a while I read something and I find myself thinking, ''Now, why didn't I think of that?''. Well, Richard Gresswell had such an idea. He started a blog, called it ELTBITES, and challenged us: ''Describe an activity that requires no more than the teacher, students, and possibly making use of the board, pens, and paper. Describe the activity ...

A few weeks ago, I suggested some ideas for a lesson based on a close-up image - if you've missed it, I suggest you read that first. Click here to read it.I snapped this shot today, and I thought I'd share some more ideas with you all. Between this and the previous article, I think you'll get an idea how you can start your students speaking on any ...

We have already seen an activity for second conditional with Norah Jones, and I'd also touched on the subject of countries prior to this. However, from my experience, the concept of conditionals isn't too hard to grasp, but it could be used as a springboard for speaking activities. Please see my post on The Best Countries as well. With that in ...

Here's a simple fun activity for you to practise listening and conditionals. First, listen to the song, and you can follow the lyrics if you want (there are some minor errors).Then, click on the image below the lyrics, and this will direct you to an interactive cloze activity, prepared using Lucy Georges' Cloze Creator. Try to fill in the gap ...

Here's a simple beautiful song by the equally beautiful Norah Jones.  Look at the word cloud - all the lyrics are there - and see if you can put the words in the order in which Norah sings. You can click on the image to see a larger version. As you probably already know, we use the conditional sentence type 2 to talk about conditions that, ...

Need some novel way to enliven your class? The traditional way of practising dialogue is to have students work in pairs (or groups), prepare their dialogues, then role-play them, maybe in front of the classroom. Instead of doing that, why don't you get them to prepare a comic strip first (after working on expressions, vocabulary, etc., of course). ...