This is an alternative approach to the inevitable “what did you do on your holidays” conversation.   Many first lesson activities and ideas are based on the premise that nobody knows anybody else but often the students in your classes have come up through the levels together and the only new person in the group is you… It should also combat those ...

The Vortex Game.  This is a game I’ve created that can be used with any age or level – for pretty much any purpose.  It came out of a conversation with a colleague (thanks Sarah!) who was looking for an idea to help learners with minimal pronunciation pairs, but it can be used with pretty much anything! I can’t claim complete originality here ...

This is a great activity that you can use as a warmer or as a fun practice task in a number of situations. I should acknowledge that I originally saw my Dip tutor Peter Moran do this during a lesson in Wroclaw in 2006 – in various forms it’s been one of my staple activities ever since! I can’t remember why Peter did this – though as I recall he ...

There’s a new twitter based application on the web that you don’t have to sign up to twitter to use:  Tweetolife.  It’s the outcome – well, it’s one outcome of the development of Twitter corpus data by researchers at the University of Edinburgh, whose paper on the subject is available to read as pdf. Tweetolife can show you which genders use ...

It’s early evening on a Friday about 7.30pm and the end of a long week both for me and the poor student who’s ended up scheduling her lessons at a time when the only other person in the school is the receptionist who has to lock up after us. We’ve been talking about presentations and leadership and the board is covered in useful expressions, ...

I blame that Simon Thomas over at efl-resource.  It’s all his fault.  And I’m still not sure whether it’s “zip zap zop” or “zig zag zog” or something else entirely! I’ve inherited a class, which Simon once taught back in the misty dawn of time, of 12-year-old pre-intermediate students.  When I walked in the classroom the other day, they were all ...

A relatively simple way of dealing with multiple choice cloze tasks in the classroom: Take one multiple choice cloze task, possibly one like this FCE style task found via a google image search, or just one from your coursebook. Before the class, you’ll need to type out the multiple choice possible answers onto A4, print a single copy and then ...

The visual thesaurus was pointed out to me some time ago as a great alternative to the standard online dictionary search, and also as a great way to help learners broaden their vocabulary, particularly with higher level students who have a tendency to rely on a more limited than necessary lexical resource. But….  I’ve tended not to use it because ...

State of the World’s Mothers 2011 Statistics and Facts – Save the Children - thanks to Greg Fuller for posting this on facebook….. There’s a lot of information here and obviously the most interesting thing for any class to do would be to pull out all the statistics that relate to their country and decide whether or not they agree with them, why, ...

Thanks to Tommy Holt for spotting this and mentioning it on facebook! Primary pad is an online synchronous editing tool – learners can access and edit the same document at the same time. This is the first tool I’ve come across that allows synchronous editing and as such is quite an exciting development!  It’s free and requires no registration, ...