Yesterday I implemented the following activity with my adult students – all of them are retired people that wish to learn English for traveling and visiting different countries.  Basically it was a listening activity, but it also had speaking and reading parts. It requires several steps. We have not finished yet – I expect tomorrow or on coming ...

One day teacher of English B said to teacher of English A, “When we communicate with one another we do it by using the four skills of a language: listening, speaking, reading and writing. So it is sensible you make your students practice those four skills. Your students will be gaining experience by using them. Our students don’t only read and ...

Back in July I posted a selections of 20 ideas and activities that might be worth trying out as you get to know your new classes this school year – and since then there’ve been a couple of additional ideas to throw into the mix: First Lesson Ideas / Warmers First Lesson: Find Nobody Who… First Lesson: I don’t know what you did last ...

A very quick alternative to the standard composition task “What I did on my Summer holidays”. Essentially, you ask the learners to write the composition (100 words? I guess length will be age & level dependent) about somebody else in the class. I think I’ve blogged a similar activity at some point before, but not sure when.  Anyway, the key to ...

This is an entry for everyone currently working at an ELT summer school somewhere in the world!  It’s not always easy and there’s a lot of hard work – hopefully this post will help out a bit!  I’ve been fortunate enough to enjoy my summer school experiences immensely over the years and one of the things I’ve enjoyed doing most has been the project ...

For many teachers, though the school year might have just ended – the joy of summer school classes is about to start.  Or may have already, but I think lessons at my habitual summer haunt are due to begin on Monday morning – I’m not there this year, so not sure. In any event this post contains a collection of getting to know you type activities / ...

Following on from the recent blog challenge on raising awareness of disability access issues, I came across the Leonard Cheshire Disability campaign whilst watching Shaun the Sheep dvds with my daughter. The campaign is called “Creature Discomforts” and has very similar aims to the blog challenge – namely to get people to think about the way ...

It’s the end of the school year at the moment and most of my classes have been badgering for “Movie, teacher! Movie!” for some time.  Resistance would seem to be futile…. Basically, what they want to do is sit down and watch a film for the entirety of the lesson, “practising” their listening skills, but otherwise doing nothing.  The pedagogical ...

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, ...

Dictogloss is primarily a listening and writing activity used with English Language Learners. It can certainly be done a number of different ways but, very simply-put, the teacher reads a short text, often one students are familiar with. Then, after the first time of just listening, the teacher reads it again and students [...]