«Give us the news» [YL]

Versions of this game roam around the world, but here's one I've adapted for my li'l buggers. 3-4 children is probably best to play with.

You'll need:

1) a pack of preferably colourful cards (you can even make your own getting pictures off the Web);

2) some creativity.

Preparation:

For every type of card, say all ones, all twos, all yellows, all reds etc. create a corresponding physical action or a sentence to repeat, depending on what you'd like your kids to learn. E.g. All ones might be "Stand up!" or all reds "Blow a raspberry!". During the lesson you will ask your kids to create their own physical actions or sentences, but make sure you prepare one for all types of card nonetheless.

Make your own pack of cards using the types of card you've chosen (you might decide to leave out a few types so the game is not too challenging), and include the Joker as well. 

Down to business:

Here's how the game goes down. First ask each child to choose a card and create a corresponding action or sentence (you might want to give an example first, but use a card that the kids wouldn't probably choose themselves), then split the pack amongst everybody (even yourself) so that everyone has the same number of cards. Each player plays a card without looking at it, placing it face up in the middle of the table (or carpet, even better). When the players see the card they perform the corresponding action. Last one to perform, or first one to make a mistake, picks up the card and puts it in his pack. The first player to discard all his/her cards wins.

After you've played a few rounds introduce the Joker. When the Joker is played everybody shouts to the player who played it "Give us the news!"; the player then creates and performs an action off the top of his/her head and everybody mimics him/her. Again, last one to perform or first one to make a mistake picks up the card and puts it in his pack. The next time the Joker is played the whole process is repeated and a new action is assigned to the Joker.

The tragedy of listening for adults at lower levels [AL]

Oh, I just love listening activities. I can just forget about all the dull, quite frankly rather dumbed down listening exercises you generally find in course books and just pick a favourite gag off YouTube or play that song my students have been nagging to listen to in class for weeks; or even make up my own, if they're not quite ready yet to go full authentic material, and perhaps throw in a little guitar playing to ginger it all up. I mean it's just great.

Great, right.

I mean... Unless they're beginners of course.

Creating a listening activity for lower levels is no piece of cake, and in time I suppose I have come to agree that sometimes slow motion stiff-sounding speech is most of what you can give to your students. It's kind of boring, but I suppose teaching English to low-level adults is likely to come down to pretty basic boring stuff. To some extent we all need to come to terms with it, but there's no reason why we can't try and spice it up and dare a little more. Grade the task, someone said, not the language.

Here is how I have managed to throw my beginners in the deep end of authentic materials, and how I have managed to come out of it alive.

Here's what I do:

Imagine your students have just successfully gone through a vocabulary activity and know their words twice. You have been drilling and they can pronounce them pretty well. Make sure everybody is confident about the new vocabulary and start the activity. Tell them you are going to repeat the very same words to them, and do so. Then ask them to repeat. E.g.

T:  "Table"

Ss: "Table"

At this stage I alway like to kind of dumb it down for them, just for fun. E.g.

T: "Pic-ture"

Ss: "Pic-ture"

Hopefully they will look unimpressed and underchallanged. Just keep going for a couple more just to tease them.

Finally, tell them you are now going to repeat the same words, but this time in the middle of a sentence. Again, they will have to repeat just the one word they have learnt. Stress the fact that they don't need to be concerned with the meaning of the sentence, just the words they have learnt. Pronounce the sentences at natural speed. E.g.

T: "Today I bumped into a table and almost tripped and fell".
Ss: "Table"

Try and be decent with them. There's no need to speed up at this stage. Hopefully after one or two times they will get it. Now pick up speed. E.g.

T: "Look at the pictures please"

T: "There's my office over there"

You can even keep talking for a while before actually pronouncing a word. E.g.

T: "Today I got back from work and I was so exhausted I just took a shower and after that just literally dropped on the sofa to finally get some rest".

Or, if you want to be mean, try and pronounce sentences where no focus language is present and see if they fall for it.

If you like, I suggest only once the activity is over, you can make them think about how such a situation is quite common in real life, say for example when you go abroad and just manage to pick out the name of a street or a hotel. Sometimes just a few key words is all you need to hear (or listen for).

This activity will give your students a bite of natural language and reward them with a very practical new skill. Some of them will even be able to make out some words from the sentences that you didn't plan them to hear and will feel like they have exceeded your expectations and impressed you and the rest of the class.

Getting to know you... (Mnemonic techniques) [YL: Teenagers]

I spent the whole of July teaching at a summer school in Southampton. I taught roughly a hundred and eighty kids over four weeks so I had to think of a way to know them and remember their names. It is ridiculous how much of a difference remembering your students' names can make and will make. I always try to use their names not only when I am directly speaking with them, but also when I am mentioning them to the others: casually, familiarly.

I also course-directed for the last two weeks of the summer school and whenever I had to stand in for one of the teachers, even briefly, I would start by learning the students' names. The activity has got almost everything you would want for a summer school lesson: it requires virtually no preparation on your part, it is quick and gives you heaps of opportunities for spinn-offs and it involves you in a performance.

Here is how it goes down:

You tell your students what your name is, without writing it up on the board, then you go through some stuff you need to take care of, like taking attendence, filling in students' forms etc. After all that is done you ask your students if they remember what your name is. Most likely at least half of them won't remember it, so you act concerned and tell them that you need to think of a way to help them remember your name. At this point you jerk your hand in the air and pretend you have just had the idea: you are going to give them a method to remember your name. Don't forget, the method should be easy, preferably funny, and should involve a part of your body or physical appearance or anything that can serve as a permanent reference to your students. My own mnemonic technique (I introduced myself as Emile) went something like this:

T: What's this? (Pointint at his hair)

Ss: Hair!

T: But what's it called when your hair drops on your forehead like this? (Pointing at his fringe)

S1: What??

S2: Dunno.

S3: Hair!

T: It's called a fringe.

Ss: Aaaah! (Sounding smug — fringe in Italian is frangia, and my students were all Italian)

T: Do you think fringes are typically British?

Ss: No!

T: Typically Italian?

Ss: No!

T: Typically French?

Ss: Yes!

T: So here is how you can remember my name: I have a fringe, fringes are typically French, my name sounds French (here using a mocking French accent helped a lot), so: Emile.

I drew all this on the board and by the time I was finished I gave the students a few seconds to copy stuff down or just take it in, then I rubbed the whiteboard clean and asked them what my name was. This time of course they all did remember and so looking quite pleased I elicited the whole mnemonic technique from them. At this point I asked students to create their own methods to help me remember their names. Have them work in pairs. First I would give a few examples myself. You can get pretty good at this if you practise for a bit, so do practise before you use this activity, especially if you know what country your students are from and what names are more likely to come up. The more idiotic the techniques the more memorable they are. Here is one off the top of my head:

Riccardo

T: Right, so your name is Riccardo, which in English is Richard, Richard sounds like Rich, you're wearing a T-shirt with California written on it. If I had to go to California I'd need to be rich to pay for my flight and stay there, so there you go: California > Rich > Richard > Riccardo.

You might find that you need to help some students out, but you will get a few very creative ones. What you can do is try and figure out who will be able to help you before you even introduce the activity, and make sure they are paired up sensibly. Having two very creative students work together might be very engaging for them but will not help other students and will not help you in the end.

You are basically sifting the most creative out-going students from the shyer and less motivated ones and the cool thing is that it does not really matter whether your students can't think of a technique: you can help them. And you will help those who would naturally have less of a chance to talk to you anyway. So seize this chance and ask them questions about themselves to help you create a mnemonic technique. The cool thing is that this does not feel forced at all, whereas usual Getting to know you type of activities do, and you are asking the very same questions.

Once this is all over you have them present their techniques and you try and remember them all. What I do then is I throw a ball to one of the students and try and remember their name. If I am correct they throw the ball to a different student, if on the contrary I am wrong they win the right to throw the ball at me (of course get hold of a spongy type of ball, not a leather one). I generally do pretty well and get a round of applause, but do try and make a few mistakes so students, especially the naughty ones, get a chance to throw the ball at the teacher. When this is over you can even have the students come centre-stage and play the same game. Just remember to have them repeat the technique every time they remember somebody's name.

Love circle [YL/AL]

Family and family members is something that you're just bound to teach as an EFL teacher, whether to younger learners or adults. The problem is, most activities you find in books are pretty boring and don't seem to engage students, especially children, a whole lot. Songs are usually okay, but besides helping them with pronunciation and memorisation of single items (i.e. father, mother) songs don't really get them to actively and engagingly use focus language, which is usually the toughest challenge in EFL teaching to children.

I must admit I'm a bit of a TBL kind of guy (if you don't know task-based learning, check it out on its Wikipedia article, it'll be worth it), but TBL activities just make perfect sense when it comes to teaching lexis. I've found that if you get your kids to actually ask you for new vocabulary and to use it because they have an intrinsic reason to do so, then well, Bob is pretty much your uncle (no pun intended).

So anyway this is what I came up with to teach family members in a way that is both engaging for the kids and effective in terms of memorisation.

Here's how it pans out:

Get a set of nine pictures featuring you and members of your family, relatives or just people who are important to you, e.g. your best friend, your boy/girlfriend. You can either draw these yourself (which gives the activity a nice touch) or use photos, just make sure they're large enough for everyone to see, especially if you're teaching a big group. Stick them all face-down on the wall to create a 3x3 square. Turn over the middle one (which will be the picture of yourself) and ask kids who they think it is. Make it fairly easy to guess, think of a feature that children will immediately recognise, like a tuft of hair or a peculiar pair of glasses. Then proceed to call one child at a time and ask them to choose a square and turn it over. Ask them to look at the picture, show it to the rest of the class and try to guess who the person is. Have them ask you:

Is this your... 

E.g. Is this your father?

It is advisable to drill this using your body. What I usually do is gently heaving my shoulders up and down for a total of three times (once for each word). Have the kids do this as well, it'll help them remember. Hopefully they will associate the movements to the sound and so next time they can't think of the question you just heave your shoulders up and down without speaking at all. Most of the time they will get it.

Every time you tell them whether they were right or wrong, tell them using always the same tone or making always the same facial expressions. What I usually say is:

This IS my father!
This is NOT my father!

Soon enough children will start asking you for a lot of words, either to guess right or to make fun of you. Say for example you show them a picture of an old woman (your grandma) and the tomboy of the class wants to make fun of you, she'll ask you how to say girlfriend or lover or wife and, most importantly, she'll be more likely to remember it.

Try and include a wide variety of people, your family members, a couple of relatives, perhaps your best friend, your partner and, depending on the level of the class, your pet (pets are decidedly quite easy to guess). What I like to do is include the children as well, as in, I include a drawing of a bunch of kids that look like them:

Is this your class?
This IS my class!

This is great because 1) it's fairly easy so it'll boost their self-confidence, 2) it's funny, 3) it's great for rapport-building.

Continue until all the people have been correctly identified, which might take a while, but the great thing about this activity is that the more wrong guesses they make, the more they will practise focus language and, most importantly, they won't be thinking about their English, they'll be thinking about the game!

Once the game is over, ask them if they can remember all of them. If you have some spare time or you want to give them some homework ask them to draw their own love circle (even if technically it's a square) to play the same game next time in pairs. The feasibility of this however will largely depend on your class size.

My umbrella is for... [YL]

I teach English in a primary school and although I have to stick to the programme set out by the school and the state, I give it my own twist as often as possible.

The whole idea of teaching English EFL style to classes of twenty or twenty-five is very questionable and what teachers usually end up doing is drilling ad infinitum until the poor things know everything by heart. So whenever possible I throw in a task-based lesson that will entertain and stimulate the kids creatively.

One of my favourite activities I came up with last year was "My umbrella is for...", which we did jointly with the art teacher.

Here's how it works:

Bring in an umbrella, perhaps make fun of British weather if you're from the UK, and ask the kids what it is. My kids knew it as the English word is pretty similar to the Italian one, but if they don't just teach it and drill it. The umbrella works pretty well for drilling. Open it in three steps, one for each syllable, and have the kids repeat each syllable after you. This way they won't rush it and really have the pronunciation down.

Next, ask them what it is for (this can be done in their L1). Most of them will smugly reply that umbrellas of course are for sheltering from the rain. Act unimpressed. Say something like

"Well, yeah, of course, that's ONE use for them..."

Kids will look perplexedly at you. Go on with:

"Surely you must know at least a few more!"

Keep it up as long as needed, then finally proceed to show them a different use for umbrellas. My favourite is draining pasta, poking holes in it and using it as a colander. Do a funny drawing on the board to show them then ask them if they can think of some more uses. Collect a few ideas, praising their creativity, then tell them they've come up with so many ideas they will have to draw them in their exercise books to keep track.

Once that's done all you need to do is scurry back and forth from kids with their hands up telling them how to say things in English. Here are some ideas my children came up with:

My umbrella is for... Sailing!

My umbrella is for... Showering!

My umbrella is for... Dancing!

My umbrella is for... Flying!

Secret object: His/Her/My [YL]

Grammatical words can be hard to teach, especially to younger learners. In fact, the younger they are the harder it becomes, doesn't it? Typically, I wouldn't even care to focus on grammatical words unless I had a specific reason to, but sometimes you simply might have to do it.

Such a situation might occur, as it occurred to me, when you're dealing with exam preparation. Time is tight and you need to make sure children know what they're expected to, so down with the sour grapes and on with it. However, if you've ever taught kids for some time at least you'll know that you can hardly afford to bore them and what usually makes you a good teacher is your ability to entertain them even when you're teaching supposedly boring stuff.

So anyway I was preparing 7-year-olds for Trinity level 2 last spring and they just had to have his/her/my down. This is what I came up with to help them learn them in a fun way.

Here's how I did it:

Children are asked to form a circle in the middle of the room (preferably no deks in the way) and close their eyes. Here you might need to come up with a clever way to have them really close their eyes, because some of them WILL peek.

A child is chosen and he/she is asked to pick an object in the classroom, one belonging to a classmate, and place it in the middle of the circle. Once this is done the rest of the group can open their eyes and look at the object. Now children try and guess whose the object is and do so by touching the classmate they think it belongs to and saying, for example,

This is his pen!/This is her hat!

If the first child is right then the game is over, otherwise you can just keep on calling children and ask them to guess. One way of helping yourself keep them with their eyes shut is to set a time limit when choosing the secret object and have the rest of the group count up to ten before they can open their eyes.

The great thing is that it doesn't really matter whether their guess is correct or incorrect, what matters is they will keep on practising and won't even notice it too much, as they will be so engrossed with the game.

Just a word of advice: don't keep the game too long or children will get bored. If you really need to, try and ginger it up a little bit, perhaps by having them play in teams.

The serendipity of lexis learning [AL]

The term Serendipity refers to the fact of something nice and unexpected happening by chance.

Learning new words or, more generally, lexemes can be a tricky business. The typical student will have plenty of recorded words and expressions he or she would love to use but never really gets to use and hardly ever comes across again anyway, so the whole chore of collecting and organising them ends up being, to a very large extent, a bit of a waste.

There are a few tricks students can use to make some use of their notebooks and all the untapped potential, but perhaps I will talk about this in a different post: what I am concerned with now is what we, as teachers, can do in our lessons to help our students memorise new lexis.

I have found that in order to learn new lexis students need two things: repetition and meaningful context, or rather cotext (i.e. other words that words occur with). What I mean by repetition is clear: students need to see words not just a couple of times but several, and the more often they see them the more likely they are to remember them; but if you just drill them over and over again the learning value of each repetition progressively lowers. What they need along with repetition is meaninful context. And meaningul context, in short, is provided by unexpectedness, the exact opposite of drilling. Here's where the concept of serendipity kicks in.

We can have our students make serendipitous encounters of lexis, or rather sneakily use words that we know they are going to come across in future lessons and make it all seem serendipitous.

Here's how we can do it:

Before teaching a lesson or, better yet, before starting a new course, you skip ahead to following units and make a note of all the interesting lexis you come across, especially words and lexemes that you know you could spontaneously use in class. Next step, of course, is use them, so that when you reach the following units and your students see them for the second time they will be more likely to remember them because you've providided them with meaningful context.

An example of how I used this in class is the word swap. I noticed it was going to turn up in one of the reading texts in the very following unit so what I did was, I used the word during a lesson to give instructions for a speaking activity.