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.

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.