Teaching Tips
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Energising the gapfill 1
Gapfill exercises occur with relentlessly high frequency in coursebooks, and other supplementary materials. They are a useful, quick and focused way to check or diagnose students’ knowledge of a lexical item or a structure and, from an author’s perspective, they are also quite easy to write! Here’s my favourite way more…
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Lesson plan: hindrance or help?
Is the lesson plan like having a ball and chain around your ankles? Some would argue that it limits a teacher’s ability to respond to students. In focusing on getting through the plan from A–D, any deviation off the pre-determined route is viewed negatively by the teacher. Thus, any sort more…
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I remember when …
I used to spend hours preparing a lesson. I was newly qualified, teaching in my first post overseas, and fired up with a passion for the subject. My planning time was at least equal to, if not more than my contact time with the students, for at least the first more…
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Sentence stress 2
How to provide more opportunities for students to listen intensively was the subject of the tip two weeks ago. The following suggestion kills two birds with one stone: it practises intensive listening and also raises awareness of sentence stress. It can be adapted for any level. In my experience, by more…
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Sentence stress 1
A few weeks ago (12 March) we looked at how to work on word stress. This tends to be easier to practise than sentence stress, probably because the units of sound are smaller and generally less variable. However, spending time on sentence stress is also very valuable, particularly with a more…
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Intensive listening
Intensive listening is a skill which I believe to be overlooked in many contexts. Historically, one could argue that there was too much intensive listening, at the expense of general comprehension. However, nowadays coursebooks and teachers may have shifted too far in the other direction with the focus mainly on more…
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Making your clarification more effective
‘Clarification’ refers to the ‘teach’ stage of your lesson, where the rules of meaning, use, form and pronunciation are clarified. In the past it was called the ‘presentation’ stage, but nowadays this term can hold slightly negative connotations, and be associated with more teacher-fronted lessons.
In a grammar lesson, the clarification more… -
A day with a difference 2
Last week we looked at some ways in which you can incorporate change into your teaching. Here are some more suggestions.
• Use an approach or technique which is new for you, such as a dictogloss, a transformation exercise, a mumble drill (where students just repeat the target items repeatedly ‘under more… -
A day with a difference
As teachers, our behaviour can easily become ritualised. Sometimes I stand back from my teaching and realise that I am ‘stuck on the same track’; that my teaching is becoming a little too predictable.
Forcing change or difference onto your teaching is the most obvious way to respond to this. Here more… -
Exploiting the dictionary: quick mini-activities 2
Last week we looked at how to incorporate dictionary work, in response to lexis issues arising in class. Here are a few more ideas.
• Choose a word / phrase from the lesson which the students have had problems with, eg *He arrived to there; *She gave me some good advices. more… -
Exploiting the dictionary: quick mini-activities
Dictionaries are a great tool in the classroom. I tend to use them as a way of rounding off or padding out a stage; catering for early finishers, rather than as a large ‘dictionary slot’ per se.
The suggestions below will hopefully serve as a reminder as to how you can more… -
Fish, fruit, flower
This is a game which I played as a child, and you are likely to be familiar with, perhaps under a different name, such as Town and Country. I wonder, though, if you have played it in your language classes? I find that my students of all levels really like more…
