TopAn English teacher's notepad:
New ideas,favourite exercises and useful links for the English classroom.
(Of course you may use these ideas in class, but remember the © Dierk Andresen 2001. Ideas powered by Pilgrims. Web pages created at Weberberg, Biberach, Germany)
Business English and economics
How can one use these funny maps in the classroom? (Source: Atlas der Erlebniswelten (see:www.atlas-der-erlebniswelten.de), Eichborn Verlag. Could they be used for a variation of my hyperlink activity? Unfortunately the picture is too small. But if one copied it into a Word document and enlarged it, one would have a blurred and mostly unreadable map in German. You can easily doctor it to make it totally undecipherable. Ideal for the EFL classroom?
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One of my favourite classroom activities (because it is invariably popular with students), is one I call "I read the news today, oh, boy!" in which every students gets an L1 news item from a paper or magazine and then has to tell a classmate what it is about. They should not translate, inf fact, they wouldn't be able to as the words in the news would be way beyond their level. But the situation is realistic enough: suppose they have an English speaking visitor at home, are watching the news, get excited about something because it is shocking or funny, and then want to tell their guest all about it. This is what is being practised in this exercise. If you are teaching foreign students in Britain and want to avoid the cost of foreign newspapers, you will find enough material on the WWW. You could go to the more light-hearted or even odd bits of news or be more serious. Both would work well. Click here for examples in American, German, Spanish, and Italian.
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Another (often pretty frustrating)one of my favourites. It demonstrates how difficult teamwork can be. Once students have got the knack of it, follow-up exercises go much speedier. Lots of listening and talking goes on during the exercise.Or you have total, flabberghasted silence.
Here goes:
a) Copy the following sentences onto individual slips of paper.
b) Tell students that they are not allowed to show their sentence to anybody else. Emphasize the "show"!
c) Tell students that all the other instructions are on their slips of paper and that, therefore, you will stay out of the exercise until they have finished. (This is v e r y difficult for teachers, especially if things go wrong!)
d) If you should find this exercise too risky: Discuss briefly the strategy of solving a jigsaw puzzle. Ask students questions like: "Do you look at every piece only once and then put it back into the box if it doesn't fit?" "Do you sometimes try out whether two pieces match?" "Would it make sense to look at all the pieces only once and then sit and think how they best fit together?" Then tell students to apply their knowledge of visual jigsaw puzzles to this acoustic puzzle.
And here are the sentences. They make perfect sense in this, i.e.the correct, order, don't they? (Just in case: Do not leave the numbers on the slips of paper you hand out!)
1)Does anybody know what we have to do?
2) I suppose, we're meant to solve a puzzle.
3) How can we solve it, if we don't know what it ays on the other people's slips of paper?
4) Well, we could read our sentences out loud one after the other.
5) O.K. Who's got the first sentence?
6) I've got sentence No. 1.
7) That can't be right, because here it says "This is the beginning of the story."
8) But don't stories usually start something like this:
9) "Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess"?
10) Fairy tales do but this is not one of them.
11) Thank you for another year of scrubbing the floor.
12) That sentence doesn't seem to belong here.
13) No, it doesn't. I think we've got it now.
14. Yes. Let's read everything out once more leaving out that one odd sentence.
Tessa Woodward uses "loop input" in her teacher training seminars (see her Models and Metaphors in Language Teacher Training). Mario Rinvolucri introduced them to me. Ah, what would my life be without Pilgrims? It doesn't do Tessa justice to just say that loops are, for example, reading comprehension exercises about the topic of reading comprehension or a dictation about the challenges of dictation exercises, but you get the drift. Here's a clearer example.
Warning: THIS EXERCISE CAN GO SERIOUSLY WRONG AND END IN EMBARRASSED SILENCE - NOT JUST IN TEACHER TRAINING SEMINARS. And this is why it is such an ideal activity for introducing teamwork, the importance of listening and cooperating, of asking for repetition, clarification, etc.
Variation (unsorted version):
What that person suggested was this:
Ten people with one slip of paper each.
And so the solution was found quickly.
At last someone had a clever idea.
What a difference a good idea can make!
No help from the teacher either.
Just that. No instructions given.
"Let's all read out loud what it says on our slips of paper!"
The result? Confusion, embarrassment, silence.
The ice was broken. Everybody did as suggested.
Each student needs a postcard size sheet of paper. Ask students to write the numbers 1-6 on it, one numebr below the other. They should then write down answers or words according to the following instructions:
1) the name of a shop that was important to you before you were six years old.
2) the names of 10 objects you use in your work every day.
3) brief notes about a film you saw last year / the year before. Do not mention the title or the actors.
4) the most important thing you learnt after/out of school.
5) a country you would like to visit.
6) Something you collected when you were a child.
Now students sit in rows facing a partner. They can either move their chairs to form two rows or just turn round from their desks. They then talk to their opposite for three minutes about the first item, then get up, move two chairs to the right and continue with a new partner talking about the second item. So it goes on until all six items have been dealt with. Keep it fast-paced.
You could also have some aspects of a recently taught topic on the cards. The exercise would then turn into a very quick and intensive revision exercise. Some suggestions: Students write down a) a word which they learnt in the last unit b) something they found intriguing c) something that changed their view of the world d) the three most important facts e)why they found it boring/interesting/ etc. f) how this topic relates to their personal lives/autobiography etc.
What about correction? Let them be! If you can't resist, hover around them and write corrections on little slips of paper and pas them to the respective student discreetly.
WHY: Very intensive talking in a lively, slightly chaotic and non-threatening environment.
WHAT YOU NEED: Nothing that is not found in classrooms anyway.
TIME: 20 -30 minutes.
This exercise can be done at the beginning, when not all students have arrived yet, to give the punctual ones something to do. It is also useful as a stopgap when a pair or group of students need more time than the rest and you want to let them finish whatever they are doing without keeping the others waiting. Just take a lesser known proverb, a graffitto, or some random funny sentence, write the individual words on cards and put them in an envelope. A pair or small group of students then have to put the jumbled words into the correct order to form a meaningful sentence. No words must be left out. Nothing may be added. Here's one example to enlarge, copy, and cut up:
Mothers president become but all in politicians they want their the don't want sons process to them to be grow up to .
WHY:This focusses students' attention on vocabulary and structure. It also makes them discuss, argue and negotiate.
WHAT YOU NEED: One or more envelopes with little cards that have single words on them. These words make up one complete sentence. Useful sentences can be found at Dave Sperling's ESL Cafe on the WWW. (Click on Quotes!) .
TIME: 5 to 15 minutes, depending on the complexity of the sentence. Have further puzzles handy for the faster students.
Solution to the above puzzle: Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be president but they don't want them to become politicians in the process. (John F. Kennedy)
This exercise has a simple games format. It works like this: Students have to find words in their dictionaries which the teacher does not know. The whole class plays against the teacher. For every word the teacher knows (a near definition is enough, but this has to be negotiated), s/he gets one point. For every word s/he cannot define or, alternatively, translate, the class gets a point. The winner is the party who has collected five or more points first. The number of points needed, has to be agreed upon beforehand. This game should only be played by teachers who speak English as a second language. Native speakers would otherwise have an unfair advantage, unless students are sophisticated enough to find the very rare words and the teacher has to give a pretty precise definition.
WHY: Working with monolingual dictionaries is a skill that has to be learned. This activity makes reading definitions and thinking about them fun. And students can be better than their teachers for a change.
WHAT YOU NEED: At least one monolingual dictionary per pair of students.
TIME: 15-20 minutes.
Show students a picture of two people. (Not too outlandish ones.) Projection via OHP works fine. Tell students that you know the people in the picture very well and are willing to answer questions about them. As students keep asking questions make up your answers but be consistent. Occasionally throw in an unusual bit of information, e.g. Why they moved back to London? Well, they wanted to be closer to their son, who was in prison at the time. After about 5-10 minutes declare that you do not really know the people but just made up the whole story. Then pair students and ask them to decide which one in the pair is A and which one is B. A gets a picture and has to pretend to know the people in it. B has to ask questions. When the picture seems to have been exhausted, hand out the second picture, this time to student B. Repeat the process. Sometimes students will want to go on and talk about a third picture. It would be good to have a few at hand so that you can keep everybody talking.
WHY: Students can use their imagination to tell wild and wonderful stories. And question practice is an added bonus.
WHAT YOU NEED: Pictures of couples - not necessarily married ones. Any two people in a possibly intriguing setting are fine. You will need one picture per student and a few back-up copies for early finishers. You will also need one picture for yourself.
TIME: 10 minutes for the introduction and then 10 to 15 minutes per round.
On the board write a list of adjectives you want to work with. These adjectives should be new to your students and be emotionally charged, i.e. they should describe feelings and /or qualities that can be ascribed to people. For an advanced group you could, for example, choose a dozen or so of the following words:
cocky creepy knackered gullible peeved nitpicking gregarious smarmy radiant livid miffed goofy huffy stubborn broody exuberant chirpy queasy smug
Then ask students to put these word into three columns according to their gut reaction to these words:
| POSITIVE | INDIFFERENT | NEGATIVE |
When they have done this, let them share their reactions and have a brief plenary feedback round or even a vote on some of the words. You can then either - provide them with the correct definition or - hand out a concordance of the use of the word taken from the Internet and let them try to figure out the meaning of the words themselves (or at least determine whether they are "positive" or "negative") and finally - let them look up the definition in a monolingual dictionary. Variation: Depending on the spirit of the group you could let the class assign adjectives to certain students but only before they know what they mean. This will create some hilarity and discussion once the true meanings of the words have been found.
WHY: Creating interest for new vocabulary and an awareness that words have emotional qualities
WHAT YOU NEED: Blackboard; a set of adjectives you want to work with; optional: monolingual dictionaries and printouts from the COBUILD collection of concordances. Minimum: have definitions of these words handy and/or even example sentences from a dictionary.
TIME: 30 minutes
Teaching business topics at a German grammar school
For a teacher training seminar on teaching business English and the vocab of economics in the last two years of a German grammar school with a vocational orientation I have prepared some texts, ideas, and links, which you can find here.