What I’ve done recently

I have a group of students who are studying for the university entrance exam. These students will also take the language test too because they want to study TEFL or literature. Mostly we do more serious work in order to be ready for the vital test. However, there are times we need to take a deep breath and do something lighter.

Last week we revised the conjunctions. They solved tests and did lots of paraphrasing exercises but we were all bored. I felt they needed a challenge and told them to write poems using
neither ….. nor
both …… and
not only ……. but also
either …… or
Some chose to write paragraphs instead of poems and some wrote great poems.
They loved the activity and we continued writing poems with another activity.

Using songs in other languages was an idea I learned from Ken Wilson last year at a conference in Istanbul.
I adapted an activity from this idea.

We listened to a song in French and I told them while listening to the song they would write either a poem or a paragraph.

The song was ‘il faut savoir’ by Aznavour from Duos where he sang the songs both in French and in English.

After listening to the song in French I asked them to listen to the English version carefully and catch what the singer advised them to learn.