Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, efl, fun activities, grammar, lesson ideas, Passive Voice, teenagers, web 2.0, wordle, young learners

Passive Voice, two activities using web

Pub Quiz on the Net

Target Language: Passive Voice, Simple Past Tense

Level: A1, A2

Materials: ( colourful) pen, paper, internet connection,

Team students according to the size of your class.

Give them categories as inventions, literature, discoveries, music, etc.

Tell them in teams they will search on the web and come up with 10 questions, such as who composed ‘four seasons’?

Tell them in turns they will ask their questions to the opponent team. The answers should be in passive voice. The winner is the team with more correct answers.

Then tell your students to create a poster with their questions and the correct answers. They can use ‘glogster’ for the class blog.

Pub Quiz on Wordle

Target Language: Passive Voice, Simple Past Tense

Level: A1, A2

Materials: pen&paper, internet connection

Wordle: Passive voice

Create a word poster with some inventions, discoveries, books and movie titles, songs, etc.

Team your students

Distribute the word poster

Tell them to search the web and find out who the inventors were.

The group who finds who the writers, directors, inventors, etc first becomes the winner.

Follow up:

Students can create posters for the inventions.

Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, grammar, lesson ideas, lesson plans, reported speech

Reported Speech activities, ideas and links

It is mid-term break now. At the moment I’m enjoying myself reading blogathon posts and doing some preperation for the first week of the school. February will be a hectic month and I have to pre-plan everything.

Reported Speech is the grammar point that we will study  but I want to challenge them with something different, fun and enjoyable so I checked what I’ve collected so far and searched the web and I’ve compiled a list as follows:

REPORTED SPEECH ACTIVITIES

Write  gossips (possibly from a magazine about a popular person) on post-it notes.

Tell students to walk around, listen to their friends, take notes about the gossips they heard and then report it to the class.

Give them some scrap paper

Tell them to write a wh question

A yes-no question

A warning

A request

A statement about an event that happened at the
weekend

A piece of advice, etc

When they finish, tell them to make balls from the papers

Tell them it’s time to play snowball

Allow them to play snowball for some time.

All of them should have a snowball in the end; they open the ball and report the things written on it.

Tell students they are bored in the lesson 😉 and will exchange messages secretly from the teacher (something they always do)

Give them situation and tell them that they will exchange messages until you stop them.

Stop them and ask them to report the conversation.

Play Chinese whisper

Tell a statement, ask a question to the first students and tell him he will whisper the message to his friend and the friend will do the same until the last students receives the message but the last students will report the statement or the question. If he does it correctly, he will become the first student. If he can’t he will continue as being the last receiver for one more term.

Skeleton poem

Tell students to write a poem based on a given model that you think is suitable for your learners

Mum says

Dad says

Teacher says

But nobody says

Bring cartoons to the classroom and ask ss to report the dialogues.

Watch any video about an interesting topic.

Tell sts to take notes and then report some of the talk.

An inspirational TED talk or another short video

Tell something about yourself like ‘I was at starbucks with my friends two hours ago’

Student 1 will report it to the class and say something about himself/herself.

Student 2 will report what st 1 has said and tell something about himself /herself

Or

Student 2 will report what you and st 1 have said and adds his/her own

Student 3 will report what you, st 1 st2 have said and adds his/her own

Recently I’ve stumbled upon this blog. Here you will find a very short mingling activity http://icebreakeractivityoftheday.tumblr.com/post/16455813518/post-it-pass-itand after the activity is done, ask students to report what their friends have wrote.

When I searched on the net, I came across with the following links. You may also find them interesting:

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/activities/eavesdropping

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/activities/doctors-patients-speaking-activity

http://www.ehow.com/info_8554756_reported-speech-activities.html

http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/grammar-reference/verbs-and-tenses/reported-speech-tips-and-activities/152843.article

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets/grammar/reported-speech/

http://esl.about.com/od/readingcomprehensionquiz/a/report_read.htm

Videos and movie clips

An excellent video on B.C  http://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/en/how/how-tell-if-your-boyfriend-slob

Play wheel of fortune http://www.englishw.com/SamplePage3.php

From movie segments to assess grammar goals 3 extracts from 3 fun movies http://moviesegmentstoassessgrammargoals.blogspot.com/search/label/reported%20speech

Songs for teaching reported speech

Beatles DO YOU WANT TO KNOW A SECRET

Beatles Things We Said Today http://busyteacher.org/2736-reported-speech-with-friends-theme-song.html

A fantastic idea how to revise reported speech with a song http://bfunb1.mixxt.com/networks/files/file.81836

 

 

Eva Buyuksimkesyan activities, discussion, grammar, lesson ideas, modal verbs

Using Quotations to Revise Grammar

Last week we revised modals with my year 12 students and after doing a lot of exercises, tests, etc ( they are studying for the university entrancre exam and they will take the language exam so they need to master the grammar and the skills as well) I realised they still got confused as most of the modals would be translated into Turkish as the same way. To make them focus on the meaning, I prepared some paraphrasing exercises and at the bottom of the page I decided to add a quotation to motivate studying and I started to search for a good one but found too many. Then I decided to prepare a gap fill exercise with these quotations omitting the modal verbs.

Finally in the class after doing the exercise we talked about some of the quotes, the ones they liked, etc. As a follow up I wanted them to choose one of them and reflect on it writing a 120-140 word article. I still didn’t get their articles and don’t know what I will recieve but the activity can be fun if your students like talking  and discussing together.

 


Another  activity I preparedwith quotes but haven’t used yet is

Find some quotes about any topic you want to discuss

Create a wordle

In groups ask your students to put the words into correct order to find out the quote.

Discuss them together

Ask them to write something on them

Tell them to create a poster using bighugelabs or another tool.

Can you guess the wordle?

 

Wordle: learning

Eva Buyuksimkesyan grammar, lesson ideas, listening, songs

Songs to teach grammar

note

I guess you all know that I love using songs in lessons. This week I’ll teach giving advice, talking about regrets. The target language is the modals for that.

I decided to start with a song. When I prepare I will also share but after I tweeted ‘Dear PLN, can u suggest me a song 4 teach giving advice or criticism, can’t remember any., looking for though, pls RT’. My PLN came up with lots of great ideas. In order not to lose them I creaded a google spread sheet and I’m adding it here too.

If you used a song in the class for any grammar topic, can you please add it to the spread sheet.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnayGhctnQeddHlvaEIxTFJmeDd0eWk0dXlDLTV6aHc&hl=en

And here I’m adding some of my bookmarks:
A document from ELTCommunity.com: http://www.eltcommunity.com/elt/docs/DOC-1044

Teaching grammar through songs and rhymes: http://www2.vobs.at/ludescher/Grammar/teaching_grammar_through_songs_a.htm

You can find more song related posts on this blog here. here, here, here

Eva Buyuksimkesyan grammar, past cont, past simple, web 2.0, writing

Old techniques die hard

Wordle: Approaches 4 teaching FL

I think most of you will agree with me that drilling can be boring and it is very old-fashioned. It is mechanical and it doesn’t promote any critical and creative thinking.

However, don’t you ever think  they work with certain classes, students. I couldn’t catch yesterday’s eltchat but as I followed from the tweets, it was  about whether to use the traditional methods or not.

Through years we’ve had many methods, some were the improved versions of the formers, some were completely new and some others, given brand new names, were similar to the ones that we discussed they became old-fashioned.

Do you throw the old books from your bookshelves to the dusbin when you buy the new ones? or do you always want to get rid of the old clothes when you do your spring cleaning? I still keep some although they won’t fit me anymore (but I have a daughter and fashion is something that repeats itself and vintage is always popular)

Personally I don’t want to be a teacher who encourages memorizing, drilling and mechanical work. Yet I belive there are times that we need them.

I have a group of year 10 students. Most of them have been learning English since kindergarten but they still can not write a proper paragraph. They have problems with the English structures. They think in the language they know and try to say the thing they want to say as in Turkish. Some of them solved their problems but others because of many other reasons still have problems. And these some of them are sometimes lazy to revise at home so we only have the class to make them learn.

When you try the new approaches and try to neglect the classic grammar teaching methods some students will complain that they don’t learn anything. Last week while I was trying to make my year 7 students to speak, one of them asked me ‘What are we going to learn today, teacher?. I said ‘we will just talk’. I recalled similar conversations. I believe PPP can still be used with teenagers and up to pre-intermediate level. Students will understand how the structure can be used when the teacher sets the scene, drills and lead them to guided production. However, it may be boring and useless for adults and higher levels. Whereas the other old techniques and approaches will work well with higher levels.

Unfortunately our students are used to learning things in analytic ways. Because still for some teachers the best student is the one who keeps a neat notebook, does homework regularly, sits at the desk and responds to the tasks the teacher has assigned. These students are trained to learn this way. We have to change the methods the other teachers use in order to have more flexible approaches in our efl classrooms. But I think this is another discussion topic.

Anyway,I also believe Dogme is  a great challenge. I can’t call myself a dogmeist but there are times I do things which will lead me to dogme in near future. Yet, I have some questions in my mind. Can every teacher become a dogme teacher? I think it is not a question of being NEST or NNEST.

Don’t you think being ecclectic is a good way and will allow the teacher to be more flexible?

This post has just been editted for Marisa’s  Blog Challenge: Tradition Revisited & Revamped