An update on yesterday’s post begging for help with Fry Instant Phrases.
I should begin by telling you this class is called Listen and Speak, it’s beginning level and there are 5 students in the class. And it’s a supplementary class.
So I went to the students’ main teacher and asked if there was any area of speaking that they needed particular help with. She said practicing gerunds would be good, especially in sentences like, “I enjoy dancing,” or, “I think about travelling.”
So I took a bunch of the the phrases, that …Continue

I guess this is old, but I just found it. Cracks me up

I vastly prefer the idea of using Fry Phrases to the most frequently encountered words. Primarily because it’s often the content words that matter most.
It is important to remember, never turn on the GAS before STRIKING a MATCH.
People who say KEYNES is wrong are INCREDIBLY MISGUIDED.
OBJECTS in the REARVIEW mirror may be CLOSER than they APPEAR.
But phrases, collocations. These can be used as fluency exercises and are much easier to match up with content words.
My plan was to cut up a bunch, drill a few with students and then hand …Continue

Just going through my computer and found a bunch of “I Wish” songs to introduce students gently to “I wish I were” and “I wish I had done”. Figured I’d put up a list and add one I actually have used quite a bit in class.
The song everyone seems to be using now is Beyonce’s If I were a Boy, which isn’t “I wish” exactly, but it’s conditional getting at the same thing. I do like that it has lots of implied conditionals.
Kate Nash’s The Nicest Thing is a good …Continue

So this post combines two of my recent topics–how (despite my reservations about dogme) I do a lot of speaking grammar exercises materials-light. And Jason Renshaw’s Open Source/Sauce.*
I originally bookmarked the Time Flies Template as one that would be good for the mixed-verb tenses chapter in our book.
In fact students have real issues with the future, particularly when to use will and am going to and the future perfect. So I planned to do (among other things) an activity found in many a textbook where students have …Continue

If you haven’t seen these toys offered by the always generous and creative Jason Renshaw, you are missing out. These are awesome templates for DIY materials and videos on how to use them. Plus some design ideas.
 
For what it’s worth, I was so inspired by the 1:3 tutorial that I made up my own: 1 to 3 lesson template which anyone is welcome to use or adapt. As always, discussions of how to make it better are always appreciated. It is really fun to make materials that are shiny and pretty even …Continue

More and more, I really enjoy teaching ideas that are materials light because I think they produce a lot of authentic practice and often involve a lot of fluency. (Though Jeremy Harmer has me questioning what really does involve fluency!). In any case, I often find that when I try to think of a real situation where we use certain vocab or grammar so my students can practice authentically, materials and worksheets just don’t come to mind. We rarely have props with us when we speak. So recently, I was …Continue

I came across Word Layer, an iPhone app that teaches and tests vocabulary through pictures. Which I thought was a really good idea because it bypasses translation. However when I was looking at the screenshots, I briefly had the impression that it worked like an image dictionary – you type in a word and a picture of that thing comes up. Then I realized that we already have such a device, Google Image Search. Which made me wonder if anyone has encouraged students to use Google Image Search to look …Continue

This is less of a proper activity and more just sharing a Process Essay Graphic Organizer that I made. These three were made for specific readings that students were to reverse outline, but they can easily be adapted to other readings. Or just used by students to write their own essays. They aren’t anything particularly fancy but they illustrate three different ways to put together a Process Essay.