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How to Teach Modals of Possibility/Probability/Deduction

27th July 2013 by Alex Case

Modals like “It must have been the CIA” and “It can’t really be Elvis!” are so much fun that many teachers already spend too much classroom time on this point. However, that doesn’t mean that this grammar point is necessarily well taught, and many classes could benefit from more emphasis on typical student confusions, pronunciation and related forms before moving on to classic activities like guessing ambiguous pictures. The practice stage could also be made more useful by adding less controlled and so therefore at least slightly more realistic speaking tasks.

Typical student confusions when studying and using these kinds of modals include:

  • Trying to use “can” as the opposite of “can’t” and/or “mustn’t” as the opposite of “must”, perhaps because those are the opposites when the verbs have different meanings (e.g. “I can ride a bike”/“I can’t ride a bike”)
  • Thinking “could” and “might” must have past meanings
  • Confusions between “must” and “will”
  • Trying to use “be” in all sentences (often because the form is taught as “must have been” etc rather than “must + have + PP”)
  • Trying to use “should” and “would” in context where it isn’t possible

“Should” does actually have this meaning, as indeed do all true modals, but it is much more limited in use. In most practice activities “That should be some kind of bird” and “Aliens should have landed here” would be wrong, so it is usually best to ignore this form. This leaves, in approximate order of certainty:

  • must
  • may/might
  • could
  • can’t

I’ve seen quite a few lists that put “could” higher than “might/may” but I would argue that “It cooooooould” with extreme intonation to show more doubt is more common than “It miiiiiiiight” and “It maaaaaaaay”. Varying the level of certainty in this way is a pronunciation point which is well worth teaching, and something that means it is usually best to avoid putting percentages on each verb as some books do.

You can also show the level of “could” with a look at the useful area of collocations with these verbs. I would also argue that “could possibly” is a more natural collocation than “might possibly” and “may possibly”, with the more certain “might well” and “may well” being more natural than “could well”. The collocations “really must” and “really can’t” are also worth teaching.

A fuller list with variations of pronunciation and collocations could include:

  • REALLY MUST
  • really must
  • must
  • may well/might well
  • may/might
  • could
  • could possibly
  • coooooould poooooossibly
  • can’t
  • really can’t

I often get students to put such expressions into a graded list in just this way as a discovery approach to presenting the language, with example sentences spoken by the teacher or on a CD helping them use the doubtful or sure intonation to check their answers. Lower-level classes might not need all the collocations, but I do “cooooould” with all classes and “REALLY MUST” with most as a way into the very important pronunciation point. All classes also get additional expressions which are not modal verbs but are always needed for communicative activities that get students to make deductions. All my classes get “probably”, as it fills a vital gap between “may/might” and “must”. Most also get “almost certainly”, with the negative forms “probably not” and “almost certainly not” also being useful. Higher-level classes also get “will” to give me a chance to clear up the confusion that both “must” and “will” basically mean 100%, but with the former being according to my logic and the latter seen as a fact. To help with this, after they try to put the expressions into order I sometimes give classes a ranking sheet with hints like this:

1. IT’S A FACT!

2. It’s a fact.

3. I’M SURE!

4. I’m sure.

with the answers being “will definitely”, “will”, “REALLY MUST” and “must”.

As well as presenting modals as part of a general lesson on speculating, you can also do so as part of a lesson on hedging/generalising, e.g. giving students statements like “TV has no future” to make it more realistic.

Higher-level classes might also benefit from a whole lesson on different grammar of modal verbs depending on their meaning, e.g. that “couldn’t” is the past of “I can’t speak Spanish” but “can’t have been” is the past of “It can’t be the right thing to do”.

Practising modals of possibility/probability/deduction

FCE Speaking tasks with pictures, especially Speaking Part Two, are really good for this point. In that task, students compare two pictures that they’ve never seen before and therefore need to say things like “This could be a lake too, but it’s probably the sea”. To emphasise this language point, you can get them to speculate on one picture before you show them the second one to compare with it. Another way of doing that is to give two groups one of the two photos each to speculate on, then put them in pairs to find the similarities and differences without showing the pictures to each other, insisting on speculating language at that stage too.

It’s also possible to make discussion questions similar to FCE Speaking Parts One and Four (and the similar IELTS Speaking Parts One and Three) such as “Who was your favourite teacher at school? Do you think they enjoyed their job?” and “What are your predictions for the future of this city?”

If It Can Be Done At Home, Don’t Do It In Class

27th July 2013 by Alex Case

The title of this piece is the main rule that I keep in mind when planning lessons and writing online teaching materials. As well as the obvious advantages of leaving class-time free for more productive things, this policy can also foster student independence. If you get into a cycle of leading into the thing to do at home in one class and then using what they have learnt at home in the next class, it also naturally leads to more recycling of the language covered, making sure it isn’t just taught in one class and then forgotten.

Examples of things that can be just as usefully done at home include:

  • Checking the answers to their homework
  • Most detailed reading of a text (for example vocabulary questions and detailed comprehension questions)
  • Almost all written practice activities (gapfills, matching sentence halves, etc etc)
  • Much actual reading (after doing the lead-in during the lesson)
  • Memorisation of a dialogue to prepare for controlled and then freer speaking
  • Choosing which language is worth learning (for example selecting five words from a text)
  • Preparation for speaking tasks
  • Most brainstorming

I should emphasise here that something that students could do at home doesn’t automatically become something worth doing in class just by putting them into pairs. Such activities are still better done at home unless they would really benefit from hearing each other’s ideas.

There are very occasionally times when you do need to do parts of the lesson that could be done at home, like making sure students understand the grammar to be ready for the next activity.

Moving things to homework can be taken much further by taking what I call a PPPP (Presentation Practice Pause Production) approach. For a language point such as grammar, the lesson is planned so that students finish a discovery approach presentation of the new language at the end of class and so are perfectly set up to do written exercises on the same language for homework. After checking their homework in the next class (or even better asking questions after checking their own answers with the answer key at home), students do controlled and then less controlled speaking practice on the same language point, which is then tied cleverly in to a discovery approach presentation of the next language point if they are ready to move on to it.

The same PPPP approach can also be  taken with texts, with detailed comprehension questions being done for homework. Discussion questions based on the text are then talked about in the next class. Less confident classes can also prepare answers for the discussion questions at home, though they shouldn’t be allowed to look at what they’ve written while they are speaking in class and there should also be a few new discussion questions that they haven’t prepared for. With listening texts, students will obviously need tapescripts and/or recordings to make this possible.

Nowadays and for many students I’d even include pure free conversation in the “If it can be done at home
” rule, seeing how cheap and easy it is for most students to find conversational English teachers on the internet. They could also easily start an English conversation club where they could do the exact same thing as during pairwork and groupwork in class for free.

Things that they are unlikely to be able to do outside class include:

  • Lead-ins to listening and reading texts such as prediction tasks
  • Being led through discovery tasks to help them work out language patterns and rules for themselves
  • Communication games and other controlled spoken practice tasks
  • Feedback on their speaking
  • Getting useful self-study tips tailored to their own needs and interests
  • Most pronunciation work
  • Analysing listenings for what it is that makes things difficult to understand
  • Most other skills training, e.g. scanning and reading for gist

The other main exception to the “If it can be done at home, don’t do it in class” rule is vitally important things that students could do at home but can’t be trusted to. With most of my students, those times include:

  • The first couple of times they check their own answers to the homework and prepare questions to ask you
  • At least the first couple of times of correcting their own written work using a simple marking scheme and then asking about any corrections they aren’t sure about
  • Timed practice of exam tasks
  • Learning how to use a dictionary properly
  • The first couple of times of brainstorming and planning writing
  • The first couple of times reading quickly for general understanding, scanning for specific information, etc

I should emphasise that all of these things can be left for the students to do after class after the first two or three times being done in the classroom. However, you should always do some kind of feedback session in future lessons to check what they are doing at home and how well they think it is going, in order to get useful feedback for you and to motivate them. These Q&A sessions can also train students to prepare questions for the teacher, including eventually things unrelated to the syllabus of the class.

How to Teach Giving Examples

27th July 2013 by Alex Case

Phrases like “such as”, “to use a well-known example” and “e.g.” are vital for supporting arguments in situations such as presentations, debates and academic writing (including IELTS Academic Writing Task 2). They are also useful for clarifying meaning. Unlike much functional language, it is well worth students having a good selection of phrases for this point, as it is often necessary to give lots of examples and good English style means not repeating yourself, particularly in writing.

Phrases that have the basic “for example” meaning include:

  • for instance, …
  • …, for instance
  • …, including(:) …

There are also many general expressions with the actual word “example”, including:

  • By way of example, …
  • If I can use an example, …
  • To give an example, …
  • I’d like to illustrate my point with an example
  • An example to show (you) what I’m talking about is …

It is also possible to use the verb form: “This is exemplified by …”

Then there are phrases that come afterwards to show that the things mentioned are not the only examples:

  • … among other examples.
  • … and other things of that nature.
  • … and so forth.
  • … and so on.
  • I could give other examples (but I think I’ve made my point).
  • I’m sure there are more.
  • Those are just a few examples.

At least as useful as the example giving phrases above are phrases that give more specific information about examples. Most of these can be categorised as follows:

Comparing with the previous example

  • A better example is …
  • A different example is …
  • A less clearly connected example is …
  • A less well-known example is …
  • A similar example is …

Mentioning how often the example is used

  • A common example is …
  • A well-known example is …
  • The most famous example is …
  • A much quoted example is …
  • A typical example is …
  • An example that is often used to illustrate this point is …
  • An obscure example is …
  • This is often illustrated with the example of …

Evaluating the example

  • Perhaps the best example is …
  • By far the best illustration of this is …
  • A great example is …
  • My favourite example of this is …
  • One of the best examples is …
  • The most obvious example is …

Numbering the examples

  • An additional example is …
  • Another example is …
  • There are many examples, such as …
  • To give one example of what I mean …
  • To give just one of many examples, …
  • Just one of many examples is …

Giving additional information about the example

  • A recent example is …
  • An example (that) you might be familiar with is …
  • An example from my own experience (which I’d like to share at this point) is …
  • An example which I often use is …
  • One example that I heard is …
  • One example that springs to mind is …

You could also present questions asking for examples and phrases that explain why an example is being used, such as “This is difficult to link to our real lives without the use of an example.”

Typical student problems with example giving phrases

It’s surprising how often students are unaware of the very common abbreviation “e.g.” or at least of the fact that it can used both in speech and in most levels of formality of writing (in common with other Latin abbreviations like “i.e.” and “P.S.”). Some try to use “ex.” in its place, perhaps influenced by “Ex. 1” for “Exercise 1”.

Other common problems include:

  • confusing formal and informal example giving phrases
  • confusing example giving phrases that start new sentences and those that continue the same sentence (a typical written example being “For example, the house next door.”)
  • a missing S in “one of the” structures, resulting in “One of the best example is”
  • mixing up e.g. (for example) and i.e. (that is)

If students are likely to want to write a list of examples, they might need some help with punctuation such as when to use a colon and the difference between commas and semi-colons in lists.

Students also often have problems with the collocation “give + example”. This is usually due to direct translation from their own language, making phrases like “make an example”. It is usually easy to clear up due to the meaning of “give” being fairly literal in this collocation.

Perhaps the main problem students have in production is overusing “for example”, which is an issue not only because native speakers try to avoid repetition as far as possible, but also because “for example” is neither as precise nor as persuasive as “Perhaps the best example of this is …” or “An example from own personal experience that I’d like to share at this point is …”.

Classroom practice of giving examples

From these examples we can see that just getting students to stop repeating themselves and to use longer phrases would be a start. For the former, you could give them an activity where lots of examples are compulsory or necessary and tell them to use different phrases each time. This can be done with one person in each group of three to five students monitoring, giving points and/or noting down different phrases used. Longer phrases should naturally come out of this once they have run out of short ones, especially if you emphasise that even a slight variation (e.g. using “To give an additional example” after someone else uses “To give an example”) counts.

Another way to get longer phrases out of them is to give them keywords that they should compete in groups to make longer and longer sentences with. These should be words that are used in many sentences above like “example” and “give”. They can also be given less common words that are useful for making longer sentences to add to those words in the next stage.

All those kinds of keywords can be used in a game while they are speaking too, by getting them to use phrases with the words that they have on their worksheets to be able to cross them off and score a point.

By far my favourite game to practise the language of giving examples involves one student giving more and more examples of one thing (using different example giving phrases each time) until their partner guesses what the category is. This can be from a list they are given or from their own ideas. This is great both for covering lots of vocabulary and for making sure they really understand the meanings of the categories. I’ve also used this for cultural knowledge (e.g. famous Australians they should know before they go to university there), and it could also be used for revision or before brainstorming something.

The opposite of that game (and something that could follow it) is for students to compete to give examples of something (as always using different phrases each time) until one person repeats an example giving phrase, uses a phrase wrongly, repeats an example of that thing or runs out of examples of that thing.

Using Memory in EFL Classes

27th July 2013 by Alex Case

The most important reasons for using students’ memories in EFL classes are:

  • Students will sooner or later need to remember the language in order to be able to use it
  • Memory activities are stimulating, and in a way that retains an emphasis on language more than faster-paced “fun” activities usually do
  • Short-term memory is important for some language tasks, such as listening when you only know what you are listening for afterwards (for example TOEIC questions)

Activities that exploit and expand these memory skills are possible at both the presentation and practice stages.

Memory activities for presenting language

Students trying to recall things stands at the centre of URA (Use Recall Analyse), my own personal variation on PPP/TTT (Presentation Practice Production/Test Teach Test). After being asked to use the language in some way (for example answer some discussion questions written with a mix of conditionals), students are asked to recall something about that language (for example the tenses that were used in those conditional prompt sentences). After checking their memories against the original worksheet, they then analyse why particular language was used that way. This is designed both to work smoothly in the classroom and to train students in the process that they will need to go through to make sure that communication outside the classroom also turns into learning.

Another approach to presenting language that relies on and simulates short term memory is Dictogloss, in which students work together to reconstruct a text which the teacher has read out twice at natural speed, then analyse the language used in that text.

Running Dictations can also be used at the presentation stage. In a Running Dictation, one person goes back and forth to a text on the wall to dictate the whole thing to their sitting partner. As only the person walking is testing their short term memories, you’ll probably want to have a stage (maybe in a future class) where the roles are reversed.

Most of the activities below can also be used in the presentation stage by taking a URA approach.

Memory activities for practising language

Memory games are much more common at the practice stage. A very simple one is to get students to repeat a dialogue again and again, each time covering one more line from the bottom. For example, they read out the whole ten-line dialogue, cover the last line and try to remember the tenth line after reading out the first nine lines, cover the ninth line, etc. You can insist on them keeping as close as possible to the original dialogue if you really want them to remember exactly the words and phrases used there, but I tend to let them improvise from the point where the dialogue is covered if they prefer.

A similar game is Disappearing Text, in which a text on the board is read out in full as it is deleted word by word. This can also be reproduced in pairs by giving students a grid and scraps of paper with which to cover the words in each box on the grid.

There are also activities where students try to remember as much as they can rather than every word as it is. One is something similar to the game Chinese Whispers, but passing on whole stories that someone else has told you (without any use of notes). Something similar can also be done with students listening to a tape over and over and rehearsing the story on there to tell to someone else, for example the joke-telling activity in the book Skills + Advanced Speaking and Listening.

A different approach to the idea of using memory is to get students to remember something else in order to prompt language use, for example:

  • looking at a picture for a couple of minutes and using their memory of it to pretend to be a witness to a crime as in one of the Play Games with English books (for Past Continuous)
  • talking about the differences in the next picture that they are shown (for Present Perfect, there is/there are, etc)

Similar things can be done with videos. Students can also try to remember things in the classroom, for example positions for prepositions, what people are wearing for clothes vocab and Present Continuous, what the teacher did for Simple Past, the class this time last week for Past Continuous, or changes in the classroom for Present Perfect.

You can also get students remembering events from their lives, for example students guessing the year from what happened to their partner for Simple Past or telling anecdotes for active listening skills. This is a nice way to practise remembering and forgetting phrases like “What was his name? No it’s gone./Got it!”, something that is worth presenting for many of the activities in this article.

I’ve also used a nice memory-stretching activity during tests. After finishing the allotted time, I tell students that they will be able to try the test one more time for five or ten minutes at the beginning of the next class. Their task is therefore to try and recall what was in the test until they can have a look at their books, and then remember the right information from their books until the next lesson.

First Lessons for Academic English Classes

27th July 2013 by Alex Case

Needs analysis

As with most other classes, I like to start EAP courses with a needs analysis, in this case one focused mainly on finding out their academic interests and difficulties in using English as part of that (in the past, present and future). I tend to do this with students interviewing each other in pairs and making notes on a form that I give them. I do this even with Academic Writing classes, as they can benefit from a bit of speaking to warm them up. It also helps them to get to know something about their classmates, so they can understand if the class deviates from their own ideas on what or how to study because of other people’s needs, interests or ideas. The forms are then handed in so I have a note of people’s needs and wants.

Linking to needs analysis

An obvious way to continue with the rest of the first lesson is to link it in with the needs analysis stage. One way is to continue discussion of the last question on the needs analysis form. I often do this by making the last question “The best ways to improve your academic English/academic writing/academic presentations in English”, something that leads naturally to language for giving and supporting opinions. You could also do something similar by getting them to define academic writing or good academic writing, moving from that to phrases for defining your terms.

You can also link other functional language directly in with the needs analysis stage in similar ways. The function that is most likely to come up during needs analysis in pairs as described above is phrases for checking and clarifying such as “What do you mean by
?” and “I can explain that better with an analogy
”

Another possibility is to link from needs analysis straight into a form of academic speaking or writing. The two most obviously connected are introductions to presentations for speaking classes and academic applications (for jobs, courses, scholarships etc) for writing classes. After asking each other for information and making notes in the needs analysis stage, students can discuss which information is most suitable for the kinds of academic communication you are covering, then try to put it into the right format. With presentations this will depend on the topic being covered, so students can work together to find suitable information for both of them for presentation topics like “Socks” and “The future of buses”.

You can also go from needs analysis into survey questions in presentations by asking students to guess similar things about the rest of their classmates and then make up questions like “Please raise your hands if
”, “How many people here
?” and “I imagine most people here
 Can I just check if that is true?” The final one also ties in with generalising and hedging language.

Two more ways into any of the functional language that are likely to come up in the needs analysis stage are correcting mistakes and asking them to brainstorm (better) phrases that they could have used. It is also possible to combine those two, with students going from correcting their own mistakes on the board to correcting other typical mistakes for different academic functions that the teacher has prepared on a worksheet, then brainstorming more possibilities for each of those functions.

Error correction can of course also be used to link needs analysis with grammar, with the two most common mistakes that you are likely to find and so prepare follow-up for being:

  • determiners (especially “a” and “the”)
  • prepositions

The final possibility is going from needs analysis into vocabulary, with words used to describe kinds of academic communication (essay, dissertation, etc), jobs (lab assistant, visiting professor etc) and qualifications (PhD, post-doc etc) most likely to come up naturally.

Priorities

Another way of looking at what to do first is to think about their priorities, i.e. what they need first and what they need most. Their main priority time-wise is likely to be emails with written work attached, for example the email with the essay that I always ask them to send me before the second lesson. This can be presented with an error correction task (maybe adapted from a real particularly annoyingly pushy email you received!) to link in with other correction tasks mentioned above.

Academic Writing students are also likely to need planning techniques and sentences for defining their terms from the very first homework.

Reviews

The third way of approaching a first lesson is to try and give them an overview of the whole area of academic language that the course will deal with, with future lessons revising, expanding on and reinforcing it. The overview could be a review of grammar, vocabulary, functional language and/or tips, perhaps linking into the needs analysis stage in the ways suggested above.

Tips on good academic writing are easily collected from books and websites (for native or non-native English speakers). I tend to add some bad tips based on common misconceptions such as “Use lots of passive sentences” to these, getting students to cross off the wrong ones. This can be tied in with language by making the tips ones that students can brainstorm useful words and phrases for afterwards such as “Explain the structure of your writing in the introduction” (e.g. “In this essay I will… and then
”) and “Define your terms as you go along” (e.g. “
, used here to mean
”). A similar activity is to make many, most or all of the statements about academic English over-generalised, then get students to use hedging language to make them more true.

How to Teach Clothes Vocabulary to Young Learners

27th July 2013 by Alex Case

Things you need to teach about clothes vocabulary, in approximate order of when I would introduce that point, include:

  • Names of basic clothes that students often wear
  • Identifying the written forms of those words
  • Verbs associated with clothes (“try on”, “put on”, “wear”, “take off”, etc)
  • Phrases to talk about clothes in whole sentences (“I’m wearing
”, “I like
”, “I have
”, “I’d like
”)
  • Clothes that are always plural (“glasses”, “jeans”, etc)
  • Words to describe clothes (colours, fabrics, thickness, warmth, etc)
  • Shopping language
  • Parts of clothes (“sleeve”, “collar”, etc)
  • Clothes for particular purposes (“apron”, “goggles”, etc)
  • Common problems with clothes vocabulary (e.g. Jangliish/Konglish/ Franglais clothes expressions)
  • Different words for the same clothes (e.g. British and American English like “trousers”/“pants”)
  • Other more unusual clothes (“dungarees”, “waistcoat”, etc)
  • Clothes from the past and/ or future (e.g. as a CLIL topic)

You may also want to introduce accessories and jewellery like “handbag” and “necklace” at the same time, or the topic of clothes could be combined with describing people (“blue eyes”, “elegant”, etc). This is also a good topic just after body parts, because you can get students brainstorming or talking about clothes which cover particular parts of the body.

The great thing about this topic is that there are already loads of great things designed for outside the classroom that can usefully be brought into the lesson, for example:

  • Picture books, catalogues and magazines
  • Real clothes
  • Toys (e.g. dolls) and their clothes
  • 2D figures with 2D clothes (e.g. cut-out figures or stickers)
  • Computer games/Online games which involve dressing people up
  • Puzzles, e.g. Spot the Difference

Clothes are also fairly easy for students to make their own versions of, e.g. drawing, colouring and cutting out T-shirts and jeans. Most clothes are also possible to mime (e.g. acting out putting them on and/or taking them off). The other good thing about this topic is that students all have clothes and opinions on them, so it is easy to personalise this topic.

There can be a problem with most of the things for use outside the class being designed mainly for girls (and with boys who do dress up their sister’s Barbie doll not wanting to do so in public), but it should be possible to get around that by also using male figures, using storybooks that (also) have male characters, etc.

Presenting clothes vocabulary

There are many sets of clothes flashcards available online, or you can easily make your own from ClipArt –although some care is needed to make sure that it is clear what they represent, including distinguishing between similar things (“jeans” and “trousers”, “coat” and “jacket”, etc). Pictures representing clothes are particularly good for the game of slowly revealing the card bit by bit for students to guess. For at least the first half of that game, I tend to get them to mime putting on and taking off all the clothes presented so far between presenting new words, but obviously you need to think carefully about what mimes you will use (e.g. not presenting the second one of “glasses” and “sunglasses” until the miming stage is finished).

The same thing can be done with real clothes (for people or dolls), including the slow reveal bit by pulling each thing slowly from a bag, or taking it out screwed into a ball or folded up and then rolling it out.

With higher-level classes, I tend to do basically the same thing but describing the card I am holding rather than showing it to them. This is especially useful if you want to later move on to words to describe clothes like “long” and “You wear it on your legs”.

Practising clothes vocabulary

Miming, identifying pictures and describing clothes can also obviously be used in the practice stage. If you want students to describe the clothes to each other, you might need to give them suitable language to do so, e.g. “I think most people here have one at home”. Other activities are dealt with below by category.

Picture books, magazines and catalogues for the topic of clothes

There are very many books where clothes are a major factor, including:

  • The Story of Little Babaji
  • The Smartest Giant in Town
  • Blue Hat, Green Hat
  • Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing

The main thing when choosing which book to use is to decide where you want to be on the list of things to introduce given at the beginning of this article, e.g. not including (many) historical clothes unless students are quite advanced. You don’t have to worry so much about the other language in the text, as the pictures of clothes means it is usually quite easy to describe the story in easier language than what is actually written there.

With magazines and catalogues, students can flick through to find the thing that the teacher described as quickly as possible (also possible with books like Where’s Wally), or cut out things to stick on some A3 paper with written descriptions to make up an outfit, wardrobe or shop.

Realia for the topic of clothes

It is possible to get students dressing in real clothes, although nowadays even very young learners tend to be a bit too fussy to get into this. If you have a suitable selection of clothes (including amusingly oversized ones), students can race to dress one member of their team in the clothes that you shout out or just find and hold them up. They can also choose clothes for an outfit, wardrobe or shop as suggested with magazines and catalogues above, but this time describing the clothes and their merits orally to other groups. They could then vote on each other teams’ choices.

All these activities can also be done with toys, cut out figures or computer figures.

Craft activities for clothes

Students can also rush to make clothes or make and then describe clothes in similar ways to the activities described above. For example, students could race to cut out shapes of shorts, caps and boots from scrap paper, with one point for the quickest that really looks like that thing and one point for the best one within the time limit. To practise word recognition, they could also take written cards from the board, table or floor and add those clothes to their figure, maybe with students voting on how cool the final results are. This can also be done with descriptions of clothes, e.g. taking one card that says “black” and another that says “socks”, then adding that colour clothes to their character.

Personalised games for clothes vocabulary

Students can be tested on what their classmates are wearing now, or guess what clothes their classmates like or have at home. Higher-level classes could also find things in common, e.g. things that they were both wearing at exactly the same past time.

7 Word Formation Games

26th July 2013 by Alex Case

Word formation is the addition of affixes like -ly and semi- to make longer words and different kinds of speech. Although it is often included in EFL exams and higher-level textbooks, it still probably gets just a few percent of the attention of lists of similar vocabulary, let alone tenses. Perhaps one reason for that is the lack of fun things you can do with it, something that this article seeks to start redressing.

Word formation brainstorming races

Give students a couple of minutes to brainstorm words with a single affix, e.g. il- or –ity. If it isn’t a prefix, you could also give them an additional two minutes with a (paper) dictionary to try to add to their answers. Then give them a big list of such words to compare their answers to (something which you can easily make by searching the internet for lists of words “beginning with
” or “ending with
” then editing the lists down). If there are patterns in those words (e.g. im- usually being with words beginning in P or M), see if they can work them out for themselves, perhaps with some good examples highlighted to help them.

There are also ways of making this more competitive, e.g. as Board Race or with different groups brainstorming different things and correcting each other (losing points if their corrections didn’t turn out to be correct).

Word formation list dictation

This is kind of the opposite of the game above. Read out a list of words which have something in common, e.g. words which take –en to make verbs (broad, wide, length, etc). Students listen to the list until they work out the missing affix, with five points for a correct guess, minus one point for a guess which isn’t true about those words, and no points for a guess which is also true but isn’t what the teacher is thinking of. They can then do the same thing with a version of the worksheet that the teacher is reading from with the answers taken out, check their answers, and test each other in groups. They could also use dictionaries or the internet to make similar lists to test other groups with.

A variation is to read a list of words that already have affixes on them in which all the affixes have the same meaning, e.g. –ship for relationships, asking students to guess the meaning of the affix for that list of words.

Word formation snap/pelmanism

This is a livelier game for practising several similar ways of forming words, e.g. un-, il-, ir- and im- for opposites or –ment, -ness and –ity for nouns. Prepare a pack of cards without those affixes. With the usual rules of Snap or Pelmanism, students have to try to get cards by finding pairs which match by the affix that could be added to them.

Word formation sentence halves matching pairwork

Find or create some sentences that include the affixes that you are practising. Split the sentences at the affix, e.g. “A sense of wonder” “ment is essential in a great artist”. As in this example, the sentence halves should be matchable by both the affix and the meaning. Give the sentences halves to different students and ask them to match them without showing them to each other (i.e. just speaking and listening). They should try to do so just with the split words first, then use the whole sentence to check their answers. There are several ways of organising this. The easiest is to give pairs of students Student A and Student B worksheets with the sentence halves in mixed up order, asking them to match sentence starter 1 with sentence ending J etc. It can also be organised as a mingling activity with single cut up sentence halves, with students coming up to the teacher for more when they think they have found matches.

Word formation jigsaw text

This is like an extended version of the task above. Cut up a whole text before suffixes and after prefixes, e.g. “The plan was completely il” “conceived and badly planned but somehow the original” “ity of how it was carried out made some kind of crazy sense and
” Students work together to put the text back together from logical and word formation clues. It might also be possible to design this as an oral task.

Word formation Call My Bluff

Students find examples of real word formation in a dictionary and make up two or three wrong alternatives, e.g. “punishment”, “punishness” and “punishation”. They read them out to another group, seeing if they can fool them about which one is the real one.

Something similar can also be done with written exercises such as FCE Use of English word formation ones. Students fill the gaps with a mix of the real and wrong answers and other groups see if they can spot which is which.

Word formation sentence transformations

The keyword sentence transformation exercises in FCE Use of English can also be used for word formation, e.g. by giving them “I was happily playing in the sandpit when the snake appeared – happy” for them to make “Playing in the sandpit was making me happy when the snake appeared”. Games with this include memory games like Grammar Reversi and challenging them to use as many different forms of the underlined word as they can to express exactly the same meaning as the original sentence.

How to Teach the Language of Prohibition

26th July 2013 by Alex Case

Despite its scary sounding name, the language of prohibition can start with something as easy as “You can’t
” or “No
ing”, and is easy to present and useful in classroom instructions even with low-level young learners.

Presenting the language of prohibition

Suitable language, in approximate order of when I would present it, includes:

  • You can’t
 (here).
  • Don’t
 (here).
  • No
 (ing) (here).
  • You mustn’t

  • You aren’t allowed to

  • ….is prohibited.
  • 
 is banned.
  • 
 without permission.
  • Never (ever)

  • You aren’t supposed to

  • 
 under any circumstances.
  • There’s a rule against

  • 
 has been banned.
  • 
 used to be allowed, but…
  • 
 isn’t permitted.
  • Whatever you do, don’t…
  • You are prohibited from

  • No unauthorised

  • This isn’t the right place for

  • Don’t you dare…
  • Don’t even think about

  • Under no circumstances are you to…
  • 
 is not the kind of thing which is allowed here.
  • You would need special permission to
 here
  • (As a rule) we don’t allow
 here
  • You don’t have permission to

  • Any
 (here) will lead to

  • The punishment for
 is

  • 
 is restricted to


You might also want to cover past forms like “You couldn’t
” and “You weren’t allowed to
”, and most communicative situations that bring up this language also tend to include asking for permission (“Is it okay to
?”) and/or the language of obligation (“You are obliged to provide two references”, “You must complete all five pages”, etc).

The most common way of presenting this language is with signs with a red line or cross on them meaning “No smoking” and “You can’t take pushchairs onto the escalator”. Given how universal these signs have become in workplaces and highways, this works with all but the youngest learners (something that unfortunately can’t be said of signs that are supposed to show positive obligation such as “You must wear a seatbelt”). Other possibilities include making a cross with your fingers, hands or arms (something that is a common gesture in some countries), shaking your head, tuttutting, or waving a finger from side to side.

Practice activities for the language of prohibition

Draw the prohibitions

Signs showing things that are banned can also be used to practise this language, for example by getting them to draw a sign for a particular sentence that they have been given until the people watching guess the sentence (something I call Prohibitions Pictionary). They could also compete to create the best signs to show something that is difficult to represent with pictures, such as “No chewing gum” and “Don’t tease your classmates”.

Decide on the prohibitions

Drawing can also be used as the last stage of this activity, in which students decide on the rules for a place such as a school, park or theme park. They could also design their own museum etc and then add signs to it to represent whatever rules their group decides on.

Find out the prohibitions

One student is given a strange prohibition like “You aren’t allowed to turn your back on the king” or “You can’t drive faster than walking pace” and the other people listen to hints and/ or ask questions until they guess what the rule is. This can also be set up as a kind of roleplay, e.g. where half the class are parents asking head teachers about the school rules, language students asking about a host family, or recruits asking HR departments about the company rules. The person who is answering has to respond to all questions honestly but doesn’t need to mention any strange rules that they aren’t asked about. The people who were asking the questions have to choose one of the places on offer and then are asked if they change their minds when told about any rules that they hadn’t heard about during the questioning stage.

Prohibit everything

In this roleplay task students are given a situation (e.g. in an airport or arriving at a host family’s house) in which one person must try to naturally mention as many prohibitions as possible, explaining the reasons for any that their partner questions. If you want to score it, students get one point for each prohibition they mention naturally, unless they can’t explain it when asked.

Why prohibit that?

Students try to guess why things have been prohibited, e.g. in particular places or at particular times, and then read or listen and check. They can then discuss whether those are good reasons or not.

More prohibited

Students rank prohibitions, e.g. by how important or how silly they are.

Prohibitions bluff

Students try to work out which prohibitions are true from a list of silly laws, laws in particular places such as private schools, old laws which have never been taken off the law books, laws particular to one country, etc. They can also make up their own imaginary prohibitions and work out which ones other groups made up and which ones are true.

Guess from the prohibitions

Students guess a country, type of premises, activity (e.g. sport) etc from a list of rules that are true in that situation.

A class contract

Students work together to draw up rules for this English class that they all agree on and agree to keep to.

Spot rules being broken

Students watch a video with lots of naughtiness (e.g. Dennis the Menace) and should shout “Stop” when they see a rule being broken and then describe it with some of the language above, e.g. “He mustn’t throw that there”.

Allowed everywhere

One student tries to say something that is allowed everywhere and their classmates try to think of circumstances under which it is prohibited, e.g. “Actually, that is banned on army bases”.

Freer speaking activities for the language of prohibition

Many of the topics mentioned above can be set up for discussion without pushing the language of prohibition, e.g. in a task-based approach. Suitable topics include choosing schools, improving behaviour in a school, getting rid of slacking in a company, cutting down on white collar crime or tax evasion, being a host family, bringing up children or teenagers, dealing with a country’s drug problem, and prison reform.

Games to Practise Want/Want to

25th July 2013 by Alex Case

The verb “want” is often presented with the kind of low-level or young-learner classes that need and want the sorts of competitive games shown below.

I want mimes

Although it can take a while to guess the exact sentence being acted out, it is possible to mime sentences like “I want to sit down” and “I want to turn on the air conditioning”.

Want sentence completion games

Give students sentence stems including “want”/ “want to” which they should be able to complete at least half of truthfully, e.g. “I have __________ but I want more” and “I wanted __________ but I don’t anymore”.

There are two games which you can play with these sentences. One is bluff, in which you get students to fill in some sentences with false information and see if their classmates can guess which ones aren’t true. The other is the Sentence Completion Guessing Game, in which students read out just the part they have written from one sentence and their partners see if they can guess which sentence that was written in.

We want to make chains

This is a variation on the well-known ice breaker game in which people try to remember what everyone before them said and add their own statement, as in “Jane likes bananas, Steve lives next to a bank and I hate the smell of milk”. In this variation each person says “I want
” sentences but they only make their own sentences if they don’t feel the same way as any of the people who have spoken so far, instead saying “
 wants
 and I do too” if that is the case. This leads to more actual communication, better bonding of the people in the classroom (by finding things in common), and sentences like “July and Fernando want to see the fireworks tomorrow and I do too. Keith, July and Frances want to learn how to speak French”.

Make me say Yes I do

Students ask each other “Do you want
?” questions which they expect a positive answer to, getting one point for each “Yes, I do” answer but no points for “No, I don’t”. To make the game more realistic communication, they will need to put time clauses in the sentences to avoid exchanges like “Do you want to eat cheese?” “Now? In class??”

Only I want to

Students walk around the class asking each other questions to try to find something that only they want to do, e.g. “Do you want to get a tattoo?” If anyone says “Yes, I do”, they should try to think of something else and start asking everyone again. People can sit down whenever they think they have found something that only they want to do.

Because that’s what I want

One student says what they are going to do to achieve something they want until the people listening guess that “I want to be a vet”, “I want to be rich” etc with clues like “I’m going to study business at university” and “I’m going to set up as many new technologies companies as I can and sell them as soon as possible”.

Maybe I do want to

A big problem with most of the activities above is that they demand clear statements about desires that are often not so clear in real life, and this activity exploits that. Students try to ask questions to which their partner’s answer is “I’m not sure”, e.g. “Do you want to go to Costa Rica on holiday?” If they answer “Yes, I do” or “No, I don’t”, they must explain how come they have such a strong opinion, e.g. that someone told them Costa Rica is overrated or they have a friend living there that they want to visit.

EFL Lessons on Parks

25th July 2013 by Alex Case

A fair number of kids’ textbooks introduce vocabulary like “slide” and “swing” or develop the topic of parks more, but it is a rare topic in adult classes. This obviously makes it difficult to prepare lessons for people with particular interest in this topic such as gardeners, people who spend most of their weekends and holidays in parks, landscape architects, etc. Given that it is tied to the very contemporary topics of city planning and green spaces, it could also be of more general interest, and could indeed be one of the best of all possible topics for a roleplay debate (see below). It is also exactly the kind of obscure thing that students have to describe nowadays in IELTS Speaking Part Two.

Which of the above are true for your students will obviously influence what and how much they will want to be able to describe about parks, but the possibilities are:

  • Plants and parts of plants, e.g. “daffodil” and “branch”
  • Animals and things connected to them, e.g. “tadpole” and “nest”
  • Equipment/Facilities, e.g. “tennis court” and “bench”
  • Negative words, e.g. “dog’s mess” and “mud/muddy”
  • Positive words, e.g. “child friendly” and “leafy”
  • Parts of a park, e.g. “lawn”, and “playground”
  • Things connected to sport/exercise, e.g. “running track” and “chin up bar”
  • Things connected to water, e.g. “fountain” and “paddling pool”
  • Things for children, e.g. “climbing frame” and “sandpit”
  • Things that people do in parks, e.g. “climb trees” and “walk my dog”

Activities specific to that language include:

Plants

  • Students debate the use of exotic plants, limiting the park to local plants, or letting the park run wild
  • Students try to solve problems connected to plants such as old ladies running off with cuttings and children walking over them

Animals

  • Students decide what to do about wildlife in parks that is considered inconvenient or unpleasant, e.g. that empties the bins or attacks people
  • Students design a park to be more suitable for particular animals, e.g. dogs or migrating birds
  • Students decide on the park policy on dogs

Equipment/Facilities

  • Students decide how to spend a budget, perhaps looking at online catalogues for real prices
  • Students design a new and better piece of park equipment, e.g. a bin which compacts the rubbish or a safer swing
  • Students decide on which equipment/facilities will be replaced and which will just be scrapped (e.g. for budget reasons) in a kind of balloon debate

Negative words

  • Students design a park to get rid of negative aspects, perhaps after deciding which problems are priorities to tackle
  • Local residents complain about a park to the relevant government official in a public meeting. The government official must try to make them happy while spending as little money as possible.
  • Students try to find negative things to say about a park their partner has been given or designed

Positive words

  • Students design a park that matches as many positive words as possible, perhaps after deciding which are the most important
  • Students present a park design that they have been given, using as many positive words as they can to present it – or they can design a pamphlet or website in the same way

Parts of a park

  • Students redraw a map of a real park (e.g. a local or famous one) to make way for a new area such as a skateboarding park

Sport/Exercise

  • Students decide policies on people using the park for paid sports and exercise lessons (e.g. group tai chi), ball sports, cycling, roller skating and/or skateboarding
  • Students redesign the park to make it more suitable for one or more sport, or for keeping fit more generally

Water

  • Students try to come up with ways of using less water or reusing it
  • Students decide on rules on how the pond/lake can be used

Children

  • Students try to come up with ways of attracting children who are more interested in computer games and other technology
  • Students design a safer park
  • Students decide on the health and safety rules for a park, perhaps after looking at real examples (including over the top or silly ones). They could then go on to design signage etc telling people those rules.

Things that people do in parks

  • Students decide what actions (e.g. topless sunbathing or napping on benches) will be banned, plus maybe how they will make that happen with punishments, signs, etc.
  • Students design a park to be more suitable for particular actions, perhaps after discussing which ones should be most encouraged

The activities above can also be done for several categories or without particular language suggested, e.g. designing a park which matches ten randomly picked words or debates on topics such as:

  • Who should be allowed to take control of a park (with students taking roles like local residents and a gardening centre)
  • Cuts to services to save money, e.g. shorter hours or less gardening
  • Ecology, e.g. getting rid of most of the grass
  • Forcing local residents to be responsible for a local park if they don’t want it to be shut/sold off

Lessons can also be based around suitable texts, e.g.

  • Catalogues, press releases and/or reviews of things to go into parks such as playground equipment
  • Past or future designs, e.g. computer generated pictures of what a park would look like and how it would be used
  • Maps
  • Pamphlets/Leaflets
  • Photos
  • Website pages, e.g. official park pages
  • Reviews on travel sites
  • Signage, e.g. ones showing park rules

As well as using the sources mentioned above to stimulate speaking about parks themselves, you could also talk about and design/write those things, e.g. deciding which park has the best website or pamphlet and using that to help improve one of the other ones such as that of a local park.

It is also possible to find or write articles and blog posts on parks. Topics that you should be able to build an interesting lesson around include:

  • Commercialisation/Privatisation of parks
  • Odd rules in parks
  • Parks in different countries
  • Private or exclusive parks
  • Strange parks/Parks designed by artists/Modernist parks
  • Teenagers and parks
  • History of parks
  • Controversial parks
  • Security in parks, such as high pitched sounds to stop young people congregating and videoing people in the park
  • Sexual harassment in parks
  • Homeless people in parks
  • Vandalism

The topic of parks can also be extended into greening cities or public spaces more generally.

How to Teach Body Parts to Kids

22nd July 2013 by Alex Case

Teaching body parts like “arm” and “hair” is very common in young learner classrooms, and justifiably so because:

  • Conversations about body parts (“I bumped my head”, “Ha ha ha, I can see your belly button!”, etc) are very common in everyday life for young and (especially) very young learners
  • That kind of language is also needed for classroom instructions like “Put your hands on your head” and “Put up your right hands if
 and your left hands if
”
  • There are many good games, books and songs for teaching body parts

Some of those great activities are described below, but first it is also worth considering the potential problems with this topic.

Potential issues with teaching body parts

  • Some of the most popular songs and books, e.g. the song Head Shoulders Knees and Toes, don’t have very useful vocabulary in them
  • There is sometimes more than one possible word for the body part you want to teach, e.g. “pinkie”/ “little finger”
  • Often the most age-appropriate vocabulary, e.g. “tummy”, is something that would be considered advanced level in an adult class
  • There can be translation problems, e.g. the most common words for “leg” and “foot” are the same in Japanese and in many languages “toe” and “finger” are the same
  • Some words can’t be translated into (level appropriate) English, e.g. there is no single word for “lower back” in everyday English and most toes have no individual names
  • There is always a very good chance that one or more students will introduce ruder body parts that you want to avoid

Other solutions are mentioned below, but the main thing you need to do to avoid most of the problems above is decide which body words are most suitable for your class. The approximate order of when I would teach them is:

Basic body parts

  • head
  • finger
  • mouth
  • nose
  • eye
  • ear
  • hair
  • hand
  • foot
  • leg
  • arm
  • teeth

Slightly higher level body parts/Pre-Intermediate body parts

  • thumb
  • tooth
  • lip
  • tongue
  • cheek
  • toe
  • shoulder
  • knee
  • tummy/stomach/belly
  • neck
  • back
  • bottom
  • little finger/pinkie

Medium level body parts

  • belly button
  • skin
  • beard
  • chin

Higher level body parts

  • index finger
  • middle finger
  • ring finger
  • ankle
  • wrist
  • elbow
  • forehead
  • eyelash
  • eyebrow
  • moustache
  • chest
  • hip
  • big toe
  • little toe
  • palm
  • fingernail

Very high level body parts

  • forearm
  • armpit
  • spine
  • waist
  • fringe
  • heel
  • sole
  • shin
  • calf
  • jaw
  • biceps
  • crown
  • wrinkle
  • bags under your eyes
  • temples
  • ear lobe
  • nostril
  • pupil
  • iris
  • eyelid
  • shoulder blade
  • collar bone
  • trunk
  • rib
  • thigh
  • lower back
  • toenail

Songs to teach body parts

The best tip for teaching young learners body parts is lots of action songs where they sing and touch or move the body parts they mention. There are EFL versions (e.g. The Bath Song on Super Simple Songs and Touch Your Head in the Saxoncourt book Fab Red, or Frankenstein Body Parts Song on EnglishClub.com) and variations on traditional songs with simpler body parts (e.g. the version of One Little Finger from Super Simple Songs), but it is still hard to beat the classics in terms of catchiness. Traditional songs with body parts vocab include:

  • Head Shoulders Knees and Toes (+ eyes, ears, mouth and nose)
  • Hokey Cokey (left/ right + arm and leg)
  • One Little Finger (+ lap or any body parts you get students to place their fingers on)
  • If You’re Happy and You Know It (hands, feet and head)
  • The Pinocchio (left/ right + arm and leg)
  • One Finger One Thumb (+ arm, leg and head)
  • One Two Three Four Five Touch Your Head Along with Me (+ hands and feet)

It is instantly noticeable that with the exception of Head Shoulders Knees and Toes and the variation on One Little Finger all of the songs above just practise “arm”, “leg”, “head” and “feet”. Other potential problems are:

  • Students are not sure which part they are actually singing about (e.g. the distinction between “toes” in Head Shoulders Knees and Toes and “feet”)
  • Students have difficulty distinguishing between the body part words and other words in the song, e.g. thinking “knees and” is a word
  • High level and nonsense words (e.g. in Looby Loo) can distract

Tips to get around these difficulties include:

  • Sing the songs to elicit body parts in other parts of the lesson, e.g. singing “Head shoulders knees and
” and waiting for them to fill in the next word
  • Drill the body parts before and after you do the song, e.g. shouting out “Right/ left + arm/ leg” at random before or after the Pinocchio song
  • Sometimes do the song slowly and acapella
  • Change the body parts mentioned in the song
  • Use flashcards to elicit the words of the song or change them
  • Combine songs with books, songs and games

Using stories to teach and practice body vocabulary

There are books available for most of the songs mentioned above. There are also plenty of other books for teaching body parts, for example:

  • Blue Hat Green Hat (get students to tell you where the clothes are and should be)
  • Go Away, Big Green Monster (parts of the face)
  • Here are My Hands
  • Where’s My Baby by Julie Ashworth and John Clark
  • The Gruffalo
  • The Gruffalo’s Child
  • From Head to Toe by Eric Carle
  • Barney Plays Nose to Toes

Games and crafts to practise body parts

The Barney the Dinosaur book mentioned above is actually just a pictorial representation of a game somewhat similar to Simon Says. Other games are given in the article 20 fun ways to teach kids body vocab on Teflnet, including a few ideas on using crafts for the same language point.

How To Teach Want/Want To

8th April 2013 by Alex Case

“Want” is something that is often presented early in courses just after the other common verbs “have”/“have got”, “can” and “like”. Unfortunately, it is often done so in the almost useless context of requests where “Can I
?” and “I’d like
” would be much more polite and therefore useful. For example, “I want to see it by Monday” is much more likely to be a command or communication inside a family, two things that students are much less likely to need to do in English than make requests. In fact, the first time to mention “want” is often to warn students not to use it in requests, especially as in many languages the equivalent form is commonly used in polite or at least everyday requests. The function that students will need “want” for is to express desires in sentences like “I want to be an astronaut” and “I want to improve my fluency”. This use can be a useful thing to mention even at higher levels to contrast “want” for desires with “going to” for plans, Present Continuous for arrangements and “will” for predictions. Free speaking on the future will also often bring up all four forms. The same distinction is true for “I wanted to have a party but
” (for a desire that I gave up on) and “I was going to have a party but
” (for a plan that I gave up on).

As with requests, the verb most similar to “want” for desires in form and function is “would like”, but in this case I would argue that “I’d like to see him again soon” sounds a bit more wistful and therefore unlikely than “I want to see him again soon”. This means that those two are actually on a line on which the next two sentences are “I hope to see him again soon” and “I wish I could see him again soon”. That useful contrast means that “want” is also useful to bring up again when presenting “hope” and/or “wish”.

“Want” might also come up in offers and invitations (“Do you want to come to the races with us?”), but the meaning of “want” for desires above is probably the only one that is worth presenting and practising on its own and so the activities below are all for that meaning.

Do what I want

Students say a sentence with “want” and students compete to come up with the most desirable example of that thing. For example, one student says “I want to read a book” and the others compete to draw the cover that interests that person most. The game can also be done just with speaking, e.g. in response to “I want to buy some stationery” students try to come up with the best example of that thing, e.g. “An eraser that looks like a robot”. With the drawing variation, you’ll need to keep the drawing part short and probably have a stage where they explain what they have drawn in order to increase the amount of English used. There are many sentences that are suitable for this game, such as “I want to watch a movie”, “I want to buy some clothes” and “I want a superpower”.

I want advice

One student explains a situation with “I want
” and the other students compete to come up with the best advice, e.g. “You should buy your wife some flowers”, “Why don’t you do all the housework at least once a week?” and “If I were you, I’d take your wife out to dinner more often” for “I want to be a better husband”. The student should respond to every suggestion and choose the best, then the students switch roles and repeat. This can be a good opportunity to exchange language learning tips with sentences like “I want to improve my pronunciation.”

I want you to guess

Students explain the word that they have chosen or been given without saying its name until their partners guess what it is. At least the first sentence should have “want” in it, e.g. “I want to do this today/later/sometime this week/sometime”, “I think most of you want to do this” and “I don’t want to do this, but maybe one of you do”. The things that they should describe should be chosen carefully so that they are likely to have an opinion about the desirability of them. Good topics include jobs, toys and technology.

Find what I want

Students ask each other “Do you want
?” questions to find out if something is suitable for their partner or what the most suitable thing would be. For example, if they are given a job or list of jobs they can ask things like “Do you want to work with animals?” and “Do you want to work outside?” to work out if “vet” or “soldier” is most suitable for the person answering the questions. They reveal their conclusions, e.g. with “You would like to be a soldier”, and see if that person agrees.

How many people want

Students try to make true sentences about how many people in the class want something with sentences like “Nobody wants to
” and “Almost everybody wants to
” They then ask the class to check.

We all want peace

Students work together to come up with as many statements as they can that are true of (basically) everyone on earth or (basically) no one on earth, e.g. “We all want our families to be happy” and “No one wants to live in a city with polluted air”. The other groups then try to argue with some of their sentences.

We want what we search for

Students predict the top results for “Everybody wants
”, “Most people want
” etc in an internet search engine such as Google and then check.

How to Teach Requests

15th February 2013 by Alex Case

Requesting is perhaps the most important of all functions to teach, because it is used often and in all situations (restaurants, emailing, telephoning, etc) and varies a lot from language to language. Politeness is also more important for this point than for related functions like offering, and is easily confused with that and polite commands. For example, many students use please + imperative for requests in sentences like “Please give me a pen” and “Please get back to me as soon as possible”, sentences which should usually be actual request forms like “Can I have a pen, please?” and “Could you let me know as soon as you can?”

Common problems with requests

Please + imperative is often just translation from L1, but can also be due to confusion with offers. For example, students might think the offers “If you need any further information, please let me know” (so that I can help you) and “Please take a seat” (= “Help yourself to a seat”) are requests and so try to use those forms in requests.

Sitting down is a cause of further confusion, because there is also the form “Please sit down”, which is a polite command rather than a request because, for example, it will not be possible to start the speeches until everyone is seated. Although there is a thin line between requests and polite commands, “Please sit down” is quite different from the request “Can you take a seat over there?”, which is much more common and useful for students. This confusion can also extend to common emailing and telephoning forms, e.g. causing students to mix up “Thank you for your cooperation” (suitable for a memo politely telling people what they must do, e.g. when they must submit their travel expenses) with “I look forward to hearing from you soon” after a request. The other two most common confusions are using “want” and “give” in situations where more polite/formal language is needed.

Presenting the language of requests

Request forms that you might want to teach include, in approximate order by level:

  • Can I/you
?
  • Could I/you
?
  • I’d like
, please.
  • Could I/you possibly
?
  • May I
?
  • Do you mind
?
  • Would you mind
?
  • I’d be very grateful if you could

  • 
 if it’s not too much trouble.
  • Do you think that you could
?
  • Would it be possible for me/you to
?
  • I was hoping you could
 (for me)
  • I could do with some help with

  • You don’t mind
, do you?

Which forms you present depends partly on what kind of English you want to teach. For example, in British English “Can I/you
?” is a standard form that can be used in the majority of situations, including when “Could I/you
?” might be more suitable in American English. Perhaps for that reason, “May I
?” is used for more polite requests in American English, whereas in British English it is only used to ask for permission (causing me amusement when my adult students ask me if they may go to the toilet). Very polite requests in British English tend to use very long and indirect forms like the “if it’s not too much trouble” structure above.

The other things students will need work include intonation, stress (e.g. lengthening the word “possibly” to make it even more polite) and how general rules of politeness (e.g. the longer the better) work with requests.

Perhaps the easiest and most useful way to present “Can you
?” etc is to give students useful classroom requests like “Can you write it on the whiteboard, please?” and “Can I borrow a dictionary, please?” very early in the course and expect them to use the whole correct requests. With young learners you can also do requests like “Can I go to the toilet, please?” and “Can I have a blue colouring pencil, please?”, and I’ve found it particularly important in these classes never to let them get away with “Pencil, please” in case that sticks forever. With any classes, having students using these forms for weeks or months before you need to actually present the form is obviously invaluable and can make explaining the function of the phrases unnecessary.

With higher level classes, students could classify conversations or phrases by politeness or function (e.g. dividing up requests and offers, requests and asking for permission, or requests and polite commands), then try and work out the general differences between them. If they have no idea about those distinctions yet, they will need other clues such as intonation, formality of the other language used, or situation in which the language is being used to help them classify and analyse the language.

Classroom practice of requests

As with presenting the language, the most obvious and often the best context for practice is classroom communication. A nice way of doing this more intensively than usual is to have an activity during which students can ask you for help as long as they use suitable requests phrases. For example, if students are asked to label objects in the classroom with Post Its, allow them to ask you (maybe a limited number of) questions such as “Could you tell me how to spell table, please?” and “Could you tell me what this is called in English, please?”

Students can also work in pairs or small groups to set each other challenges using similar language, e.g. “Can you tell me what this in English?” with pictures from previous units of the textbook. They can also ask each other to do things in the classroom, e.g. “Could you bring me a blue book, please?” and “Can you move the magnets, please?” There are several ways of setting this up as a game, e.g. the requester and the granter both getting points if they do it (and perhaps recall what it is later with language like “Juan moved the magnets for me”), the requester trying to find things that the granter can’t do, or the granter trying to find excuses not to do any of the things that are requested.

A similar activity can be played with requests in other situations by giving students blank pictures of kitchens, offices, etc and asking them to draw things in that match their partner’s requests.

There are also many games that can be played with “Can I have
?”, some of which start with real classroom communication. The simplest is for the teacher to give a clue as to what flashcards or realia they are holding (e.g. “They begin with C”, “They are machines” or showing the lumps in a bag caused by the plastic fruit inside), and giving that thing and so a point if students can guess what it is and ask for it with a suitable request. With realia and young learners, this is more fun if you ask them to hold all the realia you give them, taking them away if they drop any.

Students can also play similar games in pairs, asking each for objects or cards with “Can I have
?”, for example in the card game Happy Families or after passing things around a circle while other people try to keep track of where they are going.

Students can also ask for letters or words to make words or sentences for points, perhaps also allowing them one extra request each time they successfully do so.

Movement In Adult Classes

2nd January 2013 by Alex Case

Although moving the body around by miming, acting things out etc is much more common in young learner classes, there are almost as many reasons for bringing it into adult classes too. It is perhaps most often seen as a nice break from sitting around and studying or a way of waking students up, but more important is the fact that moving while reading, listening etc is a good way of learning.

There is also a caveat, however. There is the danger of some students and classes reacting very negatively to any obviously game-like activities in class, let alone being asked to stand up and wave their arms around. Classes where you might want to introduce TPR-style activities late, with care or not at all include ones in which:

  • There have been complaints about the use of games, or the student profile makes such complaints likely
  • There have been complaints more generally and the students might be looking for something else to complain about
  • Trust between the teacher and students hasn’t been gained (e.g. because it is a new class) or lost (e.g. because of some questions the teacher wasn’t able to answer)
  • The mix of gender, age or status might make people particularly embarrassed
  • Something about the class, e.g. it being Business English or exam preparation, might make them expect a more serious approach
  • Activities where they move around such as miming have already been used quite a lot
  • There is a chance of people who are not in the class seeing the miming etc going on, e.g. through an office window

Approaches that still might allow you to use movement in such classes include:

  • Ask students to stay sitting down and move just their upper body or use only their fingers and hands (e.g. their first two fingers to represent someone walking)
  • Ask students to work in pairs or threes rather than standing up in front of the class
  • Choose the movement that will be made carefully so that there is nothing which will be particularly embarrassing
  • The first time that you use movement, make sure it is with a topic whose connection to using your body is very obvious, such as gestures in different countries or body language in job interviews
  • Justify the use of movement before or after the activity, e.g. by talking about different ways of learning vocabulary or by how difficult it is to come up with realistic uses of Present Continuous in face to face classroom communication
  • Use the other obvious ways of practising the language first, e.g. using defining vocabulary until people can guess the word and drawing games for vocabulary revision before miming is used to really get the ones they are still having problems remembering
  • Use movement for something that students are really struggling with, e.g. the difference between will and going to for predictions, and in a way that obviously helps
  • Have a long introduction where the teacher is the one moving, starting with easy actions but including ones which are a little silly etc so that students won’t be surprised if they have to do one of those things in their group later
  • Keep the stage with movement in short
  • Move quickly from moving to a much more serious point
  • Elicit the use of movement as a way of learning language from the students
  • Always think carefully about whether moving is actually the best way to present or practise the language

Having said all the above, I have used movement in IELTS classes (for trends language for Writing Part One), Technical English classes (for typical verbs in their work) etc without any justification given or complaints received, and would generally recommend to always keep the possibility of getting students to move in mind. As well as being fun and a good warmer, it is a good general approach to learning language that students might also be able to use outside class and is the best way of presenting and practising certain language points. I therefore won’t give a list of people who movement is suitable for – because if it’s done properly my starting position is that virtually all classes should move around sooner or later, and that most certainly includes shy students.

How to use movement in adult classes

There are five main approaches to the use of physical movement in adult EFL classes:

  • Students listening to (or occasionally reading) instructions and following them.
  • One person miming and others responding, e.g. by identifying what the mime represents.
  • Students speaking while doing actions.
  • Games where the movement is integral to the game but not linked the language.
  • Moving around between activities, e.g. changing groups.

Examples of each of these are given below.

1. Movements in response to instructions

Asking for directions is the most common use of this kind of activity, e.g. with one student explaining where to go on a map and another student tracing or drawing the route. With classes who need to or are happy to stretch their legs, it is also possible to give instructions for walking around the classroom in the same way. A variation which isn’t often thought of as being physical is Invisible Pen, in which two standing students take turns asking questions to “find” an imaginary pen that was “placed” somewhere in the classroom while they weren’t looking.

Another good use of this approach is for one student to explain how to do something, e.g. programme a video recorder, and for the other student to follow the instructions on the real object or a large photo. Both of these uses are also obviously good for imperatives (should that be a grammar point you actually need to spend time on).

Any of the games in Watching Mimes and Responding below could also be played with students following the instructions of how to move their body and then guessing what action they are doing rather than watching other people doing it.

2. Watching mimes and responding

This use is similar to the game Give Us a Clue, in which people watching try to guess movie titles etc from mimes. People generally just shout out what they think is being mimed, but it is also possible to respond to what they think is being mimed, e.g. “I think you are feeling disappointed. Are you okay?” and “When I said stop you were thinking. What were you thinking about?”

As long as the teacher chooses the things carefully so that they can actually be mimed, students can act out:

  • Common gestures in other countries
  • Gestures for particular situations, e.g. presentations
  • Words, e.g. some recent vocabulary from the textbook
  • Idioms, e.g. ones including body parts like “sticky fingers”
  • The language of trends
  • Phrases, e.g. functional language like “Can I have a cup of tea, please?” and “Thank you”
  • Whole sentences, e.g. with Present Continuous (“You are ironing”), Past Continuous (“When I said stop, you were ironing”), or Going to for future plans or predictions (“You are going to climb a mountain”)

3. Saying something and acting it out

The most common example of this is students getting up to act out a dialogue, and the same thing can be done using things such as pencils on their desks to represent people. You can also add more connection between the action and the language by giving them roleplay cards that involve more movement, e.g. “Your partner is in a fishing boat a few metres from the shore and wound up in fishing line. Tell him/ her how to get out of it” and “You have lost your voice. Stop someone in the street and get them to phone your husband/ wife to ask them to pick you up.”

The other way of adding more action (and the language that is tied in more with it) is to get students to read out some prose rather than a dialogue while they act things out, e.g. giving them cut outs of common fairytale characters and objects and ask them to move them around an A3 photocopy of an enchanted land while they make up or retell their stories.

4. Movement tied to the game rather than the language

The two most common examples of this are a Running Dictation and mingling games. In the former, one student runs (or more commonly walks quickly) to a text that their partner can’t see, walks back to their partner and dictates whatever they can remember of it, then goes back to read and remember in the same way. This continues until one pair has transferred the whole text successfully to their paper.

In a mingling game, students have to stand up and walk round to speak to most or all of the other students, e.g. to find something that they have done and no one else has with “Have you ever
?” questions.

5. Moving between activities

My general philosophy on changing groups is that the minimum movement is quickest and easiest, e.g. moving one person to the other end of the semi-circle of students and so changing pairs along the whole row. However, this can also be a good opportunity to get students to stretch their legs and so liven up their brains. Perhaps the easiest and most active (although usually also the most time consuming) is just to ask students to stand up, find someone they haven’t worked with, and sit down together somewhere. You can also organise this by giving students matching cards and asking them to stand up and find the other Student A etc.

EFL Lessons on Gardens and Gardening

30th December 2012 by Alex Case

What kinds of lessons you will want to do on the topic of gardens and gardening depends on your reasons for choosing this point, for example:

  • Students work in or are studying gardening or landscape architecture, or will do so in the future
  • It’s a hobby
  • It’s likely to be of interest due to the age and/or nationalities of the students
  • Students need to speak to someone who is interested in this topic, e.g. a host family or foreign boss, colleague or client

If the needs above make this desirable or necessary, actual gardening vocabulary that you can introduce includes:

  • Actions that gardeners do, e.g. “weed” and “water”
  • Actions that things in the garden do, e.g. “grow”
  • Adjectives for describing gardens, e.g. “overgrown” and “unkempt”
  • Other positive and negative words connected to gardens, e.g. “weed” and “ecologically friendly”
  • Plants, types of plants and parts of plants, e.g. “cactus”, “perennials” and “blossom”
  • Animals in the garden, e.g. “sparrow” and “slug”
  • Things connected to animals, e.g. “birdbath” and “pesticide”
  • Architectural features of gardens, e.g. “shed”
  • Things connected to water, e.g. “hose” and “pond”
  • Things for children, e.g. “swing”
  • Furniture, e.g. “bench” and “patio table”
  • Decorations/ornaments, e.g. “trellis”
  • Parts of gardens, e.g. “flowerbed”
  • Tools, e.g. “trowel”
  • Supplies, e.g. “fertiliser”
  • Differences between similar words, e.g. “weed” and “plant”
  • Compound nouns, e.g. “greenhouse”
  • Non-gardening uses of garden vocabulary, e.g. “(light) bulb” and “lawn (tennis)”
  • Proverbs and quotes on the topic of gardens or with garden vocabulary, e.g. “The grass is always greener on the other side”.

Alternatively, you can just give them one of the activities below, giving them language they need to do it in a “useful language” box or as they go along.

Classroom activities on the topic of gardens and gardening

Gardening inventions
You can find some descriptions and photos of interesting, clever and downright odd gardening inventions online, and there are several activities you can do with this topic. One is to get students to come up with their own improvements on garden tools etc and/or technological solutions to gardening problems. They then compare them with the real ones. Another is to get them to guess how an invention works and what is special about it from a photo and then read and check.

Gardening balloon debate
Give students a ridiculously limited number of gardening tools and supplies that they can have such as four, and ask them to agree which they will keep and to describe how they will keep their garden in order using just those things.

Gardening “A Team” style
Tell students they have to keep their garden in order without using any actual gardening tools and supplies and ask them to decide what other household objects and supplies they can use in their place, e.g. tea bags instead of fertiliser. Things they will need to think about include mowing the lawn, weeding and keeping control of garden pests.

Gardening suggestions
Students give gardening suggestions for particular kinds of people, e.g. students who love to party, a person who mainly wants a garden to relax, and old people who can’t kneel down to weed. They could also give suggestions for solutions to gardening problems such as slugs or too little sunshine.

Use the vocabulary to design a garden
Give students a list of garden vocabulary and tell them how many of those words (e.g. six) they must use to design and present their garden. After the presentations, students vote on other groups’ designs and/or give feedback on whether they think the vocabulary was used in the right way.

Gardening ranking tasks
Students could rank gardens from their descriptions or photos, rank features of gardens by which are the most important, rank good reasons for forcing yourself to garden, or rank a list of things in which gardening is one item (e.g. things which should be studied at school and things local governments should spend their money on).

Your neighbours’ gardens
Other people’s gardens are a surprisingly common cause of complaints about things like overhanging trees and rebuilt fences encroaching on their land. Students could give each other advice on what to do if they have those problems with their neighbours and/or try to negotiate an agreement with them.

Explain it
Ask students to try and think of explanations for aspects of gardens, e.g. why the Japanese use gravel. They can then read the real explanation(s) and check. They can also do something similar by trying to explain what gardening terms in their language that aren’t really possible to translate mean.

Topic-based lessons on gardens and gardening

Topics related to gardening which it should be possible to design lessons on include:

  • Bad taste in gardening
  • Eccentric gardens/The world’s strangest gardens/Gardens of artists
  • Ecological issues related to gardening, e.g. pesticides, use of peat, encouraging wildlife in gardens, feeding birds and squirrels, and hosepipe bans
  • Encouraging more fruit and vegetables in gardens for ecological and food security reasons
  • Gardening as therapy
  • Government policies related to gardening, e.g. stopping the “ash dieback” or the disappearance of sparrows and bees
  • Guerrilla gardening
  • Laws related to gardens, e.g. not being allowed to beat carpets and mow the lawn on certain days
  • Making gardening accessible to more people/poorer people
  • Predicting the future of gardens
  • The history of gardening, e.g. how innovations changed gardening or the influence of one person
  • The influence of gardening in their country on other places, e.g. Japanese gardens in the USA, and vice versa
  • Ways of increasing the amount of green in the city, e.g. forcing all new buildings to have a rooftop garden or having a best kept garden award

You can tackle several of those points at once with a list of discussion questions, which is a good activity with the topic of gardens more generally as long as the questions don’t assume knowledge about gardening that the students don’t have.