February 15

Engaging Exam Exercises

Here are the slides from the talk I gave at the FECEI annual conference, held in Madrid last weekend. If there are any questions about any of the activities, leave a message in the comments below or feel free to email me.

Engaging Exam Exercises from verybouncyperson
***UPDATED***
Thanks to the wonderful Sandy Millin for reminding me that I was going to post links to the activities from the slides:
Spot the difference
Ask the Experts
Phrasal Verb Jeopardy
Dice Games – these can be downloaded from my Activities page
Word formation 4-in-a-row
You can find an explanation of SPRE in this blogpost  and there’s a bit about using guided visualisations in this blogpost. The idea of the final activity was to helo learners with creative writing – by doing a guided visualisation and using the SPRE format for story-writing, we can help our learners become more effective writers, especially when they’re trying to do so in the pressure of an exam
October 5

Fortnightly Focus #3 – Routines for older learners and higher levels

Before I get into the previous fortnight’s focus, here’s my focus for the next two weeks.  I’m struggling a little with a loud group of six-year-olds so I’m going to look into ways that I can control their energy levels a little better without simply resorting to more heads-down activities.

So, routines for higher levels and older learners.  Well, to be honest, I haven’t had many classes with my adult learners as yet as with one group we did start-of-the-year evaluations (this blogpost is partly a moment of procrastination as I don’t want to get back to marking their written tasks yet!) and another group only started on Tuesday so we’ve only had a couple of lessons.  However, I have put some routines in place with my PET group which I’ll adapt for the older learners too.

Weekly video – this is an activity which I successfuly used last year with my B2 adults and it’s working well so far with my B1 teens this year.  Each Thursday, one of the learners brings a YouTube video for the class to watch and prepares three comprehension questions about it.  The thing I like about this activity is that it allows the learners to share videos which interest them and can spark a lot of conversation as well

Quizlet – my colleague, Amy, introduced me to Quizlet last year and so this year I’ve started using it with the teens group.  I like the Scatter game, in which two teams compete to see who can match the vocab to the definitions more quickly

New vocab wall – I only introduced this to the B1 group yesterday, but with the promise of chocolate for participating, they seemed quite keen!  I stuck up a big piece of card to the board and made it look like a brickwall.  Learners can add new words or phrases to the wall (kind of graffiti-ing it)

Also, as I have two Cambridge preparation groups (B1 and B2), I want to work on the speaking exam more frequently, particularly the picture description and interactive tasks as I feel these are the two tasks which candidates struggle most with, but which they can easily do well in with a little training

And, speaking of exam preparation, I also have an ISE II group and with them I’d like to focus on using the different grammatical structures confidently when asking and answering questions, as one of the key points which has been raised in previous exam feedback is that candidates were often more than capable of showing understanding of different structures, but struggled more to produce them (either through a lack of accuracy or through offering more natural responses to the examiner’s questions)

April 8

FCE Practice with EDpuzzle

We’re starting to look into blended learning at Active Language and whilst chatting about it the other day, I remembered a colleague, John, mentioning EDpuzzle.  This site allows you to add questions and comments to YouTube videos (and perhaps does other things though I haven’t explored it fully yet!).  Here’s my first attempt at using it – unfortunately you do need to sign up to use it, although you can log in with your Google account.  In fact, part of the reason for embedding it here was to see if it could be accessed by the class without needing to create an account – I don’t like obliging people to sign up to things.

 

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February 14

A Bad Day – Third Conditional

I was doing third conditional with my FCE group this week and it lends itself very well to terrible things which have happened, so I adapted this activity from Lucia Walliams on one stop english and included a bit of FCE-style use of English practice.  You can download the text here – it contains Lucia’s original true or false statements, after which I asked learners what problems Emma had had, such as forgot to set the alarm and a truck splashed her.  They then worked in pairs to create third conditional sentences about her day, e.g. If she hadn’t forgotten to set her alarm, she would have woken up on time, as Lucia suggests in the original plan.

November 8

Procrastination

It took me a (little) while to sit down to write this post.  It seemed like the perfect time for a gin and tonic and when I went in to ask my partner if he fancied one as well, I realised I needed to get the washing in.  On doing that, a couple of plants on the terrace needed watering.  Then I put the washing away and when I put the basket and pegs back, I took the opportunity to sort out the recycling at the same time.  Then, as I was hanging up the towels, I saw a couple of bits and bobs which needed to go back to their homes.  So then I got my G&T, sat down in front of the computer and noticed I had a couple of notifications on facebook and twitter so I quickly checked them out and now I’m ready to write.

Hang on, a couple of swigs of G&T and I’ll crack on…

The word “procrastination” came up in my FCE preparation class earlier this week. It’s such a fantastic word and I don’t think it has a simple translation into Spanish (one member of the class was adamant that procrastinación exists, but the others looked at her with blank faces!  She said the word dilación as well, which wordreference lists as a translation of procrastination, but I don’t think it encompasses the same idea).  We were talking about the term briefly in the lesson, and at the end of class that same learner asked if we could read a text on the topic during the next lesson.  I had planned to have something prepped by the next lesson, but (typically) when I sat at my computer to search for an article on procrastination, things kept cropping up!

However, you can now download “procrastination article” and I can cross it off my to-do list as I’ve found and adapted an article from Mind Tools into which I’ve slipped some joyous Use of English activities.

 

Now, on with that gin and tonic.

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