May 28

A birthday present

This is another of the guided visualisations which I did at the InnovateELT conference a couple of weeks ago. It’s especially suitable for learners who are preparing for the Cambridge PET and works well in a group of six or more.

Here’s a rough script for the guided visualisation:

Imagine you’re going shopping. Are you in a shopping centre or the town centre?

What can you see around you? Is it busy or quiet?

What can you hear? Are there people talking? Can you hear music playing or the sounds of cars going by?

Imagine you’re going to buy a birthday present for a friend. Look around and choose which shop you’re going to go into.

Now you’re inside the shop. How does the space feel? Is it big or small? Is it crowded or empty?

Is there any music playing?

Does the shop have a particular smell?

Wander around and look at the different things you could buy your friend. Pick things up. Feel the texture. Feel the weight. Check the price.

Decide on the present you’re going to buy and when you’re ready, open your eyes and tell your partner about the present.

One thing I like about this task is that the guided visualisation takes the learners on a journey, but what we’re really interested in is the end product, so they don’t need to share the process of getting to the present, just the object they finally decided on.

As learners are sharing with their partner, use the time to monitor and collect errors or new language you’d like to share with the class. As the topic is very open, learners might have decied to buy clothes, furniture or decorative household items, plants, jewellery…so a wide variety of language can come up whilst they’re sharing.

Feedback as a group on the different items learners chose for their present. Then write a six or so of them on the board, along with the price of each. This then leads onto a PET-style discussion activity.

Say to the group:

You want to buy a birthday present for a friend. Talk together about the different things you could buy and then decide which would be best.

Learners work in pairs to do the task, whilst you monitor and collect errors.

Do some feedback on the task, asking pairs which present they chose and why.

 

 

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February 27

Spot the difference

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the FECEI conference in Madrid and held a workshop called Engaging Exam Exercises.  The first activity we practised was a picture description with a twist.  I started doing this activity in my class for two reasons:

  1. to give learners a reason to listen to their partner’s description, which is a great opportunity for them to pick up new lexis and structures from peers
  2. to provide a model in the early stages so that learners were able to describe a picture well for a minute, without becoming repetitive

Tell learners to close their eyes and describe a picture to them, but make some changes.  If you check out the slides in this post, see if you can spot the differences with the first picture.

I can see a girl who looks about 50. She’s wearing a black, long sleeved T-shirt and she’s got short, brown hair. She looks really happy and she’s holding a piece of paper that says, “4 intense weeks”. She’s in a building and I can see a plant behind her. There are also some pictures on the wall next to the plant and to the right there’s a big window. It’s daytime and it’s a really sunny day – you can see the sun coming in through the windows. I imagine she’s in a house and that she’s having a good time.

After you’ve modelled the task, put learners into pairs, A and B. A closes their eyes whilst B describes a picture; then A looks at the picture and tells B about the differences. In the next slide, you can see a model of the task with the sentence stems to help learners and on the third slide, instead of stems, there are the questions they should think about when describing the picture – giving them more autonomy and removing some of the scaffolding.

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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
February 24

More questions

So, I’ve been thinking a lot about questions recently and in my adolescent B1 group yesterday the grammar point was indirect questions.  The book we’re using this year, Gold Experience, is strong on controlled practice activities (which unfortunately aren’t particularly challenging for my group) but I find that the language the book covers, both grammatical and lexical, needs much more dynamic and personalised activities to make it enjoyable and memorable.

After presenting the grammar and doing a quick controlled practice, I gave the learners small pieces of paper like this:

They had to draw themselves on the top left and a classmate on the bottom right (there was also a space to put names in case the drawings weren’t clear!).  They had to think of a question to ask each person in the class – nothing too personal or rude, but something interesting that they would like to know.  There’s a wonderful vibe in this group so I wasn’t worried about them asking anything impolite or distasteful – but it’s worth laying out the ground rules just in case.

We then put all the papers in a pile on the table and then did a mingle: each person took a card and had to approach the person drawn on the bottom right and ask the question indirectly, then write their answer in the speech bubble.

Jaime, Nacho would like to know why you only come to class once a year.

Belén, Inma wants to know what your boyfriend’s name is.

They were really enjoying the mingle and the end of the lesson crept up on us, but the next logical stage will be to do a quick review of reported speech and feedback.

 

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)