December 11

Good idea…but no

I’ve come to realise that this is a useful column to have on the board when eliciting vocab from students…especially when you want them to use the vocab in a follow-up activity.

In a recent lesson, which was going to be focussing on comparatives, I first asked students to tell me some different adjectives.  The majority came up with the usual (tall, fat, beautiful) and then a couple of the boys were coming out with some great words (with a little bit of correction/tweaking from me), such as dead, zombified.

However, as they were going to be making comparative sentences in the next stage, I didn’t think “deader” and “more zombified” were particularly correct (as a concept, not grammatically speaking) and so I didn’t want to include them on the vocabulary lists.  But it seemed a shame not to encourage students to bring new ideas into the classroom and so I started a “Good idea…but no” column on the board and titled it as such.

I was able to explain why we couldn’t use the words for the next activity, but students could still see their ideas on the board and so felt encouraged and motivated.

Tags:

Posted December 11, 2012 by Teresa Bestwick in category Vocabulary Activities

1 thoughts on “Good idea…but no

  1. Pingback: Encouraging creative vocabulary use in class | efl-resource.com

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*