Shark Attack…what happened next?

I’ve done the Shark Attack activity recently with a couple of groups and they really enjoy the task – it’s an easy, enjoyable, controlled practice activity of the past continuous. However, I was doing a lesson today with past continuous and past simple and adapted the activity so learners would use both tenses.

The first part of the activity was the same: we brainstormed things to do at the beach and then I told them to draw the beach (I didn’t mention a shark) and then mingle to find out what their classmates were doing. Once we had mingled and done some feedback, I told them to draw the shark and to think about what happened next. There were some very inventive ideas:

Ana and Elena were swimming in the sea. When the shark attacked, they died.

Or alternatively,

Álvaro and Carlos were playing football. When the shark attacked, Álvaro jumped into the sea to save the girls and Carlos called the police.

And even…

Pepe was sitting under an umbrella. When the shark arrived, he saw Pepe and they fell in love and moved to another country.

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February 12

Cambridge YLE – Speaking Practice

I’m off to the Macmillan Teachers’ Day in Málaga on Saturday (very excited!) and one of the activities I’ll be presenting is a dice game for Starters, Movers and Flyers to practise typical questions from the speaking exam. The good thing about these games is that they’re appropriate for all learners – not just those preparing for Cambridge exams.

You can download them from the Activities for your Classroom page, listed as “Starters, Movers and Flyers dice games”.

It’s a simple enough game – learners roll two dice (or roll one twice!) and answer the question in that square. It’s worth reminding them before they start that they should answer with full sentences and that for “Tell me about…” squares they should say at least three sentences.

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February 12

Vocabulary Battleships

What do we do with emergent language?

At the end of every lesson, my teenagers write new vocab on slips of paper and put them into an envelope…but then I wanted to find ways of encouraging them to use and review the vocabulary. So, yesterday I played “Vocabulary Battleships” with my students. It’s easy to prepare, provides lots of communicative practice and is an engaging way to review vocabulary.

In preparation, you’ll need to provide two boards – A and B – with the vocabulary you want to focus on. You can use some of the same vocabulary on both boards or make them completely different. Then divide the class into As and Bs and instruct everyone to draw 6 ships on their board, keeping it a secret from their partner.

To play, A describes a word on B’s board, hoping there’s a battleship in that square; and vice versa. I’m going to try it with my adult C1 group in the future as well as they enjoy review activities and we have an abundance of new language coming out of each lesson.

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March 23

Shark Attack!

This is a fabulous activity for older Primary students, teens and adults which I picked up from Katherine Bilsborough’s session at the recent TESOL-SPAIN convention.

Firstly, ask students to draw the picture below – you could do this as a picture dictation, or project the picture and ask them to copy it. You can see me in the picture too (I’m eating an ice cream!).

Students also draw themselves in the picture and then do a mingle activity to add more detail to their picture. For lower levels, this could be, “What are you doing?” or for higher levels, “What were you doing when the shark attacked?” Students draw their classmates onto the picture and can then compare drawings, write a news report or report back to the class in whole group feedback.

This is a highly adaptable activity as by changing the original picture, you could use it for a variety of different topics and grammar points, e.g…

Students draw the playground and pictures of what they can do (What can you do? I can play tennis.)
Students draw a house and after the mingle activity, the teacher could say that someone was murdered in the living room, leading to modals of speculation (It can’t have been Tom – he was playing football in the garden.)
Students could draw an object in a classroom to practise prepositions (The ruler is under the chair.)
And many more…

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February 17

“Getting it right in the FCE Speaking Test” – Cathy Myers

And so to the final post – “But wait!” I hear you say, “There are four parts in the FCE Speaking exam!” That’s true, but we ran out of time in the session, so there are only three posts, I’m afraid!

The key point that Cathy made about the third part of the exam is that candidates are too quick to answer the second question which means that they don’t demonstrate the language expected. Candidates should be using language to put forward an opinion, agree, disagree, etc and they often jump to making a final decision. However, in this part of the exam, candidates don’t need to reach a final decision in order to pass – but they do need to demonstrate the language expected.

So, it is important when preparing students for this part to encourage them to respond and extend. A bad example of part 3:

A: I think we should buy him a watch because the one he’s got is really old.

B: No, I disagree. I think we should buy him a CD of his favourite group.

A: That’s a good idea. Or we could get him a photo album.

B: I don’t think so. We could get him…

And so on. In this part, students need to justify both their ideas and responses, making the conversation sound as natural as possible.

Final thoughts…

Remind students to show as much of what they know as possible!

Encourage them to use a wider variety of language (things could be fabulous, rather than good; or essential, rather than important) – careful with your collocations though!

Make sure students are familiar with the exam (great advice from my boss, Dani Jones) – although you don’t know exactly what language will come up in any part of the exam, you DO know exactly what the students need to do in each part so drill them constantly on the format (How many papers? What are they? What do you have to do in Paper 3, Part 2? How many questions are there? etc) I would also let your students know WHY you’re doing this as it can seem a bit patronising and get a bit annoying!