March 16

English Attack

I’ve been raving about this site since I got back from Madrid!  English Attack is a fun, motivating resource to get your students using English outside the classroom.  Students can watch music videos and clips from films, documentaries and TV series whilst learning new vocabulary and practising their listening skills.

English Attack

After being introduced to some key vocabulary, students watch the clip and then answer some questions to check their understanding of the clip.  There are a series of activities to practise the key vocabulary and students can watch the clip as many times as they like and also check out the transcript of the clip.

Although aimed more at the teenage market, it’s a great resource for adults too.  Well worth checking it out!

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December 9

Rhyming Old Wives’ Tales

I’m going to try something with my FCE group tonight..it might work, it might not – I’ll let you know how it goes!

I have some typical British sayings which I’m sure most of you are familiar with.  I’m going to take out the rhyming words and the first activity is to match them back up.

British sayings

Then, I’ll give the students the sayings with the words missing and they have to complete them.

A cheerful ………………… is the joy of ………………….

A hedge …………………… keeps friendship ………………

Advice when most ………………….. is less ……………………..

What soberness ………………………….., drunkeness ………………………

He that would the daughter ………………….., must with the mother first ………………….

Birds of a ……………….. flock ……………………

An apple a …………….. keeps the doctor …………………

Early to bed and early to ……………….. makes a man healthy, wealthy and ………………..

And finally, they can discuss what they think each saying means and decide on how far it is true.

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October 6

Wordy Wednesday #11

I was having quite an interesting chat with my Upper-Intermediate adult group the other day about what they can hope to achieve in English.  We were talking about fluency and bilingualism, and one of them asked if I thought that bilingual education would produce bilingual students.

What do you think?  If a child attends a mono-cultural, bilingual school, will they become bilingual?

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August 9

The writing’s on the wall

If you’re looking for some inspiration for the new school year, check out this post by Edna called 10 ways to think about your learning space.  It’s poses some interesting questions about how you want your students to work and how you can inspire them to learn more.

Edna suggests having a “Wonder Wall” – a place where students can write questions which will inspire others to think.  This reminds me of my classroom a few years ago, in which I had a grafitti wall.  It was just a huge piece of paper which I coloured to look like a brick wall where students could grafitti their favourite words and phrases in English.  It was great: we had song lyrics, quotes from The Simpsons and even “Ibble, obble, black bobble; Ibble, obble, out.”

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May 17

It’s Shakespeare, dawg.

I discovered a new website thanks to a tweet the other day and although it’s not particularly useful for EFL classes, I just wanted to share it with you.  There’s a educational “movement” in the USA called Flocabulary and they are trying to motivate students to learn by teaching through hip-hop and rap.  It sounds like a great idea and I would love to see the results.

Here’s one of their videos which you can check out free on YouTube.

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