November 5

I’m not so keen on first-day shenanigans

So the start of term has come and gone and I wanted to share a lesson plan which I used with both my B1 and B2 classes to start the year.  I often find those first-day classes difficult to plan for – you don’t always know how many people will turn up, what will their level be like compared to the supposed level of the class and, in my case this year as I was teaching in a new centre, what the classroom environment will be like.  I also find that with younger learners, you can easily while away the hour on getting to know you activities and revision games; however, I think as soon as possible we should be getting into “work” and certainly adults are more interested in seeing what a real class will be like than spending too long on icebreakers.

The following lesson plan is suitable for B1 and B2 and involves a task aimed at learners preparing for the Trinity ISE exams, though paraphrasing is also a skill in the Cambridge exams.

Stage 1

Before the class, write the following on the board (adapted to yourself):

  • I’m good at being organised and getting up early.
  • I can’t stand text-speak.
  • I worry about not arriving on time.
  • This year, I’m really looking forward to going to Florida at Christmas.
  • In the future, I’d love to have my own language school.

Explain to the learners that of these five sentences about you, four are true and one is false.  Put them into pairs and give them some time to think of questions they could ask you about the sentences to discover which is false.  Monitor and help with question structures.

In WGFB, nominate learners to ask you questions and then invite learners to guess which is the false sentence.

Stage 2

Underline the structures in each sentence and ask learners to identify what comes next: infinitive (with or without to), verb+ing or a noun?  Identify which have more than one option.  Write the following phrases on the board and tell learners to identify what follows.

  • I enjoy…
  • I find it difficult to…
  • I’m keen on…
  • I’m obsessed with…
  • I prefer…
  • I like…
  • I expect…
  • I hope…
  • I miss…

Monitor and support learners during this stage.  In WGFB, you can also look at substitution, such as “I find it easy/fascinating/hard to…” or “I’m terrible/great/really bad at…”

Stage 3

As paraphrasing is an important skill for the Reading into Writing task in the ISE exams, I try to find a moment to practise it in every lesson.  There is also an element of paraphrasing in the Cambridge exams, though this is much more structured.

Tell learners to re-write the sentences below using the phrases above (including your original five statements), without changing the meaning of the sentence.

  • I hate winter.
  • I would rather travel by car than by train.
  • I find documentaries about nature very interesting.
  • I’m excited because I’ve got fun plans for the weekend.
  • Finding my way around new places is easy for me.

Learners can compare their sentences and also discuss if these statements are true for them.

Stage 4

Learners can now personalise the original task by writing five statements about themselves, four of which are true.

The original lesson plan

September 17

Views from the Smartboard

Quite a few years ago, I had a change of environment and started working in a state school which had blackboards – prompting me to suggest a new title for the blog.  Well, it’s happened again…but now I’m faced with a scarily expensive smartboard!  Annoyingly, there is also a whiteboard in the room…at the other end of it and whilst I love using the whiteboard, I feel it’s a little inconsistent to ask my class to turn their chairs/desks around every other day.

So, at the moment I’m going PowerPoint-crazy, prepping my lessons like the billy-o.  However, I will ask someone at the centre to help me out with using the smartboard as a board, rather than just projecting everything.

Another area of excitement with this new environment is that I have been given the highest level group…which means I have a range of levels from pre-B1 to post-B2, with some who have even prepared for a C1 exam.  I’m going to look into how I can effectively differentiate in the classroom, bearing in mind that the centre is materials-light (so no wonderful photocopying of various level reading texts) and also has a no-phones policy (so no wonderful differentiated listening tasks on BYOD).  It’s a new adventure!

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.

 

January 31

Writing reports

In all honesty, this is a post of procrastination as I’m currently writing reports for my learners and have hit a bit of a wall.  Coffee is next on the list of things-to-do-in-the-meantime.

Report writing is, and should be, a long process.  Though we often reflect on individual learners during the academic year, the process of putting those thoughts onto paper can be tough.  It’s easier to write about some individuals than others, it’s easier to fit in everything you want to say for some more than others, it’s easier to give specific advice to some more than others and it’s easier to identify some individuals more than others.

By “identify”, I don’t mean knowing who’s who – though I did have a startling, and hopefully somewhat exaggerated, conversation with a teacher from another school on the topic – but rather reflect on that individuals’ strengths and weaknesses and bring that together to produce a meaningful, useful report. Some learners don’t stand out as being particularly strong or weak in any area and we run the risk of sending home a banal report with phrases such as “you’re doing well” or “good work this term”, without offering any honest reflection on that individual’s abilities or meaningful advice on how to improve.

Though it’s a pain-in-the-behind when you’re sitting in on a Sunday wading through reports (partly through a lack of organisation hence not getting them done earlier in the week), it really is worth the effort to write a personalised, heartfelt report.

October 19

Adapting the classics to lower levels

I started a new class yesterday – an A2 group, many of whom studied English many years ago at school or in the government-run language school.  I wanted to do some kind of a mingle as a getting-to-know-you activity and thought about doing a ‘Find someone who…’ activity.  However, when I was thinking about the actual development of the activity, I felt the mingle stage would be too heavily preluded by a stage on adapting the statements to questions and question formation, which led to doubts about whether we would get bogged down by different tenses and the use of auxiliaries and modals.  I was trying to think of a way in which I could adapt the activity so that learners would still get the communicative element of questioning different classmates, without the heavy grammatical focus beforehand.

In the end, I opted for the following stages:
1. Prior to the lesson, print a number of cards with questions on
2. Give each learner four cards and tell them to write their answer, but not their name
3. Whilst they’re doing this, monitor to check everyone’s on task and help with any queries and at the same time, write up some difficult-to-pronounce lexis on the board (for my lesson this included usually, favourite, child/children and husband)
4. Take in their slips of paper and work through the lexis on the board – this was also an opportunity to check their knowledge, e.g. which other adverbs of frequency did they know
5. Give instructions for the next stage: learners will be given four cards and must find who each card belongs to. When they find the match, they should ask a follow-up question
6. After shuffling the cards, give each learner four cards, making sure they don’t have their own
7. Learners mingle – at this point you can either be involved if you’ve written on cards yourself or simply monitor
8. As a feedback activity, ask each learner to make a sentence about a classmate. You can also ask further follow-up questions
9. Do any error correction work which you picked up on during the activity or in feedback

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