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About this site
Welcome to the EFL page of my website, which started as a place to share useful resources I found on the internet. I have since added some lesson ideas of my own, and many that others have shared with me either at St Giles College (where I teach) or via resource books and articles.
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Latest Ideas and Plans
Creating Lessons from Scratch
Speed Date Warm-Up»Suggested levels: strong pre-intermediate to advanced.
Aims: to learn and practise using interesting conversational gambits in English; to practise informal speaking; to practise turn-taking, etc., in English conversations; to create a strong class bond.
Materials: these questionnaires (one for each student); enough classroom space to make two circles of chairs.
Procedure:
Give out the speed-date questionnaire (see above).
Ask students [...]
An “Agony Aunt” letter lesson plan»Suggested levels: pre-intermediate to advanced.
Aims: to engage with the structure of informal English letters; to practise skim-reading and reading for detail; to practise writing informal letters; to compose drafts and scan for grammatical and vocabulary errors, and mistakes in register.
Materials: some “doctored” agony aunt letters (pre-intermediate examples are here, upper-intermediate examples are here and advanced [...]
Suggested level: advanced.
Aims: to engage with a classic of English literature; to practise writing and giving presentations; to experiment with different intonation patterns to evoke different emotions and convince an audience; to read for gist and detail.
Materials: these pictures of busts of Mark Antony, Julius Caesar and Brutus; these speeches from Julius Caesar; these [...]
Using Coursebooks Creatively
Games with Gapfills»Note: the ideas for most of these activities come from Jim Scrivener’s excellent Straightfoward Pre-Intermediate Teacher’s Book.
Suggested levels: elementary to advanced.
Aims: to enliven gapfill tasks in coursebooks.
The One-Minute Gap Fill
This can cause a few laughs from students. Present the gapfill in the usual way, but set a strict time limit of one minute for students [...]
Suggested levels: beginner to advanced.
Aims: to revise vocabulary and the spelling of newly-acquired words.
Materials: a word search grid on a familiar coursebook theme for each pair of students (a crime one is here); a blank word search grid (here).
Preparation: photocopies of the two grids.
This is a good vocabulary revision exercise, wherein students focus on word [...]
Note: This idea comes from Humanising Your Coursebook by Mario Rinvolucri (used with permission). I’ve found it to be a very useful way of practicing clear articulation, splitting sentences into meaningful chunks (“connected speech”), listening, writing, and various vocabulary, spelling and grammatical points.
Suggested levels: strong elementary to advanced.
Aims: to encourage attentive listening; to experiment with [...]