Notes: This is adverb placement revision and practise. It is aimed at advanced levels, or upper-intermediate, and makes use of instinct in deciding what sounds good; I’ve found that it’s good to encourage students’ language awareness in this way.
Preparation: exercises 1 and 2 below, cut up and separated, and this "adverb placement" rulesheet - enough [...]
Note: this is my own idea. It comes from use of Adrian Underhill’s Sound Foundations phonetic chart and work with J Clifford Turner’s book, Voice and Speech in the Theatre, and is intended to encourage advanced level students to leave pedagogical aids behind to an extent and to personalise their engagement with English pronunciation.
Go through [...]
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.
Preparation: copies of a medium-length coursebook tapescript, cut into four sections of equal [...]
Note: I THINK this idea is my own; the seeds for this game come from Keep Talking by Friederike Klippel, and my own boredom with conventional "list" games (wherein students individually order a pre-defined list and then compare preferences, trying to agree a final order), which I believe are a little over-used in the EFL [...]
Note: I THINK this idea is one of my own - though, like most plans, it seems an amalgam of bits and pieces from forgotten places…
Materials: copies of the limerick below for each student; a whiteboard and pen.
Pre-lesson: prepare one copy of the following limerick for each student:
There was a young lady from Niger [...]
Note: I heard this idea from Tim McLeish via the smokers’ corner at St Giles London Central.
Materials: A whiteboard and a pen; 4 slips of paper.
Pre-Lesson: write four "conflict" situations, one on each slip of paper. Situations I have used include:
Lipstick on His Collar (a man comes home to his wife with [...]
