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 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 found a close relation to this activity in 700 Classroom Activities by David Seymour and Maria Popova (Oxford: Macmillan, 2005)
Preparation: A coursebook topic title; some questions. Lesson:
Ask the students to help you push any classroom tables back against the walls.
Group the students into two circles: an inner circle facing outwards, and an [...]
Note: this idea comes from Jackie Jays, courtesy of the smokers’ corner at St Giles London Central. It’s a really good one to use with new classes, or old classes with a new teacher.
Preparation: None.
Materials: whiteboard; enough whiteboard pens for each group of 3 to 4 students.
Procedure:
Tell your students that today they can ask [...]
