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Latest Ideas and Plans
Creating Lessons from Scratch
50 to 60 minute Newspaper Headlines lesson (intermediate)»Preparation: 3 overlong newspaper headlines of your own creation - one about a past event, one in the passive voice about a current event, and one about an expected future event - you will be boarding these, so there is no need to make photocopies for your students; enough copies for all your students of [...]
Phoneme Awareness: Advanced Levels»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 [...]
Dictionary-Based Reading Lesson»Note: This lesson was originally written with the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary in mind.
Suggested level: Advanced.
Dictionary worksheet (1) - using a dictionary (teacher’s notes)
This is an expanded version of a simpler worksheet published by CUP and available here:
http://www.cambridge.org/elt/dictionaries/worksheets/CALD3-Worksheets/CALD3_WS_01UsingADictionary.pdf
The aims of this lesson are:
- to raise students’ awareness of the variety of different meanings which may [...]
Using Coursebooks Creatively
Listening/Speaking: 4-Way Dictation» 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: this idea comes from Humanising Your Coursebook, by Mario Rinvolucri. It is used here with permission.
Preparation:
Make copies of a reading passage from the last unit covered in your coursebook. I find it useful to enlarge the copies to about 110%.
Instructions:
Text-Stripping
Give each student a copy of the reading passage.
Ask them to delete all the adjectives;
Ask [...]
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 [...]
