Monthly Archives: February 2016

Phones and Music: a Superb Combination

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Music, , , , , , , ,

Funny thing! Every single year, no matter the level I’m teaching one of my lessons is  dedicated, without fail, to mobile phones.

This year, in November, I published a lesson for my B2 (upper-intermediate) students (lesson here) and now, it seems to be the turn of my B1 (intermediate) students.

This year my lessons about this topic seem to revolve around Adele’s hit “Hello”. Hey! What else did you expect? It’s not like every single year we have a song with
so many scenes where the leading actor is the mighty mobile phone. We certainly need to take advantage of this. Besides, I love Adele.

The lesson

This lesson is  aimed at students with a language level of B1 and focuses on discussing, reading and writing about mobile phones.There is also some general phone vocabulary and a song.

 

Warm-up: Speaking. Ask students as a whole class some of these questions.

  • What do you use your mobile phone for?
  • Have you ever lost your mobile phone?
  • How many text messages do you send every day?
  • Would you say you’re addicted to your mobile or the Internet?
  • Have you ever…?
  1. lost you phone?
  2. sent a message to the wrong person?
  3.  forgotten to turn your phone off/set to silent or vibrate mode (with embarrassing                      consequences)?

Teaching Vocabulary. You might want to show the slides twice to consolidate vocabulary. I would suggest doing it a third time at the end of the lesson.

Conjunto de Fichas creado con GoConqr por cristina.cabal

The song.
Warm-up. Students are going to listen to a song, so it may be a good idea to get them into the right mood by introducing the activity in a lively way.
Don’t tell students just yet we are going to listen to a song. After revising the vocabulary from the previous exercise, make a long pause until you have all the students staring at you, and say “hello”; I assume everybody should say “hello”. Pause again. Say “Adele”. I bet half the class would add “It’s me”. There you are! The perfect introduction!
(you might want to remind students that to introduce yourself over the phone “ It’s “ or “this is” are used ie. It’s Adele (speaking)/ this is Adele (speaking))

Task 1. Give students a list of words or expressions from the song. Give them some time to read them. If necessary, review how to pronounce the most difficult words. Depending on your class, you might want to keep the words in the order they are going to hear them or if you want a bigger challenge you can shuffle them and/or add some words that are not in the lyrics. Play the song and ask students to cross off the words as they hear them. Play the song once or twice depending on how challenging you want  the activity to be.
Handout here

 

Task 2.  Give students a photocopy with the lyrics of the song and ask them to sing/read along focusing on pronunciation.

Handout here

Reading and writing. Ask students to read online “7 strange stories of lost cell phones”  from the website mentalfloss.com and write a similar short story about something strange, funny or unusual that happened to them using their mobile phones.

Word of the Day: Bring Up and Educate

Word of the Day,

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?

These two words can be a bit confusing for some learners as in some languages the translation is the same, for example in Spanish.

  • BRING UP is used for the moral and social training that children receive at home. The noun is upbringing.
  • EDUCATE is used for the intellectual and cultural training people get at school and university. The noun is education.

EXAMPLES

I was brought up by my grandmother.

She was brought up as a Catholic

Her strict upbringing shaped her whole life

My mother was educated at a private school

His lack of education prevented him from getting a good job.

NOTE: Don’t confuse being educated with having good manners. 

Ex from WikiHow

If you want to have good manners, then you have to master dining etiquette, phone etiquette, as well as to learn basic etiquette, which includes being polite and holding doors for people.

 

6 Excellent Free Sites to Practise Reading Comprehension

Reading,

It’s been too long since I’ve written about improving reading skills. Last time I posted about sites to help you practise reading comprehension was in May last year. Way too long. The truth is that doing reading comprehension activities in class takes time, especially if we are talking about long texts with an amount of difficulty, and very often this is one of the tasks we give students as homework.

On the other hand, I am one of those teachers who think reading aloud in class is a good exercise. In my opinion,

  • Reading aloud fluently not only helps to improve the reading ability, but also oral expression.
  • It gives students a chance to focus only on fluency, pronunciation and intonation as they don’t need to worry about grammatical accuracy.
  • It gives teachers a nice opportunity to correct pronunciation mistakes.
  • It helps students enhance comprehension as pauses should be made in the correct places.
  • Reading aloud is especially good for students who don’t feel very confident speaking English in public. It gives them a nice chance to use English in a safe environment and helps them gain confidence.

These are some of the sites I’ve been recommending my students to further practise reading comprehension.They are all completely free.

1. Newsela. Have you already tried Newsela? It’s a really good site to help students become stronger readers while reading current event articles.

I teach different levels, and what I like most about Newsela is that you can give the same news article to all your classes no matter the level. Why? Newsela offers five different levels of the same news item. You just need to choose the levelled version you want to use.

The site also offers a multiple choice exercise to test your comprehension of the article.

Although you have to sign up, the site is free. As a teacher, you can assign articles to students in your classes and monitor their progress. Find out how to do it here .

2. Dreamreader is a free website with more than 500 reading lessons. Every lesson comes with free audio, a free printable worksheet and a free multiple choice quiz.

The site offers 5 categories, but the most interesting ones to help enhance your reading comprehension ability are “Fun English” and “Academic  English”. This last category is full of lessons and quiz questions for beginner, low intermediate, intermediate, upper intermediate and advanced students.

3. GCF LearnFree.This is a fantastic site to improve your reading skills. There is a wide variety of topics displayed at the top of the page. Choose the topic you want to read about and then at the bottom, select the kind of exercise you want to do. If you want to practise reading comprehension, select “Text” and then from the two options offered, choose “Reading Comprehension”.

The site is very visual and user- friendly and I highly recommend exploring all its possibilities.

4. Easy reading. 

This is a section of the British Council especially aimed at teens though I have often used it with adults with great success, too. Here, you can read stories and articles written at three different levels A2 (elementary), B1 (intermediate) and B2 (upper-intermediate).

After the reading test, you can do an online interactive multiple choice exercise to test your comprehension and a grammar exercise based on the text. The site also gives you the possibility of downloading the text and the activities.

5. Literacynet. Aimed at adults with an advanced level of English, it offers texts on a variety of subjects.

Select a topic and the piece of news you want to read. Click on “Story” and then from the menu on the left, choose the activity you want to do. There are five comprehension activities.

6. Teaching Kids News is a very interesting site that offers original news articles on topics that are “timely, relevant and intriguing”. Though it doesn’t offer the standard type of comprehension exercises you normally find in English exams, each article includes Writing/Discussion Prompts, Grammar Features, and a Reading Prompt.

Hope you find these sites useful!

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Tourism: Developing Writing Skills through Collaborative Writing

Lesson Plan: Advanced, Writing, , , , , , , ,

It is true that I don’t dedicate enough time to writing activities. I ask my students to do small writing tasks but not the real thing, at least not as often as they would probably need. Would it be a plausible excuse to say that I have 148 students and that it takes an awful lot of time, time I don’t have, to correct their essays? No, I know. I need to make amends, and I have started this week.

Haven’t you always dreamed of travelling to exotic off the beaten track destinations? Well, this activity is all about it! I guarantee you’ll not only enjoy writing and presenting your chosen destination, but you’ll also love hearing what your classmates have to say!

This lesson plan, which aims at developing writing skills through collaborative writing, is based on the theme of tourism and travelling.

Topic: Tourism

Level: Upper Intermediate and above

Time:  About 2 teaching sessions

Aims

  • To consolidate and extend understanding of vocabulary associated with tourism and travelling
  • To develop writing skills through collaborative writing
  • To give a presentation in front of an audience

Materials: suggested destinations here

THE TASK

Setting the context. You own a travel company and offer luxury holidays. Business has been bad the last couple of years due to the crisis and you have decided to lower the price of one of your most successful package tours, which happens to be a three-day trip to… (chosen destination)

You and your team have decided to attend the international tourism trade fair in London and try to sell your trip there.

You’ll need to explain the following to the potential customers:

  1. Brief description of the tour
  2. Transport to the chosen destination and once there
  3. Accommodation (options available) and meals included in the price (any extras?)
  4. Brief description of the three-day tour itinerary (sightseeing/ things to do…etc)
  5. Why customers should book with your agency

Display on the walls of the class posters of different package tours. Ask students to stand up and stand next to the tour they would like to take. There should be about 4 students per tour. Suggested  destinations pdf  here.

Writing. Students sit in groups now. Assign the following writing task to the group:

Student 1-

  • Brief description of the tour
  • Why the customer should book with your agency

Student 2 –

  • Transport to the chosen destination and once there
  • Accommodation (options available) and meals included in the price (any extras?)

Students 3 and 4 –

  • Brief description of the three-day tour itinerary (sightseeing/ things to do…etc)

Walk around the class offering help and guidance.

Presenting. Ask students to imagine they are at the International tourism trade fair in London and that they are going to try to sell their trip to their potential customers (the students in the class). Ask all the students in a group to come to the front of the class and read their part enthusiastically.

Buying. Ask students in the class to vote for the best trip.

(below, students trying to sell their trip)

Below, a nice presentation of Nepal created by Noelia Espinosa, Isabel Pardo, Yolanda Alonso and Silvia García. And here’s a link to the beautiful website created by Sharon Calderón as support for her presentation.  Thank you girls!

 

Photo by Kerry Lee Smith