And here, I recommended some amazing websites to make your writing stronger
And you may think that enough is enough. Well, it is not. It might only be my impression, but I feel students are making the same writing mistakes over and over again. It seems to me that no matter how many times I correct their errors, they still make them.
So, I think I need a change of tactics and I have decided to surprise my students by asking them to correct their own errors. I firmly believe that most of their errors are silly mistakes they make just because they don’t pay enough attention.
The idea is
Set a writing activity to do as homework and to be handed in to be marked.
Set a deadline and on this day, when students have their neat and tidy essays ready to be handed in, give them the “grammar and vocabulary checklist” (the star in this post) and ask them to correct their own writings, using pencil, and the grammar and vocabulary checklist.
Allow 10 or 15 minutes for this step.
Tell students that their mark in their writing will be lower if you find any of the errors written on the checklist.
Collect the edited essays and take them home to correct. Unavoidable, sorry!
This is a small presentation I have made for my students using a new online tool smore.com, which is basically a tool for creating flyers. As it happens with most online tools originally designed for other purposes, it has a lot of potential for creating beautiful content for our classes. You can add text, pictures, audio, videos… etc , and you can also embed a link, which in the specific case of this presentation is a great help.
I hope you find this presentation on connectors of contrast useful. At the end of the flyer, you will be able to test your knowledge with some online exercises. Special attention requires the punctuation before or after these connectors.
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…?
lost you phone?
sent a message to the wrong person?
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.
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.
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.
If you have been following my blog for a while you probably know how much I like exploring new tools to spice up my lessons. We all know students prefer looking at a screen than at a book so, for this lesson I have decided to explore two new free online tools, which have a lot of potential for language teaching.
Perhaps you have never considered creating your own content because you think you aren’t tech-savvy and you don’t really know how to go about these modern things, but I can assure you that creating these two videos has been as easy as falling off a log.
In class, we are studying how to express preference with the structure would rather and (would)pefer and this is just the perfect excuse to “play” with these two little tools.
1. For a revision of the grammar for Would Rather and Prefer, I have used biteable.com. This is how this tool works:
Login for free.
Click “create a new video”.
Choose your scenes one by one and enter the text. You can choose between animation scenes, footage scenes and image scenes where you can upload your own pictures. Click + to add a new scene.
Choose the colours for your presentation and then the music track or upload your own.
Click Preview and the video will be sent to your email address once it’s created.
At this point, you can download it, share it on facebook and twitter, or post to youtube.
(presentation created with biteable)
2. For a speaking activity using Would Rather, I have used emaze.com. This is how this amazing free online tool works:
Log in for free.
You can create a new presentation form scratch or upload a power point presentation.
