Activating Passive Vocabulary

Vocabulary Games, Writing, , , , ,

One of the things that worries me most when teaching vocabulary is that students tend to store the newly acquired knowledge as passive vocabulary. Agreed that most of us have more passive  than active vocabulary, agreed  that we use a larger variety of words when we write than when we speak, but still I think that as teachers we need to go the extra mile and help our students see the importance of incorporating new vocabulary into their communicative tasks.

Designing activities to convert passive vocabulary into active vocabulary is one of the things that occupies most of my planning.

This is a very simple activity I have designed to” force” my students to use new vocabulary and connectors to express contrast.

Level : Intermediate and above

Aim:

  • To use newly acquired vocabulary
  • To improve students’ writing abilities by using connectors of contrast
  • To encourage collaborative writing

Step 1.  Selecting vocabulary.  Ask students to work in pairs. Explain that they’ll need to write on a clean sheet of paper ten words or expressions recently studied. (You can also be more specific here and tell them the unit or the pages of the book you want them to get the vocabulary from).

Step 2.  Explaining the task .Ask students now to pass their list of 1o words to the pair sitting behind them or next to them.

Tell students they are going to write a story in pairs. In this story they’ll need to use at least 7 of the words on their list and three out of the five connectors of contrast you are going to write on the board (see below an interactive flyer explaining Clauses of Contrast)

Give them the beginning of a story, for example “When Fiona entered the room, she couldn’t believe her eyes” or use a story starter generator here.

Step 3. Writing and editing. Encourage students to dedicate some time to planning their story. Set a time limit of 30 minutes, but I suggest not limiting the number of words in their stories to encourage fluency and boost their imagination.

Once they have written their draft (20 minutes), ask students to carefully edit their stories. Display the following checklist on the board  (click here to download it) or alternatively print it and give one to every student.

Give each pair a different coloured paper or if you have more stories than colours, use different pen colours or assign a number to every story.

Ask students to write their story and underline the targeted vocabulary and the connectors of contrast used.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Clauses of Contrast Flyer

Photo credit: Deb Stgo via Visual hunt / CC BY

Winner of the British Council Blog of the Month Award

General,

Dear readers,

I’m thrilled to share with you that I am the winner of this month’s British Council’s Teaching English blog award for my post Six Amazing Websites that Make Your Writing Stronger, which has received over 70,000 visits so far. Thank you very much!

When I was shortlisted this month, I was flattered my post was competing against posts from teachers I have been following for a long, long time (one of them, the widely admired Nik Peachy). I never thought I could win, but … here we are! As my father used to say: “Nothing worth having comes easy”.

I want to thank everybody who voted for Blog de Cristina and once again, allow me to dedicate this award to my students who are the reason Blog de Cristina exists and an endless source of inspiration.

 

I’m sure most of my readers know about this prestigious organisation but for those of my students, who have just started learning English, know that the British Council, funded by British government, can be considered UK’s international cultural body. It works in more than 100 countries worldwide and reaches 20 million people face to face and more than 652 million people online.

Want to read a bit more about the British Council? More information here and here  and you can also become a follower on facebook here

Error Correction in Writing: Grammar and Vocabulary Checklist

Writing, , , , ,

Do you think you can correct some of your own writing errors? Yes. You just need this checklist! 🙂

If you have read my last posts, you may have noticed that lately,  I’m kind of obsessed with writing.

  • I wrote about connectors of contrast here
  • I did a collaborative writing activity here
  • Students wrote about unusual traditions here
  • 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!

Download pdf here

checklist

Clauses of Contrast: Connectors and Online Practice

Vocabulary, Writing, Writing skill, , , , , ,

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.

 

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.