| Grammar: | Present and past simple-active and passive |
| Level: | Elementary to intermediate |
| Time: | 20-30 minutes |
| Materials: | None |
In class
1. Ask people to brainstorm all the things they can think of that give off light
2. Choose one of this yourself and become the thing chosen. Describe yourself in around five to six sentences, e.g.:
I am a candle
I start very big and end up as nothig
My head is lit and I produce a flame
I burn down slowly
In some countries I am put on Christmas tree
I am old-fashioned and very fashionable
3. Ask a couple of other students to choose other light sourses and do the same as you have just done. Help them with language. It could be ‘I am a light bulb-I was invented by Edison.’
4. Group the students in sixes. Give them a new category. Ask them to work silently, writing four or six forst-person sentences in role. Go round and help especially with the formation of the present simple passive (when this help is needed).
5. In their groups the students read out their sentences.
6. Ask each group to choose their six interesting sentences and then read out to the whole group.
Variation
The exercise is sometimes more excitingif done with fairly abstract sets, e.g. numbers between 50 and 149, musical notes, distances, weights. The abstract nature of the set makes people concretise interestingly, e.g.:
I am a kilometre.
My son is a metre and my baby is centimetre.
On the motorway I am driven in 30 seconds. (120 kms. per hour)
We have also used these sets: types of stone/countries/items of clothing (e.g.socks, skirts, jackets/times of day/smells/family roles (e.g.son, mother etc.)/types of weather.
Rationale
The sentences students produce in this exercise are nor repeat runs of things they have already thought and said in mother tongue. New standpoints, new thoughts, new language. The English is fresh because the thought is.
Listening to people
No backshift
| Grammar: | Reported speech after past reporting verb |
| Level: | Elementary to lower intermediate |
| Time: | 15-20 minutes |
| Material: | None |
In class
1. Pair the students. Ask one person in each pair to prepare to speak for two minutes about a pleasurable future event. Give them a minute to prepare.
2. Ask the listener in each pair to prepare to give their whole attention to the speaker. They are not to take notes. Ask the speaker in each pair to get going. You time two minutes.
3. Pair the pairs. The two listeners now report on what they heard using this kind of form:
She was telling me she’s going to Thailand for her holiday and she added that she’ll be going by plane.
The speakers have the right to fill in things the listeners have left out but only after the listeners have finished speaking.
4. The students go back into their original pairs and repeat the above but this time with the other one as speaker, so everybody has been able to share their future event thoughts.
Incomparable
| Grammar: | Comparative structures |
| Level: | Elementary |
| Time: | 15-20 minutes |
| Materials: | None |
In class
1. Tell the students a bit about yourself by comparing yourself to some people you know:
I’ m more … than my husband.
I’ m not as…as my eldest boy.
I reckon my uncle is … than me
Write six or seven of these sentences up on the board as a grammar pattern input.
2. Tell the students to work in threes. Two of the three listen very closely while the third compares herself to people she knows. The speakers speak without interruption for 90 seconds and you time them.
3. The two listeners in each group feedback to the speaker exactly what they had heard. If they miss things the speaker will want to prompt them.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 so that everybody in the group has had a go at producing a comparative self-portrait.
One question behind
| Grammar: | Assorted interrogative forms | ||
| Beginner to intermediate | ||
| Time: | 5-10 minutes | ||
| Materials: | One question set for each pair of students |
In class
1. Demonstrate the exercise to your students. Get one of them to ask you the question of a set. You answer ‘Mmmm’, with closed lips. The student asks you the second question – you give the answer that would have been right for the first question. The student asks the third question and you reply with the answer to the second question, and so on. The wrong combination of question and answer can be quite funny.
2. Pair the students and give each pair a question set. One student fires the questions and the other gives delayed-by-one replies. The activity is competitive. The first pair to finish a question set is the winner.
Question set A
Where do you sleep? (the other says nothing)
Where do you eat? (the other answers the first question)
Where do you go swimming?
Where do you wash your clothes?
Where do you read?
Where do you cook?
Where do you listen to music?
Where do you get angry?
Where do you do your shopping?
Where do you sometimes drive to?
Question set B
What do you eat your soup with?
What do you cut your meat with?
What do you write on?
What do you wipe your mouth with?
What do you blow your nose with?
What do you brush your hair with?
What do you sleep on?
What do you write with?
What do you wear in bed?
What do you wear in restaurant?
Question set C
Can you tell me something you ate last week?
Tell me something you saw last week?
Is there something you have come to appreciate recently?
What about something you really want to do next week?
Where have you spent most of this last week?
Where would you have you liked to spend this last week?
Where are you thinking of going on holiday?
Which is the best holiday place you have ever been to?
Variation 1
Have students devise their own sets of questions to then be used as above.
Variation 2
Group the students in fours: one acts as a ‘time-keeper’, one as a ‘question master’ and person 3 and 4 are the ‘players’.
The ‘question master’ fires five rapid questions at player A which she has to answer falsely. The ‘time-keeper’ notes the time questioning takes. The ‘question master’ fires five similar questions at B, who answers truthfully. The quickest answerer wins. (The problem lies in choosing the right wrong answer fast enough.)
Possible questions:
How old are you?
Where do you live?
Which color do you like best?
What time is it?
How did you get here?
What time did you get up today?
What did you have for breakfast?
Where does your best friend live?
What sort of music do you dislike?
How many brothers and sisters do you have?
Movement and grammar
Sit down then
| Grammar: | Who + simple past interrogative/Telling the time |
| Level: | Beginner to elementary |
| Time: | 10-20 minutes |
| Materials: | None |
In class
1. Ask everybody to stand up. Tell them you’re going to shout out bedtimes. When they hear the time they went to bed yesterday, they shout ‘I did’ and sit down. You start like this:
| Who went to bed at two a.m.? | Who went to bed at quarter to two? |
| Who went to bed at ten to two? | Who went to bed at half past one? |
2. Continue until all the students have sat down.
3. Get people back on their feet. Ask one of the better students to come out and run the same exercise but this time about when people got up, e.g.
Who woke up at four thirty this morning?
Who woke up at twenty to five?
4. Repeat with a new question master but asking about shopping, e.g.:
Who went shopping yesterday?
Who went shopping on…( day of the week)
Only if
| Grammar: | Polite requests, -ing participle Only if + target verb structure of your choice | ||
| Level: | Elementary + | ||
| 15-20 minutes | ||
| Materials: | None |
In class
1. Make or find as much space in your room as possible and ask the class to stand at one end of it.
2. Explain that their end is one river bank and the opposite end of the room is the other bank. Between is the ‘golden river’ and you’re the ‘keeper’ of the golden river. Before crossing the river the students have to say the following sentence:
Can we cross your golden river sitting on your golden boat?
3. They need to be able to say this sentence reasonably fluently.
4. Get the students to say the sentence. You answer:
Only if you’re wearing…
Only if you’ve got…
Only if you’ve got … on you
5. Supposing you say ‘Only if you’re wearing trousers’. All the students who wear trousers can ‘boat’ across the river without hindrance. The others have to try to sneak across without being tagged by you. The first person who is tagged, changes places with you and becomes ‘it’ (the keeper who tags the others in the next round).
6. Continue with students saying ‘Can we cross your golden river, sitting on your golden boat?’ ‘It’ might say, ‘Only if you’re wearing ear-rings.’ etc.
Variation 1
To make this game more lively, instead of having just one keeper, everyone is tagged becomes keeper. Repeat until everyone has been tagged.
Meaning and translation
Two-word verbs
| Grammar: | Compound verbs |
| Level: | Upper intermediate to advanced |
| Time: | 40-50 minutes |
| Materials: | One Mixed-up verb sheet per pair of students. The Jumbled sentences on a large separate piece of card |
In class
1. Pair the students and ask them to match the verbs on the mixed-up verb sheet you give them. Tell them to use dictionaries and to call you over. Be everywhere at once.
| Mixed-up verb sheet | |
| Please match words from column 1 with words from column 2to form correct compound verbs. | |
| Column 1 | Column 2 |
| back- | dry |
| cross- | soap |
| ghost- | treat |
| soft- | write |
| blow- | reference |
| double- | cross |
| ill- | dry |
| spin- | comb |
| cold- | manage |
| double- | feed |
| pooh- | read |
| spoon- | pooh |
| court- | glaze |
| dry- | clean |
| proof- | shoulder |
| stage- | martial |
| frog- | march |
| wrong- | record |
| toilet- | foot |
| tape- | train |
| short- | change |
| rubber- | feed |
| force- | stamp |
| field- | test |
| cross- | question |
| cross- | examine |
| cross- | check |
Key to first group of verbs:
To back-comb/to cross-reference/to ghost-write/to soft-soap/to blow-dry/to double-cross/to ill-treat/to spin-dry
Key to the second group of verbs:
To cold-shoulder/to double-glaze/to pooh-pooh/to spoon-feed/to court-martial/to dry-clean/to proof-read/to stage-manage
Key to third group of verbs
To frog-match/to wrong-foot/to toilet-train/to tape-record/to short-change/to rubber-stamp/to force-feed/to field-test/to cross-question/to cross-examine/to cross-check
2. Ask them to take a clean sheet of paper and a pen or pencil suitable for drawing. Tell them you’re going to give them a few phrases to illustrate. They’re to draw a situation that brings out the meaning of the phrases. Here are the phrases – do not give them more than 30 seconds per drawing (they will groan):
To toilet-train a child
To soft-soap a superior
To force-feed an anorexic
To court-martial a soldier
To back-comb a person’s hair
To cross-examine a witness
To spin-dry your clothes
To cold-shoulder a friend
3. Give them time to compare their drawings. The drawings often make misunderstanding manifest.
4. Split the class into teams of four. Tell them you’re going to show them Jumbled sentences (see below) and their task will be to shout out the unjumbled sentence. The first team to shout out a correct sentence gets a point.
Jumbled sentences
Will still can you and it it dry retain its spin shape
You can spin-dry it and it will still retain its shape
Cold him we shouldered first at
At first we cold-shouldered him
Our ill ancestors treated they
They ill-treated our ancestors
Clean it don’t dry
Don’t dry-clean it
Black frog they Maria to the marched him
They frog-marched him to the Black Maria
Double your windows glaze to like we’d
We’d like to double-glaze your windows
Pooh just his poohed offer they
They just pooh-poohed his offer
Don’t soap me you soft dare
Don’t you dare soft-soap me!
The world of take
| Grammar: | Some basic meanings of the verb take |
| Level: | Intermediate to advanced |
| Time: | 40-50 minutes |
| Materials: | Set of sentences below (for dictation) |
In class
1. Put the students in small groups to brainstorm all the uses of the verb take they can think of.
2. Ask each group to send a messenger to the next group to pass on their ideas.
3. Dictate the sentences below which they are to write down in their mother tongue. Tell them only to write in mother tongue, not English. Be ready to help explain any sentences that students do not understand.
The new president took over in January.
The man took the woman’s anger seriously.
‘You haven’t done the washing up, I take it,’ his wife said to him.
The little boy took the old watch apart to see how it worked.
‘I think we ought to take the car,’ he said to her.
This bloke always takes his problems to his mother.
‘We took the village without a shot being fired,’ she told him.
‘Take care’ the woman said, as she left home that morning.
He took charge of the planning team.
The woman asked what size shoes he took.
‘Yes I really take your point’ he told her.
‘If we go to a movie,’ she told her boyfriend, ‘it’ll really take you out of yourself.’
The news the boy brought really took the woman aback.
The chair asked him to take the minutes of the meeting.
‘You can take it from me, it’s worse than you think’
4. Ask the students to work in threes and compare their translations. Go round helping and checking.
5. Check that they’re clear about the usual direct translation of take into their language. Now ask them to mark all the translations where take is not rendered by its direct equivalent.
Problem Solving
A dictionary game
| Grammar: | Comparatives, it (referring back) | ||
| Level: | Elementary (or as a review at higher levels) | ||
| 45 minutes | ||
| Materials: | One dictionary per two students |
Preparation
On the board write the following:
Abcdifghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
It’s got more letters than…
It’s got fewer letters than…
It’s the same length as….
It’s earlier in the dictionary than…
It’s later in the dictionary than…
It’s further on…
Back a bit.
The first letter’s right
The first two/three/four letters are right
(or you could dictate this to the students if you want a quiet settling in period at the start of the class)
In class
1. Explain to the students that you’re going out of the room for a short time and they’re to select one word for you to guess when you come back. They find the word in their dictionaries.
2. Go back in and have a first wild guess at the class’s word. The students should tell you whether their word is longer, shorter or the same length as your guess and whether it’s earlier or later in the dictionary. Here is an example (teachers can correct pronunciation as they go along):
| teacher: | Middle |
| students: | It’s shorter. And it’s later in the dictionary. |
| teacher: | Train. |
| students: | It’s Earlier. It’s Got The Same Number Of Letters. |
| teacher: | Plane. |
| students: | It’s Later. |
| teacher: | Rains. |
| students: | It’s Later. It’s Got The Same Number Of Letters. |
| teacher: | Seat. |
| students: | It’s Longer.The First Letter Is Right. It’s Later In The Dictionary. |
| teacher: | Stops. |
| students: | It’s Earlier. |
| teacher: | Skirt. |
| students: | It’s Later |
| teacher: | Spend. |
| students: | The First Two Letters Are Right. It’s Later. |
| teacher: | Spine. |
| students: | It’s Later. |
| teacher: | Spore. |
| students: | The First Four Letters Are Right. You’re Really Warm Now. It’s A Bit Further On. |
| teacher: | Sport. |
| students: | Yes. |
3. You can write the words you guess and notes of the students’ answers on the board as you go along, to help you to remember where you are. At the beginning, you can prompt the students by asking questions such as ‘Is it shorter, longer or the same length as my word? Is it earlier or later in the dictionary? ’ etc.
4. When the students have got the idea of the game, reverse the process; you think of a word (one from a recent lesson works well) and students guess. You give them information as to length, place in dictionary and any letters they’ve guessed right.
5. Now hand over the exercise to the students. They should scan their notes, textbooks and /or minds (but not dictionaries) and create a short wordlist. Then in pairs or small groups they can repeat the activity.
Rationale
This is a good game for teaching scan reading and alphabetical order when using dictionaries. The revision or introduction of the grammatical structures in a meaningful context is disguised since the students usually see this is vocabulary game. Because it has a pretty tight structure and build-up, it’s a good exercise for establishing the principle of group/pairwork with a class that does not take readily to working in different formats.
Note
With some classes we have asked the students to analyze their own guessing processes. Some students have written interesting short compositions on the best guessing strategies.
Eyes
| Grammar: | ‘Second’ conditional |
| Level: | Lower to upper intermediate |
| Time: | 30-45 minutes |
| Materials: | None |
In class
1. Ask a student to draw a head in profile on the board. Ask the student to add eyes in the back of his head.
2. Give the students this sentence beginning on the board and ask them to complete it using a grammar suggested:
If people had eyes in the back of their heads, then they … would/might/could/would have to … (+ infinitive)
For example:
‘If people had eyes on the back of their heads they could read two books at once’ (so two pairs of eyes).
3. Tell the students to write the above sentence stem at the top of their paper and then complete it with fifteen separate ideas. Encourage the use of dictionaries. Help students all you can with vocabulary and go round checking and correcting.
4. Once students have all written a good number of sentences (at least ten) ask them to form teams of four. In the fours they read each other’s sentences and pick the four most interesting ones.
5. Each team puts their four best sentences on the board.
6. The students come up to the board and tick the two sentences they find the most interesting. The team that gets the most ticks wins.
Note
Students come up with a good range of social, medical and other hypotheses. Here are some examples:
… then they would not need driving mirrors.
… they would make really good traffic wardens.
… then you could kiss someone while looking away!
Umbrella
| Grammar: | Modals and present simple |
| Level: | Elementary to intermediate |
| Time: | 30-40 minutes |
| Materials: | One large sheet of paper per student |
In class
1. 
Ask a student to draw a picture on the board of a person holding an umbrella. The umbrella looks like this.
2. Explain to the class that this ‘tulip-like’ umbrella design is a new, experimental one.
3. Ask the students to work in small groups and brainstorm all the advantages and disadvantages of a new design. Ask them to use these sentence stems:
It/you can/can’t…
It/you + present simple…
It/you will/won’t…
It/you may/may not…
4. For example: ‘It is easy to control in a high wind’, ‘You can see where you’re going with this umbrella’
5. Give the students large sheets of paper and ask them to list the advantages and disadvantages in two columns.
6. Ask the students to move around the room and read each other’s papers. Individually they mark each idea as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘intriguing’.
7. Ask the student how many advantages they came up with and how many disadvantages. Ask the students to divide up into three groups according to which statement applies to them:
I thought mainly of advantages.
I thought of some of both.
I thought mainly of disadvantages.
8. Ask the three groups to come up with five to ten adjectives to describe their group state of mind and put these up n the board.
9. Round off the exercise by telling the class that when de Bono asked different groups of people to do this kind of exercise, it turned out that primary school children mostly saw advantages, business people had plenty of both while groups of teachers were the most negative.
Note
Advantages the students offered:
In a hot country you can collect rain water.
It won’t drip round the edges.
You can use it for carrying shopping.
It’s not dangerous in a crowd.
It’s an optimistic umbrella.
It’s easy to hold if two people are walking together.
With this umbrella you’ll look special.
It’ll take less floor space to dry.
This umbrella makes people communicate. They can see each other.
You can paint this umbrella to look like a flower.
You’ll get a free supply of ice if it hails.
Presentation
Listening to time
| Grammar: | Time phrases | ||
| Upper intermediate to very advanced | ||
| Time: | 40-50 minutes | ||
| Materials | None |
Preparation
Invite a native speaker to your class, preferably not a language teacher as they sometimes distort their speech. Ask the person to speak about a topic that has them move through time. This could be his country history. The talk should last around twenty minutes. Explain to the speaker that the students will be paying close attention not only to the content but to the language form, too.
In class
1. Before the speaker arrives, explain to the students that they are to jot down all the words and phrases they hear that express time. They don't need to note all the words!
2. Welcome the speaker and introduce the topic.
3. The speaker takes the floor for fifteen to twenty minutes and you join the students in taking language notes. If there are questions from the students, make sure people continue to take notes during the questioning.
4. Put the students in threes to compare their time-phrase notes. Suggest the speaker joins one of the groups. Some natives are delighted to look in a ‘speech mirror’.
5. Share your own notes with the class. Round off the lesson by picking out other useful and normal bits of language the speaker used that are not yet part of your student’s idiolects.
Example
One speaker mentioned above produced these time words: only about ten years/there was a gap of nine years/ at roughly the same time/over the next few hundred years/from 1910 until the present day/it’s been way back/ within eighteen month there will be/until three years ago/when I was back in September
Variations
Choose the speaker who is about to go off on an important trip. In speaking about this, some of the verbs used will be in a variety of forms used to talk about the future.
Invite someone to speak about the life and habits of someone significant to them, but two lives separately from them, say a grandparent. This topic is likely to evoke a rich mixture of present simple, present continuos, will used to describe habitual events, ‘ll be –ing etc.
Note
To invite the learners to pick specific grammar features out of a stream of live speech is a powerful form of grammar presentation. In this technique the students ‘present’ the grammar to themselves. They go through a process of realization which is lot stronger than what often happens in their minds during the type of ‘grammar presentation’ required of trainees on many teacher training courses. During the realization process, they are usually not asleep.
Guess my grammar
| Grammar: | Varied+question form |
| Level: | Elementary to intermediate |
| Time: | 55 minutes |
| Materials | None |
In class
1. Choose a grammar area the students need to review. In the example below there are adjectives, adverbs and relative pronouns.
2. Ask each student to work alone and write a sentence of 12-16 words (the exact length is not too important). Each sentence should contain an adjective, and adverb and a relative pronoun, or whatever grammar you’ve chosen to practise. For example: ‘She sat quietly by the golden river that stretched to the sea’.
3. Now ask the students to rewrite their sentences on a separate piece of paper, leaving in the target grammar and any punctuation, but leaving the rest as blanks, one dash for each letter. The sentence above would look like this:
--- --- quietly -- --- golden ----- that --------- -- --- ---.
While they are doing this ask any students who are not sure of the correctness of their sentence to check with you.
4. Now ask the students to draw a picture or pictures which illustrate as much of the meaning of the sentence as possible.
5. As students finish drawing, put them into groups of three. One person shows the blanked sentence and the drawing, reserving their original sentence for their own reference. The other should guess: ‘ Is the first word the?’ or ask questions ‘Is the second word a verb?’ etc. The student should only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. As they guess the words, they fill in the blanks.
6. They continue until all the blanks are filled and then they do the other two person’s sentences.
Note
Groups tend to finish this activity at widely different speeds. If a couple of groups finish early, pair them across the groups, ask them to rub out the completed blanked out sentences and try them on a new partner.
Acknowledgement
Ian Jasper originated this exercise. He’s a co-author of Teacher Development: One group’s experience, edited by Janie Rees Miller.
Puzzle stories
| Grammar: | Simple present and simple past interrogative forms |
| Level: | Beginners |
| Time: | 30 minutes |
| Materials: | Puzzle story (to be written on the board) |
Preparation
Ask a couple of students from an advanced class to come to your beginners group. Explain that they will have some interesting interpreting to do.
In class
1. Introduce the interpreters to your class and welcome them.
2. Write this puzzle story on the board in English. Leave good spaces between the lines:
There were three people in the room.
A man spoke.
There was a short pause.
The second man spoke.
The woman jumped up and slapped the first man in the face.
3. Ask one of the beginners to come to the board and underline the words they know. Ask others to come and underline the ones they know. Tell the group the words none of them know. Ask one of the interpreters to write a translation into mother tongue. The translation should come under the respective line of English.
4. Tell the students their task is to find out why the woman slapped the first man. They are to ask questions that you can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Tell them they can try and make questions directly in English, or they can call the interpreter and ask the questions in their mother tongue. The interpreter will whisper the English in their ear and they then ask you in English.
5. Erase the mother tongue translation of the story from the board.
6. One of the interpreters moves round the room interpreting questions while the other stays at the board and writes up the questions in both English and mother tongue.
7. You should aim to let the class ask about 15-25 questions, more will overload them linguistically. To speed the process up you should give them clues.
8. Finally, have the students copy all the questions written on the board into their books. You now have a presentation of the main interrogative forms of the simple present and past.
9. After the lesson go through any problems the interpreters had-offer them plenty of parallel translation.
The solution
The second man was an interpreter.
Further material
Do you know the one about the seven-year-old who went to the baker’s? His Mum had told him to get three loaves. He went in, bought two and came home. He put them on the kitchen table. He ran back to the backer’s and bought a third. He rushed in and put the third one on the kitchen table. The question: Why? Solution: he had a speech defect and couldn’t say ‘th’.
Word order dictation
| Grammar: | Word order at sentence level The grammar you decide to input in this example: reflexive phrases, e.g. to myself/by myself/in myself |
| Level: | Intermediate |
| Time: | 20-30 minutes |
| Materials: | Jumbled extracts(for dictation) One copy ofExtract from Sarah’s letterper pair of students |
In class
1. Pair the students and ask one person in each pair to prepare to write on a loose sheet of paper.
2. Dictate the first sentence from the Jumbled extracts. One person in each pair takes it down.
3. Ask the pairs to rewrite the jumbled words into a meaningful sentence, using all the words and putting in necessary punctuation.
4. Tell the pairs to pass their papers to the right. The pairs receiving their neighbours’ sentences check out grammar and spelling, correcting where necessary.
5. Dictate the second jumbled sentence.
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4.
7. When you’ve dictated all the sentences this way give out the original, unjumbled Extract from Sarah’s letter and ask the students to compare with the sentences they’ve got in front of them. They may sometimes have created excellent, viable alternative sentences.
Jumbled extracts
1. Myself in absorbed more and more becoming am I find I
2. When mix I do other people me inside a confusion have I I find
3. David John and Nick as though I am me I do not feel when I walk through the park with
4. Strange seems it and a role acting am I like feel I
5. Walk park myself talk aloud myself to I by the through I when
6. Completely feel content I