Page 312 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009

Chapter 20: Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping with Young Learners
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Most series of course books are accompanied by teachers’ and resource books that contain games and activities. Even those designed for adult learn- ers give you great ideas which you can transfer to children’s topics.
When you adapt activities from books, use colourful cards that kids can move around and attach amusing pictures, perhaps something they can colour in afterwards.
Depending on the resources available to you, you can invent your own activities to practise language.
Here are a couple I use; the first activity is fun if you have English newspapers or maga- zines around. The second requires no special resources at all. What they have in common is that the children don’t need too much involve- ment from you so they can be more in control of their own learning.
Making a newspaper collage
For this you need a newspaper or two (comics for lower-level students), scissors, card, five or six boxes or envelopes and glue. Make sure that everyone has access to a page or two of the newspaper.
You simply chose a particular part of speech (verbs, nouns, adverbs and so on) and give students a time limit of a couple of minutes to find examples of this kind of word on the page. They can underline the words and you then need to do some feedback to make sure that they’ve got it right.
Next you get them to cut out all the examples they’ve found and put them in the designated box or envelope. After a few rounds you end up with collections of nouns and verbs and so on.
Finally, have groups of students pick three words from each collection without looking. They have to think up a short story using all their words, no matter how bizarre, and write it out on a large piece of card. They stick their
chosen newspaper words directly onto the card and write the rest in with their own handwriting. Award a prize for the most original.
By the end of the lesson, they’ll have learnt several new words and practised sentence structure in English.
That’s a good question!
It’s always best to let students generate language themselves so here’s a game that does just that.
On strips of paper ask students to write down questions they’d like to ask their classmates. They may be about their favourite things or more along the lines of ‘What would you do if . . .?’
When they’ve finished, go through and weed out any that are just too cheeky or inappropriate for other reasons. If you have a good question in poor grammar, put it on the board so that other members of the class can help correct it. Try to include about twice as many questions as there are students so that you retain the element of suspense. And now put the questions in a hat or something similar.
Finally you go from student to student and ask each person to choose a question without look- ing. On the flip of a coin, decide whether the student has to answer the question or nominate someone else to do so.
By the end of this lesson, the students should have practised asking questions in English and they should also know quite a bit more about each other.
Trying other activities