Page 318 - Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies 2009
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Chapter 20: Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping with Young Learners
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✓ Cul8r: ✓ GMT: ✓ IOU: ✓ Lol: ✓ MC: ✓ MTV: ✓ PTO: ✓ R&B: ✓ VIP:
See you later
Greenwich Mean Time
I owe you
Laugh out loud and lots of love Master of ceremonies
Music television
Please turn over
Rhythm and blues
Very important person
Even if students recognise the abbreviation, make sure that they can say it correctly. For example, they shouldn’t make VIP rhyme with ‘skip’ but say each letter.
Playing Kim’s game
This well-known game tests observation and memory. In the classroom you can use it to teach or reinforce vocabulary.
To play, you gather together 20 objects that teenagers use and lay them out on the desk but cover them with a cloth. Uncover them for two minutes or so to let students look at them, cover them up again, then get the students to write a list of what they were from memory. I like to choose things that students use every day but don’t know the name for in English, such as an eraser or ear-phones.
Offering advice with problem pages
Scores of magazines and websites offer advice to troubled teens. I use readers’ letters as a basis for reading and writing activities. Students can each become the agony aunt or even submit their own problem for another classmate to answer.
