Extensive Reading: Voice Diary

This recipe works best if you combine it with Extensive Reading. It builds confidence and teaches reading, speaking, and listening
Encourage your students to make a voice diary with their cell phones. Its listed under the “Voice Memo” Feature. First you need to provide a high interest story to your students.

1.    Have them read the story once quietly
2.    Next read the story aloud and record it on their voice diary
3.    Then have them playback and listen while they read

And the best part of it is, the students can track their progress. If they keep at it for a couple weeks they can actually hear the difference. Its worked great with Tech students

Can be adapted to anything, if they see a funny or cool sign, they can read it and save.

This post was submitted by Jason K.

One great place for this would be The Speech Accent Archive . There you can choose mp3 samples from speakers all over the world. They all read the same paragraph so students can just concentrate on the “accent”. I’ve made a cool game from them.

Other recipes for doing this would be visiting Voicethread. There, students can encounter a wide range of authentic audio from speakers around the world. Here are some good examples.  Also, The Language Accent Game is fun too.

This post was submitted by David .

In pairs, students silently “mouth” very slowly, the questions from a handout. Simple questions. Go here for many lists - use the simple ones like “Favorites” or “Getting to know you”.   The other student responds with one or two simple sentences.

Students see if they can follow the other person. Doing this they will gain important information about how to get more information than the ear allows and increase their ability to read facial information – so important for language learning/speaking. Plus, they will just have a lot of fun!

This website from the U. of Iowa is the perfect compliment for this exercise and a must site for pronunciation!

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

This is a fun lesson. Lily is an amazing child and your students will be fascinated.

1. Choose a student and get the student standing at the front of the class. Place a map of the world at the front of the class.

2. Show the video of Lily. When she is asked to find a country, the student at the front must find it before Lily. If not – Game over! And a new student can try….

Lots of fun and lots more geography ideas coming soon under the GEOGRAPHY tag! Also see the Current Events folder on EFL Classroom 2.0 for lots of geography ideas and presentations.

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

Write a word on a slip of paper and show it to a student. This student must whisper it to the second student. Then the second student must draw a picture of what he or she heard, and show it to the third student. The third student, then, writes the word that represents the picture and shows it to the fourth student. Then the fourth student whispers it to the fifth student…. and so on.

This continues until you get to the last student, who must say the word to the class. Each line/group that is correct gets a point. Play to 5 points.

This post was submitted by Bridgette.

not have a chair. This person stands in the middle of the circle.

2. The person in the middle calls out one instruction.

eg, “Change if you are wearing a green shirt.”

3. All the people wearing a white shirt must stand up and change places.

The last person left standing without a chair, calls out another instruction.

eg, “Change if you live in Tokyo.”

4. All the people living in Tokyo now change places and the person

left standing calls out another instruction.

eg, “Change if you are married.”

5. Keep playing for a few minutes.

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

Intensive Listening Activities

This post was submitted by David.