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.

Provide the class with a list of topics (City living / Exercise / Learning English / being single).  Model whole class. The teacher is the Devil and the students the Angel.

1. The teacher (Devil) says why they are against the topic using 3 transitions to order the arguements.

2. The students (Angels) offer the advantages / for the topic, using transitions.

3. Do this a few times so students get the idea. Then they can do the same in pairs or small groups. Really works!

Here’s the handout explaining it. Get more on this presentation page…

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

Students create the materials for learning/practicing English. In doing so, they are more interested in the topic because it is from themselves and also they have the necessary context to prompt output / speech.

Find many examples by clicking the SCC tag here.

Jason Renshaw also recently blogged about The English Wizard Grid. Read about how he recommends using it. It is a handy organizer to prompt student speech about a certain language point / theme. Great stuff.

Backdoor is a technique where in pairs students sit back to back. One student watches the screen and describes the action. The teacher can write vocab. on the board to prompt student talk. Continue for a few minutes then pause the video and the pairs switch positions.

Continue and then watch the end of the video together, describing without the sound.

This works well with 3-7 min videos and more so if they are funny!

I use Mr. Bean and get them all in this great Mr. Bean player.

For more ideas about using short videos, see my recent blog post. Lots there…

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

1.  Warm up by quizzing students about prepositions. Take a pen and place it around your body. Ask, “Where’s the pen?”.  Place it in some funny places!

2. In pairs with a pen, students practice and do the same as modeled by the teacher.

3. Draw a floor plan of your apartment on the chalkboard. Underneath, write the target language – Where is your….? / Do you have a/an …….?

Students ask the teacher about his/her apartment and the teacher draws in the place of things, describing using furniture. Your students will be very curious!

4.  Give each student a blank piece of paper. They draw their apartment/house (only the walls and front door) and then in pairs or small groups, describe and draw where things are in their apartment.

5. If you have time — get students to tell the rest of the class what they found interesting about their partner’s apartment!

This post was submitted by David.

This inspired me to do the following lesson:

All that you need for this is a stack of index cards, each with the name of possible combatant written on it. For example: samurai, tiger, battleship, pro-wrestler, ninja. Make at least 30 or 40 cards. Mes English also has some cool superhero cards www.mes-english.com/flashcards/supers.php
Also these Eigomon (Pokemon like) cards. www.mes-english.com/games/eigomon.php

Shuffle the cards and choose two, then ask your students who would win a fight between the two combatants named. The idea here is to get your students talking and, if possible, speculating. Ask them why they think this or that fighter would win. Is he / she stronger, larger, or faster, than the vanquished foe?

As always, its good to add a few comedy entries in the list of fighters. How about Tom Cruise vs. a chicken? Godzilla vs. Madonna? Mike Tyson vs. an army tank? You can also add the names of students–this always gets a laugh, and can cause animated debates among your kids.

The great thing about this format is that it can always be randomized, simply by re-shuffling the deck.

This post was submitted by David.