Russia in colour 100 years ago: past passives lesson plan

Levels: intermediate to advanced.
Scope: older teens and adults.
Type: using photos as stimuli to produce particular grammatical forms; text reconstruction.
Skills: speaking; listening; reading; writing.
Language focus: past passives; vocabulary to describe some scenes represented in photos. Continue reading

Southbound – song – lesson idea and worksheets

Level: intermediate to advanced.
Scope: older teens and adults.
Type: scanning a text for vocabulary anomalies; listening and responding to a song; various writing- or performing-based follow-on tasks.
Skills: reading; listening and pronunciation; speaking; writing.
Language focus: vocabulary related to travel and moving (and missing) home. Continue reading

Updated ELT News Feed pages

Update

Updated ELT News Feed pages

I’ve updated the ELT News Feed section of this blog to make it easier for people to find their way around. It’s now divided into four sections which I hope will really help teachers who want to build on their existing skills and find new lesson ideas for their students: Lesson Ideas, Teacher Development, Audio and Video, and Sources. I’ve also added a silly logo (below – hope you like it!).

ELT News Feed logo

The inspiration for these changes (apart from the logo) – and for starting a news feed of links to ELT-related posts and ideas in the first place – comes from philosopher Denis Dutton’s artsandlettersdaily.com website, which is an excellent compendium of links to various humanities- and social sciences-based online articles.

Debates added to topic-based materials

Update

Debates added to topic-based materials section

Further to my recent post about staging class debates, I’ve just uploaded two more to the topic-based materials section of this blog: one (on whether some art can be better than other art) here; the other (on whether private schools should be abolished) here. You can read some ideas about how to use them, and about ways of holding debates more generally, here.

The debate about abolishing private schools

image showing pros and cons for debate about abolishing private schools

I highly recommend introducing debates to interested classes of adults or teens of about intermediate level and upwards: they’re great for generating discussion; students can practise using a lot of functional language about expressing opinions, agreeing and disagreeing, and so on; and they can provide useful vocab-building preparatory homework opportunities as well!

Please remember to check the language used in my debating sheets and consider whether to pre-teach any of the vocabulary used. I’ve tried to use language relevant to the topic being discussed, and otherwise to simplify the text with VocabProfile, but some of it will still be complex, as it’s condensed.

I’ll be adding more debates over the next few days, and hope to update (and add to) those topic-based materials more widely, too.

The debate about the value of art

image showing pros and cons for my debate about art

Staging class debates

Further to Monday’s post on debating the Stop Online Piracy Act, here are a few ideas for staging debates with your class more generally, as a way to revise topic-based vocabulary and language for agreeing, disagreeing, expressing opinions, and so on, in a fun and memorable way. I recommend using these ideas with older teens and adults at intermediate level and above. Continue reading

Complete lesson plan: debating the Stop Online Piracy Act

Level: Advanced.
Scope: older teens and adults.
Type: for classes of 6 or more students – exchanging information; holding a debate.
Skills: reading; writing; speaking; listening; pronunciation.
Language focus: revising modals of deduction and speculation, and language of agreeing, disagreeing, and expressing opinions and doubts. Continue reading

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