Classroom activities « Oxford University Press – English Language Teaching Global Blog @OUPELTGlobal

Posts Tagged 'Classroom activities'

Happy Valentine’s Day! – Reading Text and Activities for Younger Learners

The following text and activities are taken and adapted from Seasons and Celebrations, Stage 2 Factfiles from the Oxford Bookworms Library, suitable for younger learners.

Activities Before Reading

1. This text below is about St. Valentine’s Day. Which of these things do you think you are going to read about? Circle four words.

Love	Money
Flowers	Buildings
Horses	Cards
Festivals	Storms

Answers: Love, Flowers, Cards, Festivals

2. How much do you know about St. Valentine’s Day. Are these sentences true (T) or false (F)?

a) St. Valentine’s Day started in the nineteenth century.

b) On Valentine’s Day people send cards to the people they love.

c) St. Valentine’s Day is 15 February.

d) Chocolates are a kind of food.

e) People often go out to dinner in restaurants in the evening.

f) St. Valentine’s Day is named after a famous Roman emperor.

Answers: a) F, b) T, c) F, d) T, e) T, f) F

Activities While Reading

Read the text below. While reading, answer the following questions.

1. Match the beginnings and endings of the sentences

1. Valentine’s Day started more than…

2. Saint Valentine was a Christian who…

3. Valentine was sent to prison because…

4. When Valentine was in prison, he…

5. People started sending Valentine’s cards…

a) he helped a soldier to marry.

b) in the early nineteenth century.

c) two thousand years ago.

d) lived in Rome.

e) fell in love.

Answers: 1. c), 2. d), 3. a), 4. e), 5. b)

2. Choose the best question word for these questions, and then answer them.

What / When / Who / How / Why

1. _____ was Saint Valentine?

2. _____ is St. Valentine’s Day?

3. _____ do people send to the people they love?

4. _____ long have people celebrated Valentine’s Day?

5. _____ do people write ‘Be my Valentine’ at the end of the cards?

6. _____ was the Emperor of Rome when Valentine was alive?

Answers: 1. Who, 2. When, 3. What, 4. How, 5. Why, 6. Who

14 February is St. Valentine’s Day. This started more than two thousand years ago, as a winter festival, on 15 February. On that day, people asked their gods to give them good fruit and vegetables, and strong animals.

When the Christians came to Britain, they came with a story about a man called Saint Valentine. The story is that Valentine was a Christian who lived in Rome in the third century. The Roman Emperor at the time, Claudius the Second, was not a Christian. Claudius thought that married soldiers did not make good soldiers, so he told his soldiers that they must not marry.

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A Letter to My Younger Self

Published 19 January, 2012 Teacher Development 10 Comments
Tags: Advice, Classroom activities, Classroom dynamics, Engagement, Learner autonomy, Learner collaboration, Meghan Beler, Motivation, Self-reflection, Student centered learning

Young woman thinking as she writes Meghan Beler is a full-time teacher trainer for Oxford University Press in Istanbul, Turkey. In this piece she writes a letter to herself about things she wished she knew when she first started teaching.

Dear Younger Self,

As you have probably realised by now, teaching is hard work. On top of a full teaching load you have to deal with homework, exams, misbehaving students, staff meetings and (gasp!) students’ parents. You are experiencing a lot of uncertainty and ups and downs, sometimes even on an hourly basis. You may feel that you don’t have enough time to plan the spectacular lessons you dreamt of when you were training to become a teacher. I remember what it feels like to be a new teacher, so I would like to offer you some simple advice that can help you deal with some of the challenges you are currently facing.

Choice: First of all, don’t be afraid to give your students choices about their learning. As a teacher, it’s very easy to fall into a pattern of being the decision-maker, judge and jury in the classroom, but allowing choice is an important part of helping students become autonomous learners. By having your students make some decisions in the classroom, you can also increase their involvement and enjoyment of your lessons. Start with something simple, such as allowing students to choose which questions from an exercise that they would like to answer. You might also consider asking them how they would like to carry out an activity – individually, in pairs or in groups? Homework and projects are other areas where choice is a possibility. If you want them to get more practice with past simple at home, give them some options and take a whole class vote, for example:

Write a short composition about your last holiday.
Record yourself talking about what you did last weekend.
Prepare a ‘past simple’ quiz for your classmates.

This allows you to cater to different learning styles while encouraging students to take responsibility for their own learning. For learners who are not accustomed to being given choice in the classroom, this new responsibility may come as a shock to them and they may struggle to come up with ideas or even try to ‘cheat’ the system. But with a bit of persistence and optimism on your part, you will be amazed at the wonderful ideas your students can come up with.

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The Power of Business Video – Part 2: Key uses of video for Business English teaching

Published 15 November, 2011 Business & English for Specific Purposes , Multimedia & Digital 3 Comments
Tags: Authentic video content, BESIG, Business English, Business Result, Classroom activities, Graded Readers, Graded video, John Hughes, Language learning, Technology, Video, Visual learning

Business workers in phone conference Following his post on using graded video, John Hughes looks at how video can be used in the Business English classroom. John will be speaking on this subject at the BESIG conference on 19^th November.

In my previous post about using video in business English lessons I focused on the reasons for using graded video materials with business English learners. In this article, I’ll focus on some of the key uses of video in the classroom and for self study. I’ll illustrate each point with reference to how certain types of video can be effectively used in these ways. The videos I refer to below are the ones we’ve developed to accompany the Business Result course series, available in February 2012. If you’d like to come along to my presentation at the BESIG conference on 19^th November, I’ll be showing extracts from some of them and suggesting ways to use them.

Video as a stimulus

Video is a great way to start off a lesson and to get students talking about the topic of the lesson. For example, you can turn the sound off and let students watch the pictures. They can discuss what they think the video is going to be about or compare what they see to their own working lives. One way we’ve related the Business Result videos to the student’s own experience is by having ‘Vox Pops’ videos. In these, we take two or three questions the students might ask and answer about their own work and ask them to other real people who give their own authentic responses. This means that you can discuss the questions with your students and compare their experience to those in the video. This is especially useful with one-to-one or small group lessons where you don’t have the benefit of lots of students giving alternative viewpoints, so it’s helpful to bring in an outsider’s opinion.

Video to generate discussion

You can often use video for in-depth discussions. For example, Business Result includes case study style documentaries. In one case study, the owner of a company needs new premises. We see him visiting two locations and discussing the pros and cons of each office for his needs. Students watch and then discuss which location is best-suited for him. It’s an elementary level video but the language is all pitched so students at this level can have a meaningful discussion afterwards.

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Scared to teach?

Published 10 November, 2011 Teacher Development 3 Comments
Tags: Classroom activities, English Language Teaching, Images, Jamie Keddie, Resource Books for Teachers, Teacher Development, Verbal communication, Webinar

Jamie Keddie, author of Images, part of the Resource Books for Teachers series, discusses the role of images and texts in classroom activities and whether they are used as a substitute for actual contact teaching. Jamie will be hosting a Global Webinar on this topic on 14th and 30th November 2011. You can find out more information and register to attend here.

Recently, I heard a story about an English language teacher who went on to teach mathematics at secondary level in the United Kingdom. Having spent 6 years in Spain, looking for ways to get his learners to speak English, it seems that he was able to put the fruits of this period to good use in his new job.

One communicative activity for geometry that he devised was to give each student in the class a piece of paper with a different shape on it. Their task was to mingle and describe their shapes to each other without showing each other the images.

“Well, this shape has three sides and two of them are of equal lengths,” student A would say. “Is it an isosceles triangle?” was the expected response from student B.

My friend who told me the story was making the point that many of the techniques that make up a language teacher’s classroom repertoire may lend themselves to other teachers in completely different contexts.

This is, of course, hardly a revolutionary observation. But what about the other way around? In other words, how much do language teachers borrow from the techniques of non-language teachers?

Of course, I can only speak for myself. And to do so, I want to recall a moment from earlier this year.

It was a Sunday evening and I was desperately trying to find a short text on the Normans. I needed classroom material to use with a group of visiting students from China who were in the UK for an intensive English language and culture course.

Now, I happen to enjoy history. If you want to know about the Normans and how they changed the course of the British history, you could do a lot worse than ask me to tell you what I know.

At school, I was lucky enough to be taught by a number of inspirational teachers, none of whom were afraid to share their subject knowledge. In other words, they used to teach us.

So the question is this: Why did it not occur to me to stand up and enlighten these students using my own voice and teaching skills? Why was I so intent on finding a text – a piece of paper to do the job for me?

If teachers of other subjects can borrow from us, why did the idea of borrowing from them not cross my mind? Am I alone in realising that for years, I have been afraid to teach?

In my webinar next week, I shall be exploring this topic and more. Whether you agree or disagree, I hope you will join us, tell us of your own experiences, and put forward your own views.

The Power of Business Video – Part 1: Using ‘graded video’ in Business English teaching

Published 3 November, 2011 Business & English for Specific Purposes , Multimedia & Digital 5 Comments
Tags: Authentic video content, BESIG, Business English, Business Result, Classroom activities, Graded Readers, Graded video, John Hughes, Language learning, Technology, Video, Visual learning

Ahead of his talk at BESIG on 19th November, John Hughes examines the case for using graded video in the first of two posts on using video in the Business English classroom.

At my BESIG presentation in Dubrovnik this November, I’ll be talking about the power of video in Business English teaching both as an informational tool and for language development.

In particular, I’ll be supporting my arguments with extracts from a new series of ‘graded’ video material produced by Oxford University Press to accompany the popular Business Result series. By ‘graded’ video, I mean that the listening part of the video has been adapted or carefully controlled (in terms of vocabulary and speed of delivery) for a particular level of learner in much the same way that graded readers are books that have been adapted or written with a certain level in mind.

So you might ask: why use ‘graded’ video when you could draw on the vast amounts of authentic video content which is freely available for use via the internet? Authentic is always better, right? Well, I’m not sure that it is and here are some reasons why.

Logically organized and ease of access

I just mentioned the ‘vast amounts’ of video available on sites like YouTube, and that in itself is part of the problem. Where do you start looking if you need a video for a lesson on the vocabulary of retail or a good model version for the presentation skills lesson? You can spend several hours searching in order to find something appropriate.

A set of graded video clips which are logically organized by content and language need solves this problem. It saves time for the teacher, and this ease of access means a learner can watch the video in their own time as well as in class.

Removing barriers to comprehension

As with graded readers, graded video removes the barriers to real comprehension. By ‘real comprehension’ I mean comprehension where the student understands 90-100% of the video content, not just parts of it. By ‘barriers’ I mean the content, the language, but also the cultural barriers to understanding. Many YouTube videos have strong cultural bias which can be exploited in some cases but can also frustrate the learner and so demotivate them.

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Posts Tagged 'Classroom activities'