Category Activities
Paraphrasing activities & resources
Practising paraphrasing is so important for our students: it requires them to know vocabulary and to manipulate structures successfully. Doing it in pairs or groups means they have to be explicit about the process, further advancing their confidence and control. If you can name it, you can tame it! It is of course a skill […]
Language patterns & the UK Linguistics Olympiad
Who’s been in a language class where you were either frustrated by the slowness of others to see patterns, or frustrated by not being able to keep up because you hadn’t yet learnt how to see the patterns? (This frustration actually put me off going to language classes and I ended up reading things like […]
Formal or Informal?
Cut-ups and Kaboom! Students often struggle to distinguish between formal and informal language, and also to produce appropriately formal language when appropriate. Given that academic language is generally formal, and that my students need to be able to write texts of varying registers for their IGCSE E2L, it’s worth some time focusing on the features […]
Developing answers
Do you find your students sometimes struggle to develop their responses to prompts for Speaking exams? I used the “My Place In The World” idea to help students to broaden their thinking. (This could also be used to develop ideas for essays.) First I asked them to consider this question: Why is education important? and […]
Vision Boards, Lo-Fi Teaching and Creativity
This summer I met the lovely Emma Gore-Lloyd whilst working at at an idyllic Devonshire summer school, and she’s very kindly let me guest-contribute on her brilliant blog. Devon is also where I rediscovered my teaching creativity and with it, my motivation! Prior to this summer, I can’t say I was burnt out but on […]
Noticing, analysing and applying features of persuasive writing
The IGCSE in E2L requires students to be able to write articles and formal letters using persuasive language. To get the top marks for a piece of writing at GCSE, students need to use “a consistently appropriate style” with an “excellent sense of purpose and audience.” Many of my students haven’t studied persuasive language in […]
Modelling teacher-student communications
I often think that our students must so overwhelmed when they first start at school here. Not only is the language a different one, but the whole culture of the school is likely to be quite different from what they know. They are thrown into an entirely new environment, with new rules and expectations, far […]
Academic texts – “Explain” tasks
This lesson came about because a Y10 student had asked me how best to write their ideas for a 6-mark extended response question in Chemistry. This sort of task presents a challenge for EAL students who may know the content well, but can lose marks due to their language. Students should be aware that they […]
Speaking challenge: focus on accuracy
My IGCSE students have been preparing for their mock Speaking exams recently – and the real thing is just after the holidays. We’ve spend time focusing on developing answers, on using a range of structures and on using vocabulary to show “shades of meaning” but the students needed to work on their grammatical accuracy. This […]
A Hive of Activities 