Tag Archives: FCE
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 […]
Exam Wrapper for Listening exams
Have you tried exam wrappers? I recently learnt the term ‘exam wrapper’ through some EduTwitter posts. In case you haven’t come across it yet, it’s a short form (or ‘metacognition worksheet’) that students fill in before a test, designed to help them evaluate their learning and think about what they can do to prepare for […]
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 […]
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 […]
Gallery Grammar Goals
My IELTS students are definitely getting to grips with the writing tasks for IELTS, but Grammatical Resource and Accuracy is one criterion they often score low in. The marking codes I use most often with this group are s-v (subject-verb agreement), T (tense), p (punctuation) and s. or pl. (singular or plural). The reasons for […]
Using pictures to study Sentence Transformations
It doesn’t matter how often I go to Cairo, I´m always struck by the beauty of the Pyramids. No matter how many times I go to Cairo, I´m always struck by the beauty of the Pyramids. Some people say that there’s no place for an exercise like Sentence Transformations in an assessment of English ability, but there […]
This is a…
What is it if it’s not a pipe? Could it be an elvish golf club, a tiny unfinished old-fashioned periscope, a fancy straw for drinking ale, part of a faucet, a teensy weensy watering can? Course it could, if you can forget the boring, sensible, conventional use and think sideways. This little warmer requires students […]
A low-prep, low-tech, effective game for revision
In this activity, pairs or small groups of students compete against other groups to answer written questions. It could be called a low tech version of a Socrative quiz. It’s most easily done with a whiteboard and projector but it could certainly be done with a blackboard instead. You just need a list of 8-12 […]
Have Something Done – a Lesson plan
I recently applied for the DELTA course, and one of the tasks was to write a B2 level lesson plan for the language point have something done. I’ve always found this one a difficult one to teach, especially with teenagers, because most of the activities I’ve come across in books are about doing up your house which isn’t as […]
Defining relative clauses
This is a communicative, personalised activity for introducing defining relative clauses. Ask your students to write the numbers 1-8 on their paper. Next to no. 1 tell them to write down a place where they like to eat. They should write the name only. You are going to read out 7 similar categories and they […]
A Hive of Activities 