Activity of the week

Here is a zero-prep fun game that really gets students reaching for that target language!

Materials- Some slips of old paper

Target language -  Use with vocabulary sets. Idioms and phrasal verbs work especially well

Procedure - In the final part of the lesson during the production phase, give each student two slips of paper.

Ask the students to write on each slip one of the phrases/words from the board.(making sure to keep it a secret)

Encourage the students to choose a word or phrase they didn't know at the start of the lesson.

The teacher gives a question which the students have to discuss with another student.

The idea is to try and 'win' the slips from their partner by using in context (not just saying) the slips their partner is holding.

Of course the students don't know which phrases and words their partner is holding, and so this activity will force the students try to use the more difficult phrases from the board.

The teacher must monitor and feed in new discussion questions at regular intervals.

the winner is the student who is holding the most slips at the end of the lesson.

This activity can be done sat down in pairs with rotation or as a mingle.

Enjoy!

Competency Based Language Teaching- the art of DOING

I know how to make the perfect fried egg. I know how to curl a ball and score from 25 yards just like David Beckham. I know how to drive. I know how to ski.  I know how to do all of these things flawlessly. Except, of course, I can't do any of them.

The bottom of my fried eggs always seem to burn before the top bit is cooked. Pressure always goes to my head when I shoot in football. My parking is awful. And anybody who has seen me ski - well, the less said, the better.

Yet I KNOW  the techniques for all these things. I have had 25 driving lessons and if anybody tells me to plough my skis again I'll.. well, I'll get to that later.

So what's going wrong?

Many skills require more than just a knowledge of how to complete them.
They also require a good knowledge of what it feels like to complete them without too much thinking, so that these skills be called upon when needed.  If we are not able to call upon the skill we need, then the knowledge of HOW to do it becomes useless.

I can repeat ad infinitum the rules of how to place my body weight and skis correctly, but this is a pointless piece of knowledge considering the fact I still can't ski.

Language learning is very similar. Rarely do I meet a student at B1+ in Odessa who doesn't know how to form the  2nd/3rd conditional. Rarer still is it to find a student at B1 who actually draws on this knowledge when in conversation to express themselves. 
The student can repeat rules but not actually apply them. Wasted knowledge.

It seems there is a gap between knowing and doing. If we want our learners to become successful English speakers then we must bridge this gap.

So what can we do?

Emphasising the need to 'be able to'  rather than just 'to know' is an essential step we must take in order to become competent teachers. I believe the onus is on us not only to give the students ample opportunity to practice- fail- repeat- improve - repeat, etc. but also to make the students aware of the gap they have to bridge. We shouldn't be satisfied with the fact that students can mechanically repeat the form of the present perfect continuous in the classroom.  Can they use it in real life?

It's also our job as teachers to understand that this process will take more than one lesson. We need to support and push our students to the point of 'being able to'  even if they may fight against us with cries of 'We know this'!

The Ukrainian Education Programme

The Ministry of Education in Ukraine has responded to this by reforming its lower-secondary programme and introducing something called CBLT (Competency Based Language Teaching) which (among other things) introduces a more practical 'can do' approach to English learning.

The Ministry has introduced 10 competencies consisting of smaller parts as a guideline  of what students should be able to do, with the emphasis being on DO rather than just know.
This is the first step in a movement away from the traditional parrot-fashion memorising of rules that accounted for a large part of education in the past.

The 10 competencies can be found on the Dinternal website.

Help is at hand!

Don't despair teachers! This shift in focus doesn't mean a total overhaul of everything we have done in the past. In fact, many of the top titles on the market such as Wider World, Next Move and Islands have been designed with all these competencies in mind. Teacher's books now list where each of the competencies are taught and practiced, to make sure your students become doers and not just knowers.

We at Dinternal are working on seminars to help teachers with this new approach and demonstrate how it can be easily applied in the classroom without too much upheaval or change.

Look out for our seminars, webinars and workshops!

CBLT will help our students become people who can use English in their day to day life in order to achieve their maximum potential. Who knows, one day I might get that skiing right!

Tom

Activity of the week!

Here is my first 'Activity of the week' of the new semester!

Designed to help enliven those long classroom hours with activities which students will find engaging and fun whilst practising the target language. I creatively refer to this game as 'sticky on the head mingle' and was inspired by a Christmas day game my family often play after a huge festive dinner.

I use it to practice personality adjectives.

Materials : Sticky labels

Get the students to write a personality adjective you have studied on a sticky label and apply it to the forehead of the person next to them. 
When all the students have done this, they mingle around the room.
When they encounter another student they make a sentence to describe the other person's word by telling them about their behaviour.

For example, ipon meeting a student with 'generous' on their head, they would say something like "Oh, thank you for the money you gave me"  or "You always give good presents." The students wander around commenting on each other's personalities.

At the end, the student guess which personality trait they had.  Simple!

It can also be adapted for many other vocabulary sets.

These secondary pre-intermediate students loved it!

Welcome to the new semester!

After a wonderful summer break, it's great to be back teaching at the London School of English!

This year I've chosen to use Speak Out for General English and CAE Gold for my CAE group. I'll be sharing experiences, activities and teaching tips from these courses during the year, so be sure to keep checking the blog for updates!