I’ve been trying more actively to incorporate elements of storytelling of late, and found a nice opportunity for a mini-videotelling this week which I wanted to share, along with the revisions I’d make. Videotelling, a term coined by Jamie Keddie, describes a kind of storytelling for the youtube age, exploiting the narrative of an engaging videoclip through… Continue reading Videotelling: Narrative Tenses with ‘A Thousand Words’
Ok this is a silly little post. I’ve just arrived in Ho Chi Minh City and everything’s been a bit hectic (expect a mega-blog-post in the next day or two) but despite being busy, I’m apparently still doomed to see everything through lens of lesson planning. Today’s inspiration for a cheeky lead-in activity came courtesy of… Continue reading DIY YL Jigsaw
This post was inspired by an ELTJam post I recently came across and is also an excuse to… a. make my FIRST EVER GIF!!! and… b. revive cuisenaire rods. Poor little things deserted in the back of staffroom cupboards around the world. While avoiding the term l***ning sty*e here, I absolutely love the visceral handling of these… Continue reading My Life Story: Expressing the Hypothetical with Cuisenaire Rods
I’m taking a bit of a liberty claiming to have adapted this activity, as I had the advantage of very high level students to road test it with. This term I found myself in the odd situation of teaching an elective course to a class including one native speaker (Colorado, born and raised) and several other bilingual students alongside… Continue reading Adapting Socratic Seminars for the EFL Classroom
Another tried and tested activity that I came back to recently. It’s meant to encourage students to be more active listeners through use of back-channeling devices i.e. the things we do/say to show our interlocutor when we are listening to them. It’s particularly useful where one speaker is dominant, for example, when telling an anecdote, or gossiping.… Continue reading Back-Channel Bingo
As so often happens last minute cover lessons turn out to be much better than anything I’ve spent hours planning. This was a fun last minute cover for an upper-int “Business Conversation” class (Look, I did a dogme!). I’d already covered the previous class in which we’d talked about good and bad bosses and covered a… Continue reading Good Boss / Bad Boss: Speaking Strategies
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