Category: Listening

Grammar, Listening, speaking, vocabulary, writing

Creative writing: The holidays

Astrid van Houwelingen

The holidays are always exciting moments for students. Whether it is Halloween, Christmas or some other local holiday, they are sure to get your students wriggling in their seats with anticipation. Why not make use of this time of year and ask your students to channel their excitement into some creative writing and story telling? And while we’re at it, throw in some revision too. Two birds one stone anyone?

The Basics

Level: B1-C2 (Pre-Intermediate, Intermediate, Upper-intermediate, Advanced)
Focus: Listening, revising vocabulary and grammar, creative writing, speaking
Time: 120 minutes divided over two lessons
Materials: Computer with audio, vocabulary list, grammar overview, writing materials

Aim

Students revise their vocabulary and grammar. This can be done either before a test or after you have set some revision homework. They also do some creative writing and storytelling.

The task

We all love to hear a good story. Writing one can be a challenge but it does provide for a great deal of language output and therefore a chance to revise what students have learned. In the slides below you will find a two-hour lesson. Students will write their own holiday related story in the first lesson (in this case a Halloween story). In the second lesson students will read their stories to each other, battling it out in a story battle. To motivate students to include their revision work the story battle works with a point system. The more vocabulary and grammar they include the more points their story has to begin with. The winner can be awarded a prize of some sort (some students work harder with chocolate in sight) or dish out some ‘eternal fame’ (or ‘lame’, as one of my students called it).

Additional ideas

Although the lesson in the slides is Halloween themed, it is easy enough to transform this into a Chrismas themed lesson. It could also be used more broadly as a lesson to be done before students are off on their spring or summer holidays. In that case you could ask your students to write about their best, most amazing, imagined holiday. You do not actually have to leave your chair to imagine where you could go or what you could do with your free time, do you?

Over to you: Do you feel like your students could write a longer piece of text like this? And how do you address the holidays in your lessons? I would love to hear your ideas in the comments.

Have fun teaching! ^_^

Love,

Astrid

Listening

Listening: Bluff the listener

Astrid van Houwelingen

For English teachers there are a myriad of resources to expose our students to real-life English language. It is just a matter of finding suitable material. It can be hazardous and time consuming to find a fragment that is just the right language level, the right length and interesting as well.

Thank the internet for podcasts. These freely available radio shows are a gold mine when it comes to suitable listening material. They cover fun and interesting topics on all aspects of society. There are great shows which are masterpieces of storytelling such as Radiolab, This American Life, The Moth and Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!.

This last podcast (for the ones who are not familiar with it) is a news quiz in which the hosts and three comedians review the week’s news in several quizzes. These fragments are fun, current and best of all: between two and ten minutes per fragment. Perfect for an authentic, real-life listening assignment!

The Basics

Level: B2-C1 (Upper-intermediate, Advanced)
Focus: Listening to a longer piece of text, summarizing, speaking
Time: 20 minutes
Materials: Speakers and internet connection, students need pen and paper

Aim

Students will learn to focus on a longer piece of audio. They will practise taking notes in key words and verbally summarize what they heard. They can pick out the main idea of a fragment.

The Task

In the slideshow you will find a step-by-step lesson plan which can be used with little preparation. All it takes is going through the slides beforehand so you know what to expect. Before you present this to your students, double check if the audio fits their level of English.

Additional ideas

The podcast releases a new episode every week. You could adapt the audio so it is related to the week’s news.

You could easily extend this into a writing activity. Have groups of three students find a remarkable but true news story. Then one student summarizes the real story while the two other students come up with a fabricated story on the same topic that could be true. Students present their quiz to the class. The rest of the class votes on the story they think was the real story.

If you want to add an element of competition to the task you could add a points system where the students who guess correctly get a point whilst the students who chose the wrong story give a point to the story they chose (whilst they themselves receive none of course). The student with the most points in total wins.

Over to you: Do you ever use real-life materials in your lessons? What do you do with those materials? I’d love to hear your ideas.

Have fun teaching! ^_^

Love,

Astrid