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Use the Search or Lessons and Activities boxes on the right of the screen to find lessons and activities that are relevant to the class you are teaching and the aim of the lesson. Below are simply the most recent additions.

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Enjoy your lessons

Coming soon:

Some practise activities for past passive √

Using smart phones and QR codes in the classroom √

Encouraging extensive reading in B1-B2 learners by using a murder mystery game

Comparatives (and Superlatives) using Top Trumps cards

Promoting Speaking fluency in the classroom

A murder mystery (to encourage extensive reading!)

Extensive reading is reading large amounts (typically books) for pleasure.

It’s undoubtedly a great way to learn languages since it gives students encounters with new vocabulary and grammatical structures in a variety of contexts.

The problem for B1 and B2 level learners is that reading in English is difficult, there are too many new words, readers stop to look-up the words too often, they re-read whole paragraphs multiple times to decipher the meaning and all this stops reading being a fun experience.

Scanning (or reading quickly for specific information) is a common reading technique that’s used for example looking at train timetables, or finding the date of an event on a poster. It can also be used to encourage learners to prioritise important vocabulary during extensive reading and not focus too much on each individual word.

Aim: To improve students’ ability to scan for information in a complex text in order to increase motivation and encourage learners to attempt extensive reading for the first time.

Level B1-B2

Here is just a summary of the activity. For more detailed instructions check the worksheet here (or in the dropbox on the right).

The story

The teacher sets the scene of the crime through a story (with the help of pictures from the dropbox or here). The teacher then checks that students have understood the scene-setting story and some important vocabulary by asking concept checking questions. “Who was the victim?/Who was killed?”.

The students are the police and it is their job to investigate the crime and find the killer with the help of the evidence that the detectives find and the police profiles of the suspects.

The teacher hands out the police profiles, one to each student – these are slightly abridged (to fit on one page) Wikipedia articles with the names changed and an added appearance section. You’re welcome to tell the students that they are copied from real Wikipedia articles. Hand out the suspect grid checklist and ask students to write the name and the job of the suspect on the grid checklist.

Present the first piece of evidence to the students using the pictures in this folder of the dropbox (a police report saying the murderer was very clever and probably had a good education). Students should read the text as fast as possible (or the killer will escape) to see if the evidence matches their suspect and tick/cross as appropriate. They can also copy the relevant text from the police file to support their choice. Each police file and grid checklist is then passed to a new student (clockwise), some new evidence is presented to the students and the students again quickly scan the text to check whether it matches their suspect.

 

Students should be discouraged from asking the teacher or checking every new word. Instead encourage students to read quickly to find if the evidence matches, nothing else matters as we need to catch the killer as soon as possible. Allow student to ask/check essential vocabulary but limit them to 4-5 words for the whole activity to encourage them to prioritise content words.

Once the students have finished with all the evidence they’ll need to share their findings (since each student checked off different information about different characters) with the other students in the class in order to decide who is the murderer. They could do this in a number of ways

1. a class discussion
2. feedback as a whole class where the teacher collects the information together on the board
3. a mingle activity (everyone stands up and wonders around talking to everyone else and completing more and more of their table)
4. a pyramid discussion (students join together in pairs to discuss, pairs then join together to make groups of 4, groups of 4 then join together, ending with a class discussion)

There are advantages and disadvantages to all of these methods.

Important: In keeping with the aims of the lesson, ask students if they feel they have improved their reading speed (through repeated reading of texts that shared a number of features which increase familiarity. Remind them that they have read a number of pages from real (adapted) Wikipedia articles in English and encourage them to start reading articles or books in English in their spare time as a method of improving their English. They shouldn’t look up every word they don’t understand as this is painful and discouraging. I often tell students to read a page and think at the end of the page if they understood what happened in the story. If not they should look up a maximum of 3-4 words a page. This encourages learners to deduce the meaning of other words from context and prioritise important content words from the text.

(Research shows that extensive reading improves reading speed as well as vocabulary and grammar acquisition by multiple encounters with words and structures in context).

Full materials in the dropbox on the right or

Instructions, key, character profile files, checklist grid

Pictures to illustrate the story

Pictures of the characters (to pre-teach appearance vocabulary or use during feedback to identify the killer)

Intro, Practice and Production for Past Passive

Introduction

Most students will know the phrase “made in ____” followed by a country and this is a great starting point for introducing the passive. Write on the board “My _____ was made in _____”. Stand in the middle of the room and ask students to give you something that was made in a country other than the one where they live. When you collect the pens, phones, jackets, hats and other items insist that students give you a complete passive sentence as they hand it to you (point at the board if necessary).

Sometimes I reinforce by doing the activity in reverse. Hold up an item that you collected in the previous activity and ask students where they think it was made (the person who owns the object can’t guess). You can then ask students “who made it?” (which is usually met by confused looks),”errr, people?”. Teacher: “Oh, so people in (Bangladesh) made this (hat) “to make clear the equivalent active structure. Then ask students if it’s important that “people” made it. This draws attention to why the passive is used as opposed to the active in this context.

Practice

At this point I would typically do a grammar exercise from a textbook, ideally one that contains a record of the passive form for students to refer to (alternatively this could be done on the board for students to copy). Identifying passives in a text is a good activity for raising awareness followed by some restricted, guided practice in completing passive sentences. I think it’s important for students to be able to do some guided written work at their own pace as it helps them to grasp the new structure rather than pressing on with another game or whole-class activity.

Free Practice and Production

Another bit that uses a past passive exercise as an example and deserved it’s own post on this blog.
Webquests using smartphones and QR codes

I often use a version of this from Alex Case on Tefl-tastic (although sometimes with different verbs depending on the students, book and level)
Passives Disasters (Stories, dominoes, pelmanism)
It’s a nice authentic use of a lot of past passive structures and students generally enjoy making up such an outrageous story.

Passives Disasters storytelling/ dominoes/ pelmanism

Passives Webquest using smartphones and QR codes!

Background on QR codes and web-quests

A lot of people are put off using technology in the classroom out of fear that something might go wrong, they’re not confident in the technology they’re using or another reason. But with an increasing number of students who have smart phones and an increasing number of schools with a wi-fi connection it gives teachers the opportunity to rely on the technology our students carry with them every day.

QR codes are basically a mixture of a square barcode and a hyperlink, they look like this

(This links to the “write to this page” of magical tefl)

and can be found on everything from cans of cola to leaflets and flyers. A smart phone with QR-code reader app can scan the QR code and take you directly to a certain website or to some text that isn’t on a website.

It’s easy to create your own QR codes using a site such as this, just copy and paste the internet link (or choose the “plain text” option and write the text), click download QR code. Then save and print the image.

Using QR codes allows us to direct students to specific websites without them wasting time searching for the wrong information or otherwise getting lost on the web.

Web-quests are becoming increasingly popular. They’re the brainchild of Bernie Dodge at San Diego state university. It’s an inquiry based approach to learning where the information comes from the web. More information about webquests can be found here.

Level:B1 upwards

Aim:  To give learners less restricted practise using the past simple passive, to encourage learners to scan-read authentic texts

For this kind of activity to work around half of your students need to have a smart phone with wireless internet access and a QR code reader (check the lesson before). Your school will also need a wi-fi connection (unless your students are happy to pay for their own internet use).

Make sure you’ve presented and practised the past simple passive with your learners before you do this activity

see: Introducing the past passive

Give students the past passive timeline and tell them their task is to complete the 10 items on the timeline using past simple passive together with either a date or a person (or both) (give an example: Big Ben was built in 1858)

Tell the students that the information they need to complete the timeline is in the sites on the QR codes. Write the wireless password on the board (if there is one).

Hand out the QR codes on a piece of paper (they link to a variety of sources, mostly the simplified English version of pages on wikipedia.org ). You could give a set of QR codes to each group of students (2-3) with a smart phone or you could cut them out and stick them around the classroom with blue-tack. Check the instructions have been understood. Go!

Monitor students carefully to help with misunderstandings, particularly linked to the target language of passive structures but also with technology issues depending on your students.

Obviously the QR codes part of this lesson isn’t strictly necessary. If you want to do the same thing you could either a) simplify the timeline so that students don’t need extra info to complete the sentences. b) print off the websites and hand paper copies to students. The advantage of using the QR codes is that it’s more interesting and motivating whilst also hiding the amount of reading that students are required to do (10 Wikipedia articles!). 

Any other bright ideas for using QR codes in the classroom? Let me know or comment below.