Writing in Class - a Waste of Time?

The class sits in silence, apart from the rustling of paper and the scratch of pens.  Meanwhile, the teacher stares off into space, completes her marking, surreptitiously checks her texts or reads the newspaper.  Through the walls drift the sounds of another class apparently having a lot more fun - they are watching a video, playing a raucous game, talking and laughing loudly...  Sound familiar?

Writing in class is a tricky area: some teachers swear by it, while others consider it to be a total waste of time  for all concerned.  Here are some of the most common arguments:

Hitting the doldrums - or not

When you start teaching, everything's a blur, but after a few months or a couple of years, you can suddenly realise that you're in a rut, without even knowing how you got there.  You know what you're doing (or at least you think you do), you have a repertoire of lesson ideas, mountains of photocopies that you might use again one day, and just that nagging feeling that something isn't quite right.  Somewhere along the way, after you lost the sense of panic, you also lost some of your drive and enthusiasm.

So how can you get them back?  How can you stop the doldrums turning into your permanent teaching home?

Here are my top tips:

Tired Lesson Topics, and what you can do to revitalise them

It's no accident that so many textbooks cover the same old topics.  Family, hobbies, education, work and all the rest of them are exam and textbook staples precisely because they are real-life conversational staples as well.  The problem starts when teacher, students or both are bored by the topic because they've covered it so many times before: when Unit 1 is predictably going to be family and talking about yourself, when food is inevitably the topic for teaching countable and uncountable nouns (yawn), and when you realise that you could actually teach that lesson on the environment (using future forms or conditionals) in your sleep, because you've done the same thing so many times before.

This is for those times.  Here are some techniques for adapting typical ELT activities, and a few less obvious ways of approaching traditional topics.