Reteach, reuse, recycle - activities to help vocabulary to stick.

Confession time: reviewing vocabulary with students is not my strongest point. This isn't necessarily a problem, since many higher level classes don't need so much help: I've tended to advise students on how they can research a word online to learn pronunciation, definitions, collocations, related words and example sentences then largely leave them to it. (1)

But there are students who don't yet have these independent study skills, and generally also for lower levels much more scaffolding will be needed.

So here's a roundup of ideas and activities for reviewing vocabulary from around the web, and a few thoughts of my own.

He's sorry, he's sorry, he's so so sorry (a lesson on apologies)

You may have seen Nick Clegg apologising about increased tuition fees a few months ago.  You may also have seen how his speech was turned into a chart-topping song by a smart alec using Autotune.  (If you haven't seen either one, you may have been on a desert island somewhere.)

Anyway, this has a lot of potential for a lesson on etiquette, politics, quirks of British culture, or all of the above.  Here's how:

First of all, play the video, and ask students to listen to discover what he's apologising for.  It's possible that some students will have seen the clip before, and some of them may even know who Nick Clegg is (although I think in the average class this is unlikely!).  You could also ask them whether they think he is sincere, and why.

This Little Piggy went to Market...

If you're lucky enough to have a good local market, it can be an excellent destination for a class trip, providing numerous opportunities for language practice and discovery.  Here are a few ideas for activities for a market excursion:

Great Videos part 2

This is part 2 of a short series sharing some of my favourite videos to use in class, along with a variety of suggestions for different lesson activities.  For part 1, see here.

3) Are you Typical?

What it is:

A presentation of population data from National Geographic (trust me - much more interesting than it sounds!), including working out the age, nationality and face of the 'typical' human alive at this time.

In class you could:

2 Great Videos to use in Class

The Internet, to misquote Douglas Adams, is big. Really big. Vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big.  (And it's mostly cats).

Even if you discount the cats, there's still so much just out there that the good stuff can be hard to find, especially when it comes to video.  And if we find it, what to do with it?  We can do better than gap-fill exercises using clips of Nineties comedy shows, can't we?

So, in this and my next post I'm sharing some of my favourite videos, with a few ideas on how to use them in a language lesson.

The Christmas Post

Merry Christmas!

I'm off for a couple of weeks, but normal service will be resumed in January.  For now, here's a video of someone gift-wrapping a cat!

Have a great Christmas / holiday / whatever, and see you in the new year.

Interactive Resources: doing it right

Sometimes 'interactive' means 'get students to do a traditional multiple choice quiz on the computer', and sometimes it means 'invite students to explore a professionally produced multimedia resource which has quality content and more than one possible learning application.'  Guess which sort I prefer!

The following three resources stand out to me for their depth of content and production quality.  Although none was produced specifically for an English teaching context, they can all be integrated smoothly into lessons on a variety of typical topic areas - and I have used them all successfully with my classes.

Track an Email with Google Green

The first site is The Story of Send, produced by Google Green.  This is an interactive journey following the path of an email from your computer, through Google's data centres, all the way to the eventual recipient.  On the way, guided by appealing animated characters, you can use text, video and photo galleries to learn about data security and green technology.  The text is in bitesize chunks, and introduces complex technology in an approachable way.  You can also use more or less of the site depending on student level and time constraints, by skipping some of the multimedia content.