TEFL GUINEA PIGS

The main goal of today's lesson was the discovery of the Past Perfect Tense and the controlled and freer practice with it. I started with the pronunciation exercise on p. 71, which was a spontaneous follow-up on an exercise that was set for homework. I decided to board and elicit the differences in pronunciation when "the" comes before a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a consonant. I boarded, elicited pronunciation and wrote phonetic transcription for the following words appearing in the exercise: the Pacific /ðə 'pəsifik/ the Amazon /ði: 'æməzon/ the Andes /ði: 'ændi:z/ I successfully elicited the rules for using /ðə '/ before consonants and /ði: '/ before vowels. Next we moved on to the text that served as the starting point for the grammar discovery. I pre-taught vocabulary by writing a few words, expressions on the board and eliciting the meaning ( set off , second-hand , run out of luck , steam ). Th...

The goal of today's lesson was to get the students familiar with a more sophisticated language of travel advertisements. They had to read a short advertisement on p. 69 (New Inside Out intermediate) and do the following exercises as their homework. I often try to set exercises from the student's book as homework because I prefer my students to read at home, especially longer texts. I prefer to assign the reading tasks from the student's book to the ones in the workbook because there isn't a key for them so they really have to make an effort. Also, as my Russian DOS taught me, reading longer texts is not very communicative and should be set as homework. This was a short text but since the language is quite sophisticated I thought it was apt for homework. The text did prove challenging for them. It contains words like: trawling nets, canopy (of trees), coral gardens, select community of travellers . To check the understanding of this vocabulary I created the worksheets wh...

Recently I have posted my first worksheet on ISLCollective . For those who don't now it's an excellent site with TEFL resources where you can freely download but also share your original material. The worksheet that I created deals with differences between "anyway", "apparently" and "actually". I felt the urge to create this worksheet because these words appeared (among others) in a gap fill exercise in the book New Inside Out  intermediate( SB, p. 65, informal email). As a way of preteaching I decided to focus on these three adverbs which all begin with the same letter and are of similar length, which might make them difficult to differentiate for students at this level. I had found the sentences used in the exercise on the Internet and in some cases I have slightly altered them to make the gap-fill as unambiguous as possible. The worksheet has proved successful and the students didn't have problems doing the exercise after I had put a few...

The objective of this blog is to record real life situations in a TEFL classroom and to summarize successful and unsuccessful aspects of a particular class with addition of subsequent analyses. The name of the blog is "TEFL guinea pigs" because that's what I sometimes jokingly call my students when I give them a worksheet that I created or when I am trying out an original methodological approach. In this blog I will focus on language and methodology related topics and anything else that I might deem important for a successful English class. A little bit about me: I am a CELTA-certified English teacher with work experience in Russia, Ireland and Germany. I currently work and reside in Berlin.