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 where they have to match pictures and vocabulary. The link to the worksheet is attached at the end of this post.
Later the students had to write a few sentences themselves as if they were meant for a travel ad. It had to be about the place they visited. They were encouraged to use the boarded vocabulary and constructions from the ads on p. 69. Finally they were asked to read their ads to their partners.
In the second part of the class the students did the grammar discovery for the modals of deduction and a lot of controlled as well as some freer practice.. I used additional exercises from the book English File intermediate. The students didn't have problems with the discovery nor with the controlled practice exercises, which was a valuable reminder for me that this is a grammar point that goes very smoothly and therefore doesn't take up a lot of time. Luckily I had overplanned for this lesson and had a lot of controlled practice exercises that enabled me to keep them busy for the rest of these three 60-minute academic hours, but I would advise everyone to be aware that this grammar point doesn't need too much explaining and it's all pretty straightforward and not very time-consuming.
Freer practice was very successful with the exercise 2 on p 71 (New Inside Out) (pairwork) and ex. 5 on p. 60 of English File.
I used L1 in explaining that Modals of deductions are used to express "Vermutung" in German. Many students can't grasp the concept of deduction. I sometimes give an example of a logical syllogism to explain what it is. Something like: "All cows are animals; all animals breathe; therefore all cows breathe".
Something that I forgot to do during the pretaching of the vocabulary is to compare and juxtapose "overlook" and "oversee". One of the students found the meaning for "overlook" as "to manage/supervise". I told her that the usage was archaic but it was a good opportunity to introduce "oversee", which I did the next day during the vocabulary revision.
https://en.islcollective.com/resources/printables/worksheets_doc_docx/pre-teaching_vocab_inside_out_p_69/tourism/102631
Tuesday, November 21, 2017
Monday, November 20, 2017
Anyway/Apparently/Actually
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 similar example sentences on the board and elicited rules summarized at the top of the worksheet: "anyway" (used to change the subject), "apparently" ("obviously", "a rumour I heard"), and "actually" (used for emphasis).
The example sentence for "actually" went something like this:
"A: Are you sad that you failed the test? B: Actually, I am relieved."
After boarding this exchange it was elicited that "actually" is used for emphasis but also to express contrast. Since this was a class of primarily German speakers I also elicited the translation of this word ("eigentlich") which has a similar usage in German.
The example sentence for "apparently" went something like this:
"Did you hear about Sarah? Apparently she got divorced."
I elicited the function of "apparently" for mentioning something that you're not 100 % sure of but you might have heard in the form of a rumour or a gossip. Then I also elicited the translation ("offensichtlich"), which is the second meaning of this word and is clearly presented with the example sentence 6. of the gap-fill exercise.
I focused on the function of "anyway" as a colloquial word for changing the subject of a conversation.
At this point I didn't want to confuse the students with other possible functions of "anyway" like the one presented in this example sentence: "I didn't like you anyway." I just thought it would be too much for them and this function wasn't needed for doing the exercise in the New Inside Out book. When creating original worksheets like this I tend to focus only on what is needed to do the exercise successfully. I find it very useful to model the pre-teaching part precisely on the exercise that comes after. That way there are no surprises and the students can completely rely on the rules.
This is a link to the worksheet published on the ISL Collective site. I was glad to discover that in only four days the worksheet has been downloaded 16 times so apparently there is a need to differentiate and practice the usage of these three adverbs.
https://en.islcollective.com/resources/printables/worksheets_doc_docx/actuallyapparentlyanyway/adverbs/102517
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 similar example sentences on the board and elicited rules summarized at the top of the worksheet: "anyway" (used to change the subject), "apparently" ("obviously", "a rumour I heard"), and "actually" (used for emphasis).
The example sentence for "actually" went something like this:
"A: Are you sad that you failed the test? B: Actually, I am relieved."
After boarding this exchange it was elicited that "actually" is used for emphasis but also to express contrast. Since this was a class of primarily German speakers I also elicited the translation of this word ("eigentlich") which has a similar usage in German.
The example sentence for "apparently" went something like this:
"Did you hear about Sarah? Apparently she got divorced."
I elicited the function of "apparently" for mentioning something that you're not 100 % sure of but you might have heard in the form of a rumour or a gossip. Then I also elicited the translation ("offensichtlich"), which is the second meaning of this word and is clearly presented with the example sentence 6. of the gap-fill exercise.
I focused on the function of "anyway" as a colloquial word for changing the subject of a conversation.
At this point I didn't want to confuse the students with other possible functions of "anyway" like the one presented in this example sentence: "I didn't like you anyway." I just thought it would be too much for them and this function wasn't needed for doing the exercise in the New Inside Out book. When creating original worksheets like this I tend to focus only on what is needed to do the exercise successfully. I find it very useful to model the pre-teaching part precisely on the exercise that comes after. That way there are no surprises and the students can completely rely on the rules.
This is a link to the worksheet published on the ISL Collective site. I was glad to discover that in only four days the worksheet has been downloaded 16 times so apparently there is a need to differentiate and practice the usage of these three adverbs.
https://en.islcollective.com/resources/printables/worksheets_doc_docx/actuallyapparentlyanyway/adverbs/102517
Thursday, November 16, 2017
Introduction to this blog
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.
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