Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (14 page)

You can use flash cards for vocabulary groups such as jobs, food, animals, weather and hobbies. Or how about having the infinitive verb form on the front, and the past simple and past participle on the back?

Likewise, try having opposites front and back.

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Drawings:
A simple stick figure drawing is enough to make students smile and give them something to talk about. If you’re a bit nervous about your art work, do it before the lesson and then just stick your picture to the board. Use a clipart website if you really can’t draw anything recognisable.

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Photos:
Celebrity photos seem to work particularly well in EFL lessons, perhaps because of the glamorous international flavour they give your lesson. Save old magazines, or even catalogues, as photographs are great for explaining the meaning of a word, or setting a context.

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Videos:
Short video clips really grab your students’ attention and lend themselves to further activities in the practice and production stages, which I cover in Chapter 6.

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Realia:
The term for real objects you use to help you teach. Students feel involved when they get to touch something or move it around.

Realia works to reinforce learning for visual and kinaesthetic learners alike.

In a lesson aimed at teaching ‘used to’ and ‘any more’ to contrast the past and present, you can bring in an old childhood photograph. I usually bring in a photograph of myself aged ten, dressed in school uniform and complete with dodgy 70s hairdo. First you find out if the students recognise you. Let them have a giggle and guess how old you are in the picture. Then tell them that you had hobbies at that age and ask students to make suggestions about what they were. Show the clues like stamps or a skipping rope. With each suggestion say ‘Yes, I used to . . . ’ or ‘No, I didn’t used to . . . ’. When they’ve guessed one or two hobbies correctly you can switch to the present and ask whether they think that you still do that activity. This leads to the statement, ‘I don’t do it any more’.

You can sometimes find cheap children’s games and activities that you can adapt for the classroom. For example, children’s playing cards are often pic-torial, showing animals or a variety of jobs. Model cars and trains are useful when you explain transport words or describe directions (left, right, forwards and so on).

Travelling along timelines and tenses

In TEFL and in Western cultures in general, you represent time as a straight horizontal line showing the past on the left and the future to the right. With a timeline, you can show how tenses refer to an aspect of time and compare them. So timelines are most common in a presentation of a new tense.

By using timelines you help students to understand the function of a tense –

what it does basically. However, you need to highlight the form of a tense or piece of grammar too. In other words, show exactly what it looks like.

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Showing simple tenses

When you want to show that an action is in a simple tense (present simple, past simple, or future simple) you put an individual point on the timeline with an X or a spot and label it, as in Figure 5-1.

Figure 5-1:

The spot

cinema

marks when

I went to the PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

cinema.

With a simple label you can elicit a statement in the past simple tense: ‘I went to the cinema’.

Likewise, you can demonstrate the simple future tense, as Figure 5-2 does for the statement, ‘I will go on holiday’.

Figure 5-2:

Showing the

holiday
X

simple, but

hopefully PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

fun, future.

Carrying through with continuous tenses

An action in a continuous tense (present continuous, past continuous and so on) should occupy more space on the timeline. You can emphasise the duration of time by using continuous X’s or a wavy line as in Figure 5-3.

Figure 5-3:

XXXX
I am speaking English now

Continuous

tenses take

more room. PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

You can use a similar method to show an action in the present perfect that started in the past but continues into the present.

From the timeline in Figure 5-4, you can elicit ‘I have lived/ have been living in London for a while’.

Figure 5-4:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
in London

The present

perfect on a

timeline. PAST

PRESENT

FUTURE

Adapting the timeline

When you use a timeline you can use specific times, days, months or years instead of past, present and future. In addition to that, you don’t need to include both ends of the line if one isn’t relevant.

In Figure 5-5, the timeline shows two actions in the past so the students can see what happened first and what happened later. For example, ‘I was hungry this morning because I hadn’t eaten’, which illustrates the past simple and past perfect tenses respectively.

Figure 5-5:

Not eat

hungry

Showing the

past simple

and perfect. THIS MORNING

PRESENT

Using the board effectively

Whenever you use the board, the first thing you should check is whether you have markers that work – pens or chalk – and then make sure that all the students can see the board. You may need to alter the seating.

Keep your board clutter-free at all costs. Nothing frustrates a student more than looking down at his notebook for a second, then looking up again to see a board so disorganised and busy that he can’t find the thing he wanted to copy down. Rub off information you no longer need. Clean the board before and after each lesson.

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Whatever you have on the board should be legible and logical. Some good practices for board work are:

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Writing in a straight line.

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Using different colours.

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Dividing the board into sections if you have slightly different fields to consider.

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Stepping back to check spelling and punctuation.

If you’re a bit poor at spelling, have dictionaries in the classroom and encourage students to check words for you as you write.

You can use the board quite a few ways to make meaning clearer through diagrams in the Presentation stage. For example, use diagrams like the one in Figure 5-6 to show clearly the relationship between items of vocabulary, including sub-ordinate groups or categories. You can have students add words to each group to demonstrate that they understand. It’s a fairly simple diagram to copy down too.

Fruit

pear

Fish

Vegetables

salmon

carrot

FOOD

GROUPS

Figure 5-6:

Showing

relation-

Meat

Carbohydrates

ships on the

chicken

pasta

board.

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

In Figure 5-7, I show some words for weather and how they’re related. You could elicit from the students a temperature for each box, for example.

Figure 5-7:

Diagram

boiling

hot

warm

mild

demonstrat-

ing how

weather

cool

cold

freezing

words relate.

So, the way you organise words on the board can show a hierarchy or a scale from most to least, best to worst and so on.

Depending on the topic, you can draw a chart or label a diagram to give visual input. For grammar presentations, charts and equations are very common.

In a lesson about asking questions, you can lay out the structure on the board this way:

Question word +

Auxiliary verb +

Subject word +

Infinitive verb

How does he travel?

Why

can

Roger

eat?

Where will

the

girls

stay?

Try to keep talking as you write on the board. Otherwise the atmosphere in class goes flat because of the silence and the fact that your back is turned. The students may also get up to mischief if you don’t keep them busy so it’s a good idea to elicit as you write.

Doing Concept Checks

It’s never useful to ask students if they understand. After all, how do they know whether they’ve misunderstood until they end up getting it wrong? So instead, you need to find out by getting the students to demonstrate understanding, usually through
concept check
questions. Concept check questions are questions that test understanding. For example, a concept check question for the word ‘breakfast’ is ‘What time do people usually eat breakfast?’ The student is only likely to get the answer right if he understands that breakfast is a morning meal.

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Translation isn’t used in most EFL classrooms, but it’s an easy way to check that students understand certain words. Sometimes you can do a straight, like-for-like substitution from one language to another. In this case the students translate in their heads by simply changing the label. However, checking a concept can be a challenging exercise when different cultural or religious perceptions are involved. For example, a bed may involve a mattress, headboard and base for some, a mat on the floor for others or a hammock for yet another culture. Is a bed a piece of furniture or just a place where you sleep?

If you don’t make clear what the concept behind the English word is, lines can become blurred.

Boundaries also exist between one word and another, and you need to define them. So for example what’s the difference between a bench and a sofa in practical and design terms? Clearly you can’t just describe them as long chairs.

Concept check questions come in various forms:

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Yes/no:
It’s quick and easy to ask closed questions. So for example, if you’re teaching vocabulary for vehicles you can ask:

• Is a van bigger than a car?

• Is a car bigger than a lorry?

Of course to make these questions work, the answer shouldn’t always be yes or always no. If it is, the students can work at your pattern and just bluff.

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Multiple choice:
Offering students a range of possibilities is another good way to concept check. Multiple choice questions don’t require students to come up with the vocabulary for the answer themselves but they do require a little more thought than closed questions if the options are similar. For example, in a lesson on the present perfect, ask students to tell you whether the action in the statement ‘I have seen the pyramids’. is in the past, the present or both past and present.

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Open questions:
When you ask students questions that start with words like ‘who’, ‘how’ and ‘why’, their answers needs to go beyond ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

They really have to think about it and use their own words to explain.

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Physical response:
Another approach is to ask the students to actually do something to show they understand. A phrasal verb is a verb together with a preposition that has a new meaning, often different from the meaning of the verb by itself. ‘To pick’ means to select whereas the phrasal verb ‘to pick up’ means to raise it from a surface. You can read more about phrasal verbs in Chapter 17. So for example, during a lesson on phrasal verbs including ‘pick up’ and ‘hold on’ you can give commands such as: ‘Pick up your purple pen now but hold on until I say “Write this down”’. If they do what you say you can tell that they understand.

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Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

Don’t spend time on inessentials. A basic object like a bath plug doesn’t really warrant having much time spent on it as most people rarely say the word, and a verbal explanation is more complex than the object itself.

Introducing Vocabulary

When it comes to teaching vocabulary, the Presentation stage can include a combination of any of these things:

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Meaning:
Sometimes a straightforward definition

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Synonyms:
Similar words

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Antonyms:
Opposites

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Connotation:
The emotion a word conveys

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Spelling:
Self, explanatory, hopefully

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Collocation:
Words that fit together

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Syntax:
An explanation of how a word fits into a sentence grammatically

‘To like’ is followed by a noun, an infinitive or a gerund: to like something, to like to do something and to like doing something.

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Register:
How (in)formal it is.

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Pronunciation:
This can include transcription into phonemes, marking the stressed syllable and drilling (repeating).

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Word families:
You can introduce other words that come from the same root. For example:

• to inherit (verb)

• inheritance (noun, thing)

•

hereditary

(adjective)

• heir (noun, person)

• heiress (noun, woman only)

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Visuals:
Pictures, mimes, realia, board work and so on.

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Part of speech:
A noun, a verb and so on. (I talk about the parts of speech in Chapter 15.)