Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (16 page)

7. Complete the examples for each stage by eliciting the words and writing them on the board:

Object

+ to be in present simple + past participle + where/how long

The water

is

put

into a container

It

is

placed

into the freezer

It

is

left

for two hours

8. Demonstrate how to transform one sentence into a negative and one
into a question on the board:

• Is the container placed in the fridge?

• It isn’t left for two minutes.

Check that your students understand the concept by asking:

✓

Who puts the water into the freezer. Is it important?

✓

Are the sentences in the past or present simple?

✓

What’s the difference between the present simple active and passive?

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Chapter 6

Holding the Reins and

Letting Them Loose –

Giving Students Practice

In This Chapter

▶ Practising new vocabulary

▶ Introducing production activities

▶ Mastering the art of giving instructions

▶ Grouping students

▶ Organising practice and production activities

Most teachers plan EFL lessons in three stages – Presentation, Practice and Production. How to handle the first stage is the focus of Chapter 5. In this chapter, I tell you about the differences between the Practice and Presentation stages and offer suggestions for activities.

Experts generally agree that people learn languages by listening before speaking. In a similar way, the class hears what you have to say and they begin to own the piece of language themselves.

Practising New Words

The second stage of the lesson, called Practice, or more specifically, Controlled Practice, is an important period of transition for the students. During the Presentation stage, students are fairly passive as you explain the form and function of the new piece of language. During the third Production stage students have freer expression. During the practice stage, they repeat what they learned in a controlled situation before moving into the more active Production stage. This means that you set the students an exercise with entirely predictable answers and these answers are rather repetitious because they’re designed to practise the new piece of language several times over. So in this part of the 86
Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together

lesson you aim to get the students concentrating on the new words or grammar without them showing off everything else they know. The students take their first tentative steps at using the words to test whether they can get it right.

Some of the many benefits of the Practice activities include:

✓

They help the students to focus on accuracy.
This doesn’t mean that the activities should be dry, meaningless exercises like the old days of Latin lessons. It’s very important that you challenge students with an activity that can only be completed if they really understand how the piece of language works. You should be able to predict the the students’

responses, though. In these exercises the answers are predictable because there’s only one correct way to complete the sentences. In the following examples the only possible answers are
have, has
and/or the past participle form of the verb given
.

An example of a
bad
practice activity first:

Complete these sentences in the Present Perfect

Example: I . . . (have) seen that movie.

They . . . visited the zoo.

You . . . read that book.

We . . . eaten there.

Students can simply take a guess and write ‘have’ in every gap. Here’s an improvement:

Complete these sentences in the Present Perfect, using the verb in parentheses.

Example: I . . . have seen . . . that movie. (to see)

They . . . the zoo. (to visit)

She . . . that book. (to read)

We . . . there. (to eat)

Notice that students have to apply the grammar rule more vigorously to come up with ‘has’ for the third person
she.

✓

These exercises force attention on the new piece of language through
frequent repetition.
Students can fix their attention on the new point without being distracted by too many other rules they’ve learned.

At the same time, by repeating the new language, students form new habits in the brain.

✓

This type of exercise allows students to come to a gradual recognition
of the new language in a safe way.
That is to say, the students feel very supported.

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One thing to avoid is letting students make a habit of an error. Once engrained, bad habits are really difficult to root out. For example, students say things like

‘Is good!’ and ‘I gonna do it’, even though they know the correct grammar, just because no one forced them to break the habit initially. So while the students are practising, monitor closely.

This practice is called
controlled
because of the limited range of what the students have to do, not because you stand over them commenting on every word. That would be counter-productive. You need to step back and let them get on with it, but make notes.

Use the feedback session immediately after the activity to root out any problems you’ve picked up on and tackle additional questions from the students.

Keep the target language as priority though. After all, if you spend too much time going through errors in other areas, students may forget what the primary aim of the lesson is. You can cover any significant error that’s off the point right at the end of the lesson.

Make your Practice activities long enough to allow you to go round and listen to everyone in the class. You’re bound to miss some errors, but that’s life! And by the way, arrange the room so you can walk around as easily as possible.

Practising with the whole class first

During Presentation you had the attention of the entire class (hopefully).

So the transition from Presentation to Practice is seamless if you continue to work with the entire group. This also allows you to offer correction that benefits everyone; after all, the students are likely to make similar errors. You can egg them on, offer reassurance that they’re doing well and quickly spot anything you’d forgotten to include, before the students work in small groups out of earshot. Doing practice activities with the whole class gives students tools for doing the activity that follows, because the practice activities serve as examples.

Pairing up with a student

Open pairs is one way of practising while you remain in control. In an
open
pairs
exercise, you ask a student questions or role play in full view and hearing of everyone else in the room. The class sees an example of how to use the new piece of language, but because you’re one of the partners in the exchange, the level of accuracy is very high. Students also know that you’ll point out immediately any mistake made by your partner.

You can continue open pairs with two students as partners, but still in front of everyone else. You have slightly less control but still plenty of opportunity for correction – by you or the classmates.

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If you’re practising the future perfect tense, you can proceed this way: Teacher: Mary Jo, what do you think you’ll have done by the time you’re 30?

Mary Jo: I think that I’ll having a baby by the time I’m 30.

Teacher: Could you repeat your sentence using the correct from of ‘have’?

Mary Jo (refers back to the board): Oh yes! I’ll have had a baby.

Teacher: Well done! Ask Olivia a question in the future perfect please.

Mary Jo: Olivia what will you have done by the time you’re 60?

Olivia: I’ll have travelled the world.

Using the board

You can involve the whole class by putting gapped sentences or questions on the board. You can then ask for a volunteer to fill in the correct answer.

Alternatively, if you plan to give the students written exercises you can include a set of questions on the worksheet that the whole class can discuss before individual study.

Practising alone

Controlled Practice activities that students do alone are based on listening, reading or writing.

Even when students work alone, they can still compare their answers in pairs afterwards to add a communicative element to the activity.

Recognising the structure

Activities that help students recognise the new structure or vocabulary may be in the form of a text (listening or reading). Students can assess it and note examples of the new structure.

Read the story and underline all the verbs in the Present Continuous.

Monique is an accountant. She works at home. This morning she’s using her computer in the kitchen. She’s looking at a lot of information but she doesn’t think it’s difficult. She’s very clever with numbers. Monique is wearing her tennis clothes because she wants to play tennis with her friends when she stops working. She isn’t thirsty, because she’s drinking a cup of coffee too.

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Remember that students need a challenge. In this exercise I include another gerund (stops working) to see whether the students can distinguish between this structure and the Present Continuous, which always includes the verb ‘to be’ plus a gerund.

Finding specific words in a text

You can use other ways to use a text without underlining tenses. When you’re doing a vocabulary based lesson, try using identifying and categorising tasks.

This exercise from a more advanced lesson is about descriptions of personality.

Decide whether the underlined words are positive, negative or neutral and write each under one of the headings after the passage. Cheerful is already slotted for you.

There are five people in my department. Sometimes we get on well but there’s also friction when we’re under pressure. Bill is the most ambitious. He’s pretty frank but on the whole a cheerful chap. Then there’s Rick who has more experience than the rest of us so he’s a shrewd character. Being more mature he likes to be selective about the projects we take on. Sarah and Beverley are both very cooperative but Sarah is far more assertive.

Positive Negative Neutral

cheerful

Mixing up anagrams

You’re probably familiar with
anagrams,
which are basically words with the letters jumbled up. By putting the letters in order, the students not only have to remember the words but also make sure of the spelling of the new words.

Put the letters in order to find three sports

lolyallevb: volleyball

skoorne:

scattehil:

The last two are
snooker
and
athletics
in case you’re wondering!

Scrambling sentences

To practise the word order of a particular structure you can design an exercise in which words in a sentence are jumbled.

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Put the words in order to make a third conditional sentence.

If Joanne was her boyfriend have known that 60 old years she never would gone had out with him.

If Joanne had . . .

Transforming tenses

This traditional exercise in language courses works best when there’s a clear context instead of arbitrary sentences. The idea is to set out one tense (or structure) and have the students accurately exchange it for another.

Make one sentence using the Past Continuous.

She typed the letter from 7.30 to 7.45. At 7.40 the telephone rang.

While she . . .

You can use timelines and pictures to generate sentences too.

Matching exercises

Activities in which students have to match opposites, or words and pictures or make other similar connections are very controlled and also useful for getting students accustomed to new words.

In a lesson on classroom language, you can have students match verbs and activities together:

raise

to your partner

ask

the gaps

compare your

hand

talk

your answers

fill in

a question

Practising in pairs

When students work in pairs they can practise their speaking and get to know each other better. Lessons are livelier than with solo activities and classmates can spur each other on and offer correction.

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To encourage communication in pairs, get students to share some materials by handing out one worksheet or text for two students to share. If it’s something they each want to keep, you can give out another copy later.

You need to have your wits about you for pair work activities. It isn’t quite as easy to control students when they’re all speaking at once and the noise level can be pretty high. However the students are generally happier because they’re actively involved.

I talk about pair exercise in the next sections.

Ranking

With a list of vocabulary you can have pairs discuss the appropriate rank from best to worst, or most to least useful perhaps. You can have students practise the target vocabulary and the expressions for justifying opinions as well. You need to have taught them expressions of opinion well beforehand, though, and you can use examples by first of all asking a few students, in front of the whole class, for their opinions about the vocabulary.

With your partner, decide on the most important electrical items from the list to have in a kitchen with 1 the most important item and 8 the least important.