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What a Boring Page!
- Take a particularly uninteresting page from your coursebook, and put students in groups to redesign it.
Real Language
- Give students a reward (such as a candy or a sticker) each time they take the artificial language in your textbook and turn it into an authentic question or comment about someone in the class.
Conversation Cards
- This activity requires a deck of cards. Print out the page of questions to ask students for each card from the deck.
http://english-zone.com/index.php?ID=94
Room Change
- This requires a little prework since the classrooms in CEC are a bit plain. Bring in some objects and pictures to put up on the walls and around the class. Divide the class into groups. Maybe two to three people in a group. Send one group out of the class. For the next minute or so you and the students re-arrange the classroom. Moving pictures, people and objects around. Then bring the group back in and they must describe as many changes as possible. This can include people sitting in different places. Backpacks moved etc...Reward points based on how many they can spot and describe.
Appropriate for beginners on up.
You´re Such a Gossip
It is a perfect activity if you want your students to speak a lot.
For the warm up of the activity you can simply ask your students if they have ever heard any gossip about them. Have them work in pairs so each of them can have an oportunity to speak. Then, you can ask them if they have ever invented any gossip about someone else, what it was, and maybe even ask them how harmful the gossip was for the other person. For the final activity you can have them work in groups. You can have as many students as possible. Ask them to invent gossip about the other groups of students. It's incredible how effective this activity is to make them speak like parrots. It can last as long as you need or want and your students will have a lot of fun, they will enjoy the activity and so will you!
From: www.daveseslcafe.com
Taxi Driver and Passenger Role Play:
Set the scene. An English speaking visitor goes out of an airport and hails a taxi. He sits in the back. On the way to town the driver strikes up a conversation. Unfortunately, he drives fast and keeps turning around to look at the passenger!
Now seat the students in pairs one driver and one passenger. The driver sits in front of and to one side of the passenger, as if in a taxi.
This can be used to practice:
For the taxi driver
1 Personal information- Where are you from? What languages do you speak? Are you married?
2 Present perfect: Have you been to our country before? Have you seen...? Have you read about...? Have you tried (food etc)? Have you heard about (recent event)?
3 Suggestions: Why don`t you visit... you should see... You could go to...
and for the passenger
4 Imperatives: Look out! Mind that lorry! Keep your eye on the road! etc.
Find Someone Who....?
*This activity can also be used as an icebreaker. Create a list of characteristics such as: traveled to another country, likes shopping, likes swimming. There should be 10 to 15 items, at least. These can easily be related to the lesson you are working on. The students must then go around the class and ask each other who likes what and write down their names. You can then discuss who likes what with the whole class.
Appropriate for beginners up to intermediate. Can be adapted for more advanced classes by talking about things like social issues and finding out who is concerned with what. Or who holds certain opinions.
Monitored Discussion and Mistake/Correction Cards
Give notecards to all of your students with their names on them and hand them out. These will be mistake/correction cards. When the students speak you will write down the mistakes that you hear on their cards (only 5 errors per time that they speak.) Give the students a role play or an interview topic. Have a pair of students come to the front of the class and speak together for three minutes. You can also do this in small groups of 3 or 4. The other students in the class listen to the speaking and also write down errors that they hear in the speech. Afterwards air all of the errors to the class. The students who were speaking need to write the corrections of the mistakes on their cards in a different color. They are to keep these cards to use anytime that they speak in front of the class. This way, they have a record of the mistakes that they commonly make when speaking.
Tour Guide
Procedure:
Cut out 5-7 pictures of places for each small group. (i.e. a beach, a market, a city skyline, etc.) Have one student be the "tour guide." With ALL pictures out on a desk, the tour guide begins to describe one picture as a tour guide might describe it to tourists. The other students in the small group must listen to try to guess which picture he/she has described. (Hold guess until the description is completely finished.) Each student in the group must play the tour guide at least once.
Press Conference
This is called "Press Conference" and it's great for small groups and classes of about six people and up. It stresses listening, speaking, and overall conversation. And it's fun!
* Divide the students into two groups: the "company" and the "press." The company should be about two to five people, any more than five and you'll invariably have some students dominating the discussion while other students remain silent. The "press" is the rest of the class.
* Either you or the "company" come up with a faulty product For example:
o blonde hair dye that turns your hair blue
o a car that flips over if it takes a turn at over 40 mph
o a bike that loses its wheel after a week
o an action figure that breaks into little pieces after you take it out of the package
* Explain the product and its defect to the whole class.
* The goal of the game is for the "company" to keep as much of its profit and reputation in tact, while the "press" tries to get the "company" to admit fault and promise refunds and/or a recall of their product.
This is a fun game, and it could potentially go for an hour or two, depending on how into it the students get it.
In my experiences, they love trying to trip each other up. If the discussion is lagging, you can always step in and ask the "company reps" a few questions yourself.
Another helpful thing to do is to write down words or sentences they've said incorrectly, or words you taught them that they keep forgetting or getting wrong, and go over this at the end of the "press conference."
Best Friend - Friend from Hell
The following exercise focuses on what students like best - least about friends. The exercise allows students to practice a number of areas: expressing opinions, comparatives and superlatives, descriptive adjectives and reported speech. The overall concept of the lesson can easily be transferred to other subject areas such as: holiday choices, choosing a school, perspective careers, etc.
Aim: Practice expressing opinions, reported speech
Activity: Choosing which qualities would make a best friend and which qualities would make an undesirable friend
Level:Pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate
Outline:
* Help students activate vocabulary by asking them for descriptive adjectives describing good friends and bad friends.
* ask them to put the descriptive adjectives/phrases into the two categories (Best Friend - Undesirable Friend).
* Put students into pairs and ask them to give explanations for why they have chosen to put the various descriptions into one or the other of the categories.
* Ask students to pay careful attention to what their partner says and take notes, as they will be expected to report back to a new partner.
* Put students into new pairs and ask them to tell their new partner what their first partner has said.
* As a class, ask students about any surprises or differences of opinion they encountered during the discussions.
* Extend the lesson by a follow-up discussion on what makes a good friend.
Friends
Step 1: Put the following adjectives/phrases into one of the two categories: Best Friend or Undesirable Friend
confident in his/her abilities handsome or beautiful trustworthy outgoing timid punctual intelligent fun-loving rich or well off artistic abilities inquisitive mind possess athletic abilities well-traveled creative free spirit speaks English well interested in the same things interested in different things from the same social background from different social background loves to tell stories rather reserved ambitious plans for the future happy with what he/she has
Best Friend Undesirable Friend
Step 2: Take notes on the preferences of your partner
Best Friend Undesirable Friend
Question Box
This is a good short activity to get your students talking. It works best with adults, as many of the questions could potentially be offensive. On strips of paper or index cards, write questions or statements that your students are likely to have strong opinions about ie, "Correa is the best president ever," or "Do you believe in God?" Explain to your students that these are not necessarily your opinions, but that you are interested in hearing theirs. In partners, students draw a question from the box. They then have 5-7 minutes to discuss their answers to the question or whether or not they agree with the statement and why.
Survival of the Fittest
The idea is that your students have survived a plane crash/ship wreck and are stranded on a leaky lifeboat. Every hour one person has to be thrown out.
The game is played by having the students sit in a circle. They have with them on the boat anything they may have in their school bag, as well as their own personal skills and qualities. They must go around and say why they should stay in, ex. I know how to navigate using the stars, or I dont weigh much, so it makes no sense to throw me out. After you have gone around the circle, the students have a chance to vote one person out. Then it begins again, but the catch is that no one can repeat a reason that has been used in a previous round. This makes for some pretty interesting reasons to stay in!
Also, students who notice that they are about to be voted out can try and convince the class that the skill they mentioned was really important or try and persuade them that someone else's reason was less valid. (http://www.eslcafe.com/idea/index.cgi?display:1174988676-6935.txt)
Mafia
Before the game starts, secretly assign every participant as either ¨Mafia¨ or ¨Townsperson¨ (assigning usually involves a deck of cards, where the face cards are Mafia and the rest are Townspeople). Assign 2-5 students as Mafia, depending on the size of the class (about 1 Mafia for every 3 Townspeople). The teacher is the Narrator/God. The game starts in nighttime, so have everyone close their eyes. Tell the Mafia to open their eyes and silently choose one Townsperson to kill. After this, tell the class that it´s daytime and that the chosen Townsperson has been killed. Sometimes it´s a humorous narrative, like ¨Jane was shot seven times in the head. It was the most amazing suicide I have ever seen.¨ The ¨dead¨ participants are no longer in the game, cannot speak, but are allowed to keep their eyes open during nighttime. The remaining group then debates who is in the Mafia and votes to kill someone whom the majority suspects. The nighttime comes and the process repeats itself. The game ends when either all of the Mafia is killed or the Mafia outnumbers the innocents.
Variants:
Add the role of the Doctor/Guardian Angel. After the Mafia chooses someone to kill, awaken the doctor/angel and the doctor/angel silently chooses one person to save. If the Mafia chose to kill Bob and the Doctor/Angel also chose Bob, then Bob is not killed and the game moves on. The Doctor/Angel chooses somebody in each round.
Add the role of the Sheriff. After the Mafia chooses someone to kill, awaken the Sheriff. The Sheriff points to a participant and the Narrator silently indicates whether or not the participant is in the Mafia.
Number of Townspeople Killed Per Round. If time is an issue, the Mafia can select one Townsperson to kill for each member of the Mafia still ¨alive¨. If there are 2 members of the Mafia, they choose two people to kill. The Doctor/Angel still only chooses one person to save.
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Have some fun activities/ideas? How about worksheets, review sheets or songs?
Send your ideas to aparedes@cec-epn.edu.ec. Please include a short summary of the activity along with any worksheets or extra materials needed for the activity.
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