with 30 worksheets.
This was the first TEFLtastic Classic I wrote about, and it has turned out to be such a classic since then that when I went back to update the links on the post I found I could also more than double the number of ideas and worksheets on there:
Extended speaking tasks (TEFLtastic Classics Part One).
It’s my latest big thing, so quite a bit of stuff. Links near the top are new.
Article
Worksheets
Headlines vocabulary guess the story
Headlines vocabulary extended speaking and test each other
Headlines vocabulary Strong and weak opinions
Test each other on headlines vocabulary (practice of classroom questions)
Words often used in headlines webquest
Newspaper headlines vocabulary and discussion
These are also all on my new News/ Current Affairs Vocabulary page
It’s obviously not going to happen for a while, but 3D printing strikes me as a rare example of technology in TEFL that I could go for. There must be other uses, but the main thing I imagine is being able download and print out sets of “3D flashcards” for the language point of day. For example, you could download the data for a set of plastic models of transport for a lesson on that topic. More complex 3D flashcards could also be used to present and practise things like prepositions of position and movement and this/ that/ these/ those. You could also 3D versions of flashcards that combine letters and things that start with that letter, for example having a 3D letter A made entirely of apples rather than just a picture of an A with an apple in the middle.
Other things you could 3D print include:
- Cuisenaire rods
- 3D substitution tables
- jigsaw texts which are really jigsaws
- versions of Boggle, e.g. one with a word or phonemic symbol or affix on each side of the cubes
- props to help roleplays, e.g. plastic wine glasses for restaurant roleplays
- dice with various things on the sides, e.g. names of classroom objects that they should run and touch
- other props for games such as Twister-style spinners and things to stack (for numbers and or prepositions of position)
Any other ideas?
An easy to organise and fun game for all kinds of polite language. Students choose one of the rude sentences they are given (“Give me a pen” etc) and compete to make it more and more polite. Whenever they can’t make it more polite, the politest sentence gets one point and they move onto another sentence. It’s loads of fun because the rude versions are funny and the super polite versions are too!
At some point they can be given useful words to make sentence more polite (“mind”, “possibly”, “seem”, etc) and/ or super polite sentences to edit down, then they work together to write sensibly polite versions of all the rude sentences.
Some of the many possible worksheets using this idea below. The top three are new:
Telephoning politeness competition game
Responding to requests politeness competition game
Checking/ Clarifying politeness competition
Telephone and email politeness competition
Complaints politeness competition game
Teleconferencing politeness competition game
Meeting people politeness game
Page four of this:
Market Leader Pre-Intermediate Unit 3 politeness competition game
Click on the TEFLtastic Classics tag below for 10 more very adaptable games like this.
I’ve got an article on teaching this point coming up, but in the meantime here’s an article with seven game ideas and worksheets for three of those:
This that these those pictionary
I’m very suspicious that these kinds of competitions are just to publicise the sites the lists are put on. I was even more suspicious when I received the email telling me I’d been nominated on the first day of the nomination period, and apparently by someone who hadn’t noticed that TEFLtastic hasn’t been on TEFL.net for more than six months.
Someone at bab.la cleared it up for me:
“all blogs from last year are automatically nominated”
Which seems fair enough as a system, but doesn’t really match my definition of “nominated”. I’m now wondering whether I was every really nominated by someone, or whether they just have a list of high profile blogs (as mine was, once upon a time) that they’d like to get their badge on.
The latter seems to be becoming more and more common, including in quite serious contexts. I’m none too keen on that, though, because it reminds me much too much of the very un-serious expression “Tefler”, which is only one or two steps removed from “backpacker teacher”. Losing three capital letters could also contribute to the popularity of the hideous verb “to Tefl”. (Despite what most TEFL course providers would suggest, I believe the verb to describe what I do in my working life is ”to teach”).
Time to start a campaign to save our capital letters before it loses its original meaning like the second word of “Cambridge Delta” (formerly Cambridge Diploma in English Language Teaching to Adults)?
After I moved from TEFL.net the owner very kindly redirected all broken links back to TEFLtastic, but that has caused problems with Google listing long gone pages as still existing on TEFL.net and so redirects have been suspended. That leaves me with around 1000 tefl.net/alexcase links to fix, which I’m working through slowly from the most popular pages. In the meantime you can just replace http://www.tefl.net/alexcase in the broken address with tefltastic.wordpress.com (note no www in wordpress addresses) or search the page name in this blog’s search box.
If you find any broken links, please let me know here or on the relevant page.
I’d just finished a story on the end of Guardian TEFL Update for TEFL News via TEFLnet when into my inbox popped a Google alert for a piece in that very same paper called How to Choose a TEFL Course That’s Right For You, this time in the careers section. It started well enough with a warning against choosing just by price. However, much of it was odd, such as the advice that spending 6 months doing a 120 hour course was good preparation for classroom teaching. Most of the rest sounded logical but is actually bull, e.g. that accreditation and careers advice are what make a good course, when Trinity and Cambridge rely on neither for their reputations.
Assuming it was written by a Guardian hack who knew little about TEFL, I clicked on Joe Hallwood’s name. No biog there, but lots of other stories on TEFL. Putting that same name into Google, however, suddenly made things clear – in 2009 Guardian had much more honestly written that “Joe Hallwood is founder of TEFL England and TEFL Scotland.”
And lo and behold, the exact same things he was recommending as the “Guardian TEFL expert” were also there on this site as characteristics of his courses:
- “TEFL England are the UK’s most accredited TEFL organisation”
- “Free lifetime access to the TEFL Jobs Centre for all students and graduates”
And it gets worse. They openly boast that in 2009 The Observer (basically the Guardian on Sunday) was recommending their course. Conflict of interests? Surely not!?
And another little point which can be used for all kinds of dodgy TEFL course providers. The IATEFL site not only bans the use of their logo by outside organisations like TEFL courses, it also recommends only Trinity or Cambridge courses. So, if TEFL England/ TEFL Scotland think highly enough of IATEFL to misuse their logo, maybe they should also follow their recommendation of not advising people to use courses like theirs…
Click on the categories below for more about The Guardian and TEFL England/ TEFL Scotland.
