Just put up a new worksheet with games linking Xmas to going to for future plans and predictions, adding to a surprising number of seasonal grammar activities. Also Xmas vocab, songs, videos, roleplays, discussions, and practice of business skills like negotiating (a particular favourite that I’ll be using again this year), saying numbers, meetings and telephoning. All here:
Xmas and New year games, worksheets, flashcards, videos and songs for EFL classes
Not much more to say about this, it’s all in the title and in the article and worksheets, here:
https://tefltastic.wordpress.com/worksheets/vocabulary/connotation/
Another instalment in my series on posts on the most useful and adaptable TEFL activities, for once for an activity that I (probably) invented. This is one of the board games I wrote about here, but is worth another mention as it is one of best ways of making students listen to each other and pay attention to their own production, and I’ve come up with a card game version that works really well too.
In the original Meeting Criteria Board Game, a student does a speaking task written on the square that they are on, e.g. “Start chatting to someone in the lift”. Their partners decide how many of the criteria in the middle of the board game they meet with their speaking, and therefore how many squares they can move on. For example, if the other students decide that they started smoothly and showed interest (but didn’t end smoothly, etc), they get two points and can move on two squares. Examples:
Meeting people criteria board game
Dealing with foreign guests meeting criteria board game
Different kinds of business communication meeting criteria board game
Negotiating language meeting criteria board game
Small talk meeting criteria board game in this e-book
Social English meeting criteria board game in this e-book
It also works well for (chairing/ taking part in) meetings, travel English, phone calls, emailing, etc, all due in future e-books.
I like this game so much that I often want to use it more than once with a class, so I’ve also come up with a card game version. Create a pack of cards with roleplays/ challenges on each one, possibly just by cutting up or reformatting a Meeting Criteria Board Game above. Also make a different worksheet with the criteria on (“Right level of formality”, etc). Deal out the same number of cards to each student, e.g. five cards each. The first student chooses one of the situations on their cards, e.g. “Email back a customer who complained”, and roleplays it with someone else in the group (just saying what they will write if it is email communication). Their partners give them a number of points by how many criteria they met, then they can take that many cards from the pack, to give them more options next time (and to represent points if they will benefit from more competition). Example:
Small talk meeting criteria card game in this e-book
and, as I said, you can easily cut up the board games above into cards.
38 more highly flexible activities with hundreds of PDF versions here.
Not a lot of new PDFs and tips, as I’ve been concentrating on polishing up the TEFLtastic index pages, but still hopefully at least one useful thing for almost everyone. Newest of each kind top of each section.
New TEFL articles
How to teach making and responding to invitations
How to teach small talk questions with how
CPE Use of English Part Three tips
New lists of useful language for EFL learners
The 100 most useful socialising phrases
The 100 most useful social English phrases
The 100 best small talk questions
New TEFL photocopiables
CPE Reported speech key word sentence transformations – NEW
Reported speech discussion questions – NEW
Quoting sources good and bad connotations
Good and bad body language roleplay game
Aptis Speaking Part Three longer phrases
Positive and negative business vocabulary storytelling game
Opinions on current affairs and media
Describing music things in common game
These also all on the relevant index pages (on invitations, small talk, socialising, social English, Aptis, feelings vocabulary, CPE, reported speech, body language, phrasal verbs, and positive and negative connotations) and in the relevant TEFLtastic classics blog posts (on dice games, longer phrases, drawing games, and things in common).
While adding two new articles and a list of useful phrases to my rapidly expanding small talk for EFL learners page, it suddenly struck me how ironic people who know me would find it that I’m teaching small talk, let alone trying to tell people how to teach it. I’ve always been happier memorising lines of dialogue from obscure TV shows and answering questions in pub quizzes than I’ve been with actual conversations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, my physics degree course was full of people who were like or much worse than me. Perhaps more surprisingly, I’ve also found the same to be true of TEFL. I was initially surprised that us social-skills-free teachers seem to do okay in the TEFL classroom, but come to think of it the (mildly) autistic teacher has some distinct advantages:
I’m not sure there are any huge implications to what I’m saying, seeing as such people are probably as happy with the clear rules of engagement in job interviews as they are in the classroom. Maybe this is just another reason not to confuse the ability to chat in the teacher’s room and down the pub with ability in the classroom. In fact, knowing hundreds of Monty Python routines off by heart could be a good sign for someone’s future TEFL career!
This is another activity that I’ve used regularly as long as I can remember and I’ve finally got around to writing about, inspired by its appearance in my new e-book. This is perhaps the best game of all for memorising things which are comparatively fixed like beginnings of phone calls and shopping conversations.
I first started play the Disappearing Text Game without worksheets, and that simple variation can still sometimes work. The teacher puts a short text such as a presentation introduction or a meeting someone for the first time dialogue up on the board. One student reads out the whole thing and then asks for one word to be deleted. The next student reads out the whole thing, including the missing word, then asks for a second word to be deleted. This continues around the class, with another word deleted each time, until nobody can remember the missing words or the whole text has gone. If you want to score, everyone else gets a point if someone guesses wrongly. The teacher should praise any guesses which can go in the gaps, but only accept exactly the words that were originally there.
The good points of the up on the board version of Disappearing Text Game include being able to improvise (somewhat) and the teacher being able to give lots of feedback, but in all but very small groups it can be so long before someone’s next turn that they don’t really concentrate and so are not able to fill enough of the gaps when their turn comes to make the activity worthwhile. I therefore prefer to play the game in small groups. This can be done by making worksheets with the dialogue in a table with one word per gap, and making cards the same size as the boxes in the table to cover the words with one by one. You obviously need to make sure that students can’t see through the covering cards, by using coloured paper, printing “XXXXX” on each card, etc. The students can then play exactly the same Disappearing Text game in groups, with the added advantages that they can look under the cards to check their guesses of the missing words if they need to, and that they can keep the worksheets afterwards for reference.
Here are some worksheet-based Disappearing Text Games that I prepared earlier:
First Certificate Speaking Part Two disappearing text memory game
Shopping dialogues jigsaw text
Meeting people disappearing text game (in this e-book)
Other things which work well with this game and will be in future e-books include:
Telephoning disappearing text memory game (with variations for taking messages, etc)
Ending presentations disappearing text memory game
Starting presentations disappearing text memory game
Starting meetings disappearing text memory game
Ending meetings disappearing text memory game
IELTS Writing introductions disappearing text memory game
IELTS Speaking Part Two disappearing text memory games
The third variation that I’ve used is with the same cards as jigsaw text activities, before or after putting the cards together as a jigsaw. For example, if students have just put a phone conversation with one line on each card into order, they can then turn their choice of cards over one by one, saying the whole conversation each time. However, in this variation it is impossible for students to remember every word perfectly, so you’ll also have to allow other guesses which fit the gaps.
For many other jigsaw activities, many of which are suitable for this activity as well or instead, see:
TEFLtastic classics: Jigsaw games for EFL learners
and for the other 37 most adaptable games in TEFL, see:
TEFLtastic classics parts 1 to 37
Halfway through my big reorganisation of TEFLtastic, found that I had, for some strange reason, combined music and song worksheets on one page. Have therefore split it into two updated and expanded pages, one on music (describing and discussing music, including linking to topics like giving opinions, making recommendations, articles/ determiners and IELTS), and another with my actual song worksheets (for second conditional, collocations, prepositions, tense review, adjectives, word order, narrative tenses, etc).
Music page (new page)
Songs page (repurposed, renamed and expanded)
There are also links to songs for particular language points on many of my pages for specific topics such as Present Continuous and possessives. New list here:
Pages with suggestions for songs for specific language points for EFL learners
Comparative and superlative songs
Prepositions of movement songs
Prepositions of position songs
Present Continuous for future arrangements songs
Present Perfect Continuous songs
While using my worksheet pages A to Z list myself, noticed that for some reason I’d rather inconveniently added “See… above/ below” like a book index when I first made it. Now added proper hyperlinks to all those instead, so that for example it now goes
“EAP games/ worksheets – See Academic English (EAP) games/ worksheets”
This should mean you can now quickly scan down and click to find worksheets on almost anything. Have also changed the name to the hopefully more memorable and so more easily Googleable:
TEFLtastic games/ worksheets pages A to Z
You can also of course just Google the page you’re looking for with “games/ worksheets” and/ or “TEFLtastic”, or use the drop-down menus under the picture above.
Now that is done, I’ve now started polishing up all those (approx. 350!) worksheet pages. See here for how to help me help you.
The first in a few additions to my occasional series on the most adaptable games/ activities in TEFL, revived due to finding that there are some real TEFL classics that are in my new e-book and I use all the time but had never got round to mentioning.
This activity was inspired by TOEIC (not an expression that you’ll hear very often!), specifically the part of the listening where students try to spot the one correct response to the thing that the first speaker said. The actual exam exercise has some typical TOEIC problems like being more a vocab test than actual listening practice. However, the idea is a great way of moving from learning useful functional language phrases to starting to put them into dialogues, as well as dealing with common mistakes such as “How do you do?” “I’m fine, thank you”.
Possible adaptations include:
Here are some I prepared earlier:
Good and bad travel English responses
Good and bad negotiating responses
Good and bad telephoning responses
Good and bad responses in restaurants (in this e-book) – NEW
Good and bad small talk responses (in this e-book) – NEW
Also useful:
All of which I have tried and will be in e-books on the topics sometime soonish. In the meantime, please check out the other TEFLtastic classic posts, well worth a look even if you have before, as I continually update them with links to new photocopiable versions.
Reasons why you should shell out a couple of quid on my new e-book
