“-ed” endings

I needed an activity I’ve always loved to work on the pronunciation of “-ed” endings in regular past verbs but, (1) I couldn’t find it and, (2) I never really knew the source of the activity! So, I decided to write my own version.

The students are given a set of paper strips that belong to three stories:
– Ted’s, whose regular past forms are all pronounced /d/, after voiced sounds (make sure you ask the students to touch their throats to check if there’s any air turbulence going on in their vocal folds as they pronounce the last sound of the verb; if you, like me, work with 30 students in a classroom, I can guarantee it will provide some memorable moments, too!)
– Robert’s, whose story only has regular verbs ending in /t/ (after voiceless sounds, so no air turbulence whatsoever this time, sorry!).
– And finally David’s story, with verbs ending in /ɪd/ (after /d/ or /t/).

-ed_endings.pdfDownload

First, the students place the three names and sort out the strips of paper by looking at the regular verbs in each of them, deciding on their pronunciation, and placing the strips under the correct name. Then, they put the strips in the right order to make a story. If they classify any of them incorrectly, they will have problems as they order the cut-out texts and will need to go back and rethink their previous choices (probably using the context, too, once they start arranging the sentences.)

I’ve also created a digital version with Flippity Manipulatives. Simply click on any of the pictures below and copy the address if you want to email it or use it in your LMS!

A helmet has always been a good idea

1. Have the students work together and fill in the speech bubbles in the conversation below. When a word is provided (sail, ships, annoying, to ruin), ask them to use it:

a_helmet_has_always_been_a_good_idea.pdfDownload

2. The students share their stories with the rest of the class and discuss any differences. This is the perfect time to work on intonation!

3. Play the video and allow some time for personal reactions. Do the students think this is an effective campaign? Why/Why not?

4. The students write one of the following:

You have just watched a road safety campaign encouraging people to wear helmets. Write a report analysing the use of helmets where you live. Make sure you include a series of recommendations.

Would increasing bike lanes be a good idea where you live? Write a letter to a local newspaper explaining your point of view.

Should the minimum legal age for driving a car or a motorbike be increased? Discuss.

Write an essay analysing the different modes of transport where you live, such as walking, cycling, cars, motorbikes and public transportation. Make sure you include issues such as safety, pollution, noise or health.

Libraries and bookshops around the world: a video project

For World Book Day on 23rd April, my students are working on very short videos showcasing unique libraries and bookshops around the world. Once they are edited, QR codes for each video will be displayed around the playground for students to watch them and look for specific information about each of them.

1. After explaining the goals of the project, I used wheelofnames.com to assign one library or bookshop to pairs of students. As simple as cutting and pasting the list below!

Tianjin Binhai Library (Tianjin, China)

The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library (Chicago, USA)

Stuttgart City Library (Stuttgart, Germany)

Trinity College Long Room (Dublin, Ireland)

Boston Public Library (Boston, USA)

Epos (Norway)

The Library of Alexandria (Alexandria, Egypt)

Royal Library (El Escorial, Spain)

Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Bodleian Library (Oxford, UK)

Biblioteca Vasconcelos (Mexico City, Mexico)

Beitou Public Library (Taipei, Taiwan)

Handelingenkamer Library (The Hague, Netherlands)

State Library Victoria (Melbourne, Australia)

Livraria Lello (Porto, Portugal)

Cărturești Carusel (Bucharest, Romania)

El Ateneo (Buenos Aires, Argentina)

Boekhandel Dominicanen (Maastricht, Netherlands)

The Bookworm (Beijing, China)

Libreria Acqua Alta (Venice, Italy)

Shakespeare & Co. (Paris, France)

Cafebrería El Péndulo (Mexico City, Mexico)

Oodi Central Library (Helsinki, Finland)

Duchess Anna Amalia Library (Weimar, Germany)

Biblioteca Statale di Lucca (Lucca, Italy)

The Black Diamond, Royal Danish Library (Copenhaguen, Denmark)

2. Before starting their research, I told the students their videos should be around 30 seconds long. We revised the differences between synthesising and summarising information, and the need to identify key points in each source, differentiate main ideas from details, or distinguish facts and opinions.

3. To help them through the planning process, I suggested following this basic structure:

• Name of the library or bookshop, city, country.
• When was it built?
• What makes it so special? Include at least three distinctive features.
• Think of a powerful closing sentence for your video.

4. Students started researching and selecting information in class, they looked for sources of public domain pictures and/or videos they could use, and they planned how they wanted to create the video, including their roles and responsibilities. With so many months of distance/blended/hybrid learning under their belts, it should have come as no surprise when they found tons of different (and tech-savvy!) options in a few minutes!

5. The students are sending their videos through our LMS. I will be holding conferences with each pair to go over their work and check what may need improving. I know the videos will be fine content-wise, and the students know we will be focusing on accuracy and intelligibility (and that they might need to make slight – or major – changes after the conference!) The students have also been asked to write two questions they would ask about their library or bookshop.

6. I will be uploading the final videos to the media site of our LMS and will create a QR code for each of them (qrcode-monkey.com/). These will be printed out and displayed outdoors on the school premises so that students can use their mobile phones to watch each video and answer the questions in the worksheet(s) I will be writing (using a selection of questions they have submitted.) The activity can be easily adpated to any level, so other groups of students will be invited to take this virtual tour around these fascinating bookshops and libraries as they practise a variety of listening comprehension skills.

By the way, would you add any other library or bookshop to the list?

Developing learner autonomy: a homework choice board

Apart from traditional homework tasks based on lessons delivered in the classroom, there is still a myriad of activities students can do by themselves to practise their English, learn to work independently, and take responsibility for their own learning. Learner autonomy is in fact one of the most important things we can promote if we really want to get our students ready for the ongoing, life-long language learning endeavour.

The following homework choice board, intended for students at B1 level and above, suggests 16 tasks to practise all four skills as well as grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation:

• Students can choose the tasks based on their personal interests, or areas they feel they need more work on, which should result in extra motivation.

• In the process of choosing an activity, students will be taking into account the skills and language items that are being practised in class, but also what is relevant to them, especially when they can connect the task with their own life.

• The activities in the board are also flexible as far as proficiency level is concerned, which means that students can work at their own performance level.
• A few tasks have been designed so that they can be used later in class, resulting in excellent materials based on students’ interests which can be introduced in different lessons later in the year.

 

HomeworkChoiceBoard.pdf

Although the tasks here have been selected so they are easy to keep track of, holding students accountable for their work, this should ideally be another step in helping students develop their learner independence skills. How would you use this board in your own student tracking system? How would you assess each of these tasks?

---

This post won the British Council’s TeachingEnglish Blog of the Month Award for October 2018.

Dominoes

Call it unimaginative or uncreative, but dominoes is one of those activities that always seem to work in the language classroom no matter the level or specific group of students. From simple vocabulary matching to more advanced grammatical collocations and sentence structure, dominoes is, in essence, a collaborative game in which students work together to solve a puzzle providing each other with valuable feedback along the way, and in which students are allowed to demonstrate uncertainty and check their knowledge of the particular language area being practised. Take, for instance, this set of dominoes to practise negative prefixes attached to adjectives that I’ve been using for years:

Negative prefixes.pdf

 

Apart from the activity itself and all the skills involved, what I really like about the game is that, once it’s over, it is often possible for students to identify patterns and write rules that may have gone previously unnoticed.

This other set of dominoes is more discovery-driven and based on rhyming words. Students pay attention to the last sound(s) and match them accordingly during the game: the final vocalic sound or, if the word ends in a consonant, the final vocalic sound + consonant. During the game, the students can ask each other in case of doubt or have the teacher model the pronunciation of individual words. And when they’ve finished, they will have hopefully noticed different spellings for the same sound and will now also be able to write down several pairs of common homophones, as in the following:

afford – reward – bored – board – ignored
sail – sale – inhale – female
delete – compete- wheat – receipt – meet – meat – indiscreet – seat
disguise – rise – prize – cries
appeal – steal – steel – wheel
flour – flower – hour – tower
mist – missed – insist
amaze – nowadays – raise
write – right – tonight – knight
lay – café – sleigh
pear – nowhere – square – hair – hare – nightmare
so – sow – sew – cargo
great – grate – weight – wait
later – favour – sailor – laser
niece – police – peace – piece
why – goodbye – lie – simplify

RhymingWords.pdf

 

Do you use dominoes in your teaching?

 

Image: Ishan Manjrekar,  Creative Commons

 

Film dubbing: a flexible integrated skills task

A context or topic that is relevant and interesting for the students is one of the main factors that helps to make language learning tasks successful and memorable. Flexibility is another ingredient: if tasks are flexible, the students will be able to work at their own performance level while working on the same goal. This is especially important in mixed-ability groups or teams within a group, but it also holds true for other more homogeneous settings where each student may need more work on different areas and skills at a given time. Finally, flexible tasks carried out in engaging contexts result in student ownership. When students manage to create something that is unique by making the necessary connections, linguistic and non-linguistic alike, learning naturally results.

There are probably many other elements that help to make tasks and lessons successful and meaningful, but over the years I’ve found these three elements to be decisive. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t expose our students to topics they are not interested in or less flexible tasks such as having them practise a particular structure; however, trying to twist the dullest of content or routine practice to include at least some of these characteristics often pays off.

A flexible task that I like doing with my teenage students is film dubbing. At its very simplest, the students are shown a clip from a film again and again with no sound until they can write a script and read it as they synchronise with the actors in the scene. Clips from classical or popular films work best as the motivation to deconstruct the whole thing will be higher (I’ve used clips from “Casablanca”, “Gone with the Wind”, “The Goonies”, “Braveheart” or even “Rambo”!) MovieClips.com and its YouTube channel has tons of clips to choose from. The students first identify the number of people participating in the dialogue and the length of each contribution, then they brainstorm ideas in their teams or in pairs, and finally write the script down. Apart from language accuracy, the students will be manipulating the language so that it fits each contribution, they will be making decisions regarding register, and they will be practising pronunciation skills such as intonation.

As the students make the scene their own, in a flexible setting and with a topic of their choice, the students analyse the language by comparing how they thought something should be said and how it is actually said, or simply by becoming aware of language gaps and making up for them. Again, this is a highly personal process but in this case within a context that is engaging enough for language needs to become personally salient and, therefore, more likely to be acquired. And once the clips are shared with the rest of the class, a good amount of language will come into play and a great opportunity to focus on specific language items through mini-lessons based on the students’ production.

I’ve always kept it low-tech, but this activity can get as simple or technologically complex as you want, and you may even want to consider recording the dialogues and adding them to each clip using software such as Movie Maker — even special effects! Would you give it a go? Have you tried anything similar?

---

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: 

Rewriting Established Texts: The Day They Got Creative

Integrated Skills through Literature: “All Summer in a Day”

Working On Connected Speech: The Fresh Prince

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

Last week I worked on an extract from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge with two B2-C1 groups of students. These students are required to work with authentic literary texts as part of the official curriculum.

Listening

I first wanted them to get an idea of what the whole poem is about, so I decided to use Iron Maiden’s version of the poem with lyrics and the following pictures from Gustave Doré to have the students become familiar with the plot and put the pictures in the right order to check understanding. The song is rather long, and I used the intervals to write the main ideas on the board with the students, but it certainly served its purpose and raised the students’ interest as well! (Iron Maiden? Poetry? Romanticism? Heavy metal? The supernatural?)

Vocabulary

Once we checked the order of the pictures and were able to summarise the plot, I told them we’d be focusing on some of the most famous lines of the poem, the moment when the albatross is killed by the mariner. To get the students ready for the text, we worked on a number of sea-related words, all of which will appear later in the text. The students made connections between the words they were already familiar with and others that were new to them, and used the picture to help them to explain the meaning of some of them.

Pronunciation

We then worked on pronunciation: the students classified several words from the poem according to their last vowel sounds. I wanted the students to be able to work out the meaning of some of the more literary words after reading, so we didn’t work on meaning at this point (although it’d be a good option with other groups so they can deal with the text more easily.)

Reading

What I did do was to provide these words and a few TRUE/FALSE sentences before reading so as to set a purpose for reading and have them make predictions. The students were also asked to complete the gaps with the rhyming words they had classified in the previous activity as they read. We worked on the first three stanzas together, and then they worked in their teams. We even practised connected speech after checking the rhyming words and the comprehension activities by reading the poem as a whole group!

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.pdf

Writing

Finally, each team wrote three short “Rimes of the Modern Mariner” using three lines from the extract. We first brainstormed a few ideas that each of the lines could suggest:

“Day after day, day after day…”
Your experience at school.
You are fed up with having to wait for the bus for too long.
You are a viewer sick of football matches.

“Water, water, everywhere”
You are on a cruise in the Caribbean/Mediterranean.
It is the first time you see the sea.
You are at a water park enjoying a summer day.

“All in a hot and copper sky”
You are on a trip in the desert.
You are lying on the beach in a holiday resort.
You are trying to get some ice cream, but you can’t find any shop.

And after that, the students wrote some amusing poems that we shared and proofread as a whole group:

Day after day, day after day,
We have to wake up at eight.
School we must attend,
if we want good food on our plate.

All in a hot and copper sky,
I’m going to have fun.
I’m on the beach, eating a peach,
and very relaxed in the sun.

No matter how many times you’ve read it, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner still retains its hypnotic power.

Carol Rumens, The Guardian 2009

---

All other images by Gustave Doré, Public Domain

Working on connected speech: The Fresh Prince

The theme song from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” is used here to help the students recognise and practise the various features of connected speech which make the stress pattern and rhythm of English so distinctive. Making the students aware of these differences and providing opportunities to work on them allows them to improve their listening and speaking skills and hopefully contribute to make their pronunciation even more intelligible to both native and non-native speakers.

In this activity, the students first watch the show’s introduction with no sound and take turns telling what they think the first-person story is about based on the images. Then they compare their predictions with the actual story once the lyrics are handed out. This is also a good time to play the video with sound once again and introduce new vocabulary.

Lyrics.pdf

Focus on sentence stress, read the first few lines and model the differences in prominence between stressed and unstressed syllables.

NOW THIS is the STOry ALL aBOUT HOW
My LIFE got FLIPPed TURNed UPside DOWN

The students practise the lines chorally and slowly at first, tapping the beat of the song as they sing and gradually reading and singing it faster and faster. As new lines are added to the choral reading/singing, introduce new features of connected speech as needed: elision (losing sounds), linking (adding or joining sounds between words) or assimilation (changing sounds). For instance, most students will struggle with the line “I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel Air” unless they have worked on linking and elision first.

The group follows the same procedure with the rest of the song, playing it every now and then while checking their progress and areas that may need improving. The following audio file belongs to one of those progress checks in the middle of the lesson:

At the end, the students may be asked to think of possible implications this activity might have on everyday speech, how it could help them improve their speaking and listening skills, and share their ideas with the rest of the class. And now that they are familiar with the lyrics, you can’t miss this video in which “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” is run through Google Translate 64 times with the inevitable hilarious consequences (and a couple of subliminal lessons that any language teacher will relish!)

“Fresh Prince” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Rebirth Cycle

Greg is grateful for those great green Greek grapes.

Tongue twisters are a great way to practise pronunciation, getting students familiar with the production of individual sounds (especially those that are different from their L1) and allowing them to analyse the stress pattern characteristic of the English language. And students like them! Prepositions used after adjectives, in contrast, are all too often problematic as learners lack clear guidelines or generalisations that can be drawn, and interferences with their mother tongue usually cause problems in the process of grasping these combinations. In the following activity, both tongue twisters and prepositions used after adjectives have been combined with the hope of helping students find those combinations meaningful through memorable tongue twisters created by the students themselves. Students are expected to have worked with adjectives followed by prepositions before.

The activity works best with alliterative tongue twisters, such as the following:

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.

Betty Botter had some butter,“but,” she said, “this butter’s bitter.”

I thought I thought of thinking of thanking you.

After eliciting that these tongue twisters share the characteristic of starting with the same sound for most of the words, students are divided into teams and given a number of cards for them to write their own tongue twisters. The only words provided are, in fact, adjectives that start with the same sound, and it is with this sound that they will be writing the rest of the tongue twister to the extent possible.

Cards.pdf

Teams first try to write their tongue twisters including nouns, a verb, one of the adjectives followed by the appropriate preposition, and any other words focusing mainly on nouns at this stage. Teams then swap cards and try to make the tongue twisters even more elaborate by inserting adjectives starting with the same sound. You may even want to have a third team look at the cards for more ideas. The cards are then given back to the original team so that they can revise them and edit them.

Theodore Thatcher was thankful for throwing things through the thick thatched roof.

Greg is grateful for those great green Greek grapes.

Frederick Freud was frightened of flying with friendly friends and fast food fries.

Jackie and Jeremy were just jealous of Jamie for jumping like Johnny and Jenny on Jonas’ jacket.

Sue’s son seemed suspicious of suddenly stealing several silver scissors from Samuel’s surgeon.

Raul was responsible for rescuing Roberta from a really risky river.

The end result of this collaborative writing process is finally shared with the rest of the class, either orally, or writing the tongue twisters up on the board, or typing them to be projected. Notice that the preposition followed by the adjective will stand out in most cases as they do not usually start with the same sound. A perfect time to draw their attention to these combinations and practise their own tongue twisters outloud, modelling individual sounds and stress patterns as needed. I have found many students refer back to this activity when adjectives with prepositions are used in a lesson, so they should be on the right track!