E V O L V E S C H O O L: TeachingEnglish Newsletter 01 December 2010

TeachingEnglish Newsletter

01 December 2010

We would like to thank Jamie Keddie who has now finished as our Guest Writer for November. As he has been writing and blogging about the use of video we thought we'd ask you how often you use video in the classroom here.

Facebook

Keep up to date with the latest updates on TeachingEnglish via our Facebook page.

LearnEnglish Kids
Children can develop their English skills with topic-based games, songs, stories.

LearnEnglish
Develop your English, with language games, downloads, stories and articles.

BritLit
The aim of BritLit is to help teachers from around the world to exploit English literature in the ELT classroom.

Premier Skills
Enabling learners and teachers to communicate in two of the world's global languages - football and English.

Welcome to December's first TeachingEnglish newsletter. As Christmas approaches we have plenty of new materials and activities for you to use in your English classroom. We have a new listening activity that uses the Big City Small World content from our sister site LearnEnglish. There's a new lesson plan that looks at superheroes and finally there's a simplified version of the popular game 'Taboo'.

There's an invitation to join an online forum that will be creating lively discussion about the use of children's literature in English language teaching. As always there is a contribution from our readers, this week madhatter6 would like to hear your ideas about course design. Why not leave him a comment?

Best wishes,

Duncan
TeachingEnglish Team | British Council | BBC

Big City Small World

This is a fun listening activity that can be used with adults and secondary groups. It exploits the Big City Small World audio soap from LearnEnglish. There is a lead-in activity that students do individually (listening and deciding whether statements are true or false) and then a follow on task where students write their own true or false worksheet based on a second listening.
Read more

Heroes and sidekicks

This lesson asks students to talk about international heroes and sidekicks as well as similar characters from local popular culture. It includes pronunciation work on adjectives to describe personality and question formation practice.
Read more

Children's literature in ELT

We are pleased to invite you to join the on-line forum which we hope will promote a lively discussion about the place of children's literature in teaching English as a foreign language, and the multiplicity of issues surrounding it.
Read more

Taboo

To play a class version of the popular word game, Taboo, prepare your taboo cards by writing the target word at the top and three words that your students aren't allowed to use in their definition below. The idea is that students have to define the target word without using any of the three words given on the card. Use words you want to recycle from previous classes. When students have got the idea, they can make a set of taboo cards as well so you build up a stock.
Read more

Course structure: bigger to smaller or smaller to bigger?

I teach a high school grammar course. Next year, our school will begin using a new textbook, so I am currently writing lesson plans to go with the new book. The book is structured so that at the beginning, it teaches about large umbrella concepts like paragraphs and papers, then narrows throughout the course down to smaller, more specific concepts like punctuation and individual words.

Do you use video in class?

As Jamie Keddie has been blogging on the subject of using video in class, we thought we'd find out how many of you use video in your language classrooms and how often. If you have any other comments about the use of video in class please leave your comments below.
Read more