Unfortunately students don’t like reading. And what is even worse, they hate re-reading. It is next to impossible to make them re-read an article . They will complain, they will pretend or they will go to the toilet, but the majority won’t read the text again.
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I have not created a new infographic for quite some time. I have been pretty content using the materials here. But when I saw the materials for HOW MUCH, HOW MANY, LITTLE and FEW I realised that I would like to have something better. Therefore I created the following materials to help my students understand the grammar better.
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During my summer holiday I spent some time creating these lovely boxes. Do you want to know what is inside?
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I am not a really good teacher. But I would like to be. That is why I study a lot. Recently I read two books which tried to sum up what the scientists know about teaching and learning. The first one is called What Does This Look Like In The Classroom?: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice by Carl Hendrick and the other is Make It Stick by Peter C. Brown. In both books I tried to find the things that I should do to help my students learn better. And here I would love to share what I have found.
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Some students find it difficult to learn all the forms of the past simple tense. The following worksheets will help them learn this grammar easily.
Autonomous students are intrinsically motivated, willing to take responsibility for their own learning and aware of their preferred learning strategies.
It has been known that people remember grammar rules best if they come up with their own explanation. Therefore, the teachers should try to design their teaching activities in such a way that they will help students create their own rules.
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The verb to BE in the past tense is one of the most important grammar points in English. As both WAS and WERE belong among 100 most frequent words in English, it is paramount that students know and use them correctly.
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[showmyads]In this post, I would like to share a set of activities I use to teach this grammar point. There is a nice communicative activity to introduce the meaning of the verb. Then there is an infographic and a video to teach the form of the verb. And at the end, there is a worksheet where students can learn to form questions and the short answers.
[su_spacer][su_heading]Was Were – introduction
[/su_heading][su_spacer]I always start the lesson with the following activity. Students work in pairs. I print the following worksheet and cut it. In each pair, one student has a worksheet A and the other has the worksheet B. They must not show their worksheet to anyone. They read the sentences and their partner has to guess if the sentence is true or not. They count how many correct answers their partner gives.Then I explain the grammar and usage of the verbs WAS and WERE using the following infographic:
Then I practise the verbs using the following video. Students watch the video and read the sentences using WAS or WERE. If they make a mistake, I stop the video.
I sometimes challenge a student and he/she tries to say all the sentences correctly on their own. Or I make teams, put the students in line in front of the screen and students have to take turns and say the sentences. The team that survives the longest without making a mistake are the winners.
To teach questions and the short answers I use the following worksheet. I use tables and various colours to make my students think about the way to create questions. The rules for the worksheet are simple. The same colour means that that you have to use the same word. A varied shade of the colour means that you use a pronoun, but a different one.
Recently my colleague noticed that our textbook contains too few exercises to practise the verb HAVE GOT. To bridge this gap I decided to create a board game. A board game will allow my students practise the grammar in a fun way and this activity can be used repeatedly.
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When learning English, students are usually given a list of irregular verbs to memorize. This list usually consists of 60 to 100 verbs. There is nothing wrong with this approach but I think that it would be much more useful to give students a list of the most frequent verbs in English and the chunks the verbs appear most often in.
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Unfortunately, there is little material like this. That was why I tried to create some. In this post, you will find a worksheet which contains nine most frequent irregular verbs in English. Moreover, the verbs are practiced in the phrases they appear most frequently in. At the end, students are given a chance to memorize these really useful chunks and use the irregular verbs in exactly the same way the native speakers do.
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[su_heading size=”28″]9 Most Frequent Verbs[/su_heading]
Do you know which irregular verbs are the most frequent in English? They are: be, have, say, make, go, take, come, see, know, get and give.
You can see all of them, except for the verb to be, in the graphic organizer below:
[su_heading size=”28″]Meaning[/su_heading]
It is important to understand the verbs. I suggest that the students should translate the verbs into their mother tongue. For this, there is the following table with several pictures. The pictures demonstrate the meaning (or better to say one of the meanings) of the given verb.
Once the students translate the verbs, it is a good idea to cover the verbs and try to remember them using only the pictures.
Moreover, now it is the right time to memorize all the 9 verbs and their forms.
[su_heading size=”28″]Exercise[/su_heading]
Once the students learn the irregular verbs, it is necessary to practise them. Use the second page of the worksheet and in the exercise 1 students try to fill in the gaps using the correct form of the verbs.
You can download the full worksheet here:[su_button url=”https://engames.eu/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/9-Most-common-irregular-verbs.pdf” target=”blank” background=”#f56b68″ size=”7″ desc=”Pdf Document”]9 Most Frequent Verbs – Worksheet[/su_button]
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At the end of 1980s Michael Lewis suggested that we should teach chunks of language. Popular as the notion might be, there are very few materials that would promote this kind of teaching. In this worksheet you will find a table with the most common collocations of the irregular verbs. This list is based on my research in BNC corpus. I suggest that students should learn the phrases by heart.
I hope you find this post and worksheet useful.
An example of a translation table.
Nowadays everyone can create audio-visual materials in professional quality. But the question is what materials we should create. The audio files, as we know them, contain a short text which students listen to and then they answer some comprehension questions. But is this the best audio which we can give to our students?
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Unfortunately, there is very little ELT methodology that would suggest some other listening materials which would be helpful for our students. In this post, I would love to share several new kinds of listening exercises and I will show you how to make them. If you have any more ideas and suggestions for listening exercises please share them with me at rotreklzdenek@gmail.com. Thank you.
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Creating Audio
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WavePad is the tool I have been using for creating audios most often. I know there are many free tools but I like this paid one for the following reason: unlike all the others, this one allows you to add your voice anywhere into an existing sound file. It sounds like something that every audio tool does, but unlike all the other tools this one doesn´t delete the existing part of the file. It simply adds your voice there and expands the original file. You can see how it works in the video below:
What is this good for?
Thanks to this feature I can create the following exercises:
- rocketlanguages listening – As the name suggests, this exercise was inspired by rocketlanguages.com. Their lessons always contain a recording in the target language and then the phrases are explained and taught using the mother tongue. Students are asked to listen, repeat and translate various words and sentences and thus they learn the language of the original recording. You can see an example lesson in the video below (Even though the lesson is a video, it is based on the recording created in WavePad and it could work without the video too.)
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- Read and repeat – by inserting silences into the original recording, you can have a great exercise where students read a text and listen to it. At the end of each sentence, there is a silence in which the students repeat what they have heard and read. In this way, they can improve their pronunciation. It could be used the other way round, too. Students read the text and then they listen and check whether they pronounced the words correctly. You can see both of the exercises in the following video.
- Zdenda listening – students hear a sentence in English, its mother tongue translation and then there is a pause in which they repeat the sentence in English. I have been using this exercise for several years, but I am not sure how useful it really is. You can hear an example below.
- Read and repeat – by inserting silences into the original recording, you can have a great exercise where students read a text and listen to it. At the end of each sentence, there is a silence in which the students repeat what they have heard and read. In this way, they can improve their pronunciation. It could be used the other way round, too. Students read the text and then they listen and check whether they pronounced the words correctly. You can see both of the exercises in the following video.
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Dictations
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This software is great for creating various forms of dictations. The simplest form of dictation is the one where students listen and write what they hear. Then they or the teacher check their texts against the original. You can see and hear such a simple dictation below.
Another kind of dictation is a simple gap fill. Students listen and write the missing words.
The third form of dictation I have been using is the receptive dictation. Students listen and they have two options and they say which sentence they heard.
Sound dictation is the last form of dictation I can think of. To create a quality sound dictation, you need a piece of software to help you mix two or more tracks together. For mixing I use the Audiodirector by Cyberlink. Normally, it is really expensive, but you can get a free copy with some specialized computer magazines or if you buy Powerdirector.
You can get free sounds at Freesound.org. Once again, the quality varies but some are awesome. To be able to share your creations, just make sure that you use CC0 sounds. You can hear my sound dictation below. There is a worksheet too.
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Where do I get native speakers to record something for me?
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This used to be a real problem in the past. Fortunately, now it is a breeze to hire a native speaker to record anything for you. I frequently use the paid services at http://www.fiverr.com. My favourite speakers there are theleam, caz3 and zazzbizz.
www.Fivesquid.com is another site where you can find native speakers who will record anything for you. It is slightly more expensive and the delivery takes longer, but I loved the performance of EmilySBrooks123 there. It was perfect for ELT purposes.
If you do not want to spend any money on voiceovers, you can try Rhinospike. You place a text there and a native speaker will record it for you. To be able to download the recording you need to record some texts in your mother tongue in return or buy some credits. Unfortunately, the quality of the recordings varies a lot but it is for free.
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Songs
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To be honest, I am not really sure how useful songs are for learning English. I have met several students who sang their favourite songs, translated and learnt the lyrics but their English was not good. Unlike students who played computer games or watched films in English, these students didn’t progress.
Even though I doubt the usefulness of songs, I have created a few for my students. You can see them below:
If you think that I am really talented, think again. I just wrote the lyrics and I used the fiverr.com services again. I can recommend Douglas Haines who recorded several songs for me (The second song is by him).
Once we return from the summer holiday, I would love to hear my students telling me where they were and what they did there. Some might be able to do it straight away, drawing on what they learned in the past, but most of them will be silent. To prevent the silence, I have designed the following lesson to help my students revise what they know and give them the language they will need to be able to speak about their summer holiday.
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In the post Microsoft Word for Language Teachers – Part 1 I explain how to use the Teacher´s Pet add-on and I share a simple macro to create the Swimming Pool worksheets. In this post, I am going to offer you more macros which will help you create vocabulary worksheets in no time.
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Noughts and Crosses
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Noughts and crosses is an activity which I published in English Teaching Professional (Issue 105). “For this activity, you need to prepare two worksheets. Worksheet 1 (one copy per student) has a grid, usually 12×13, in which your target words are entered randomly in the students’ mother tongue.”(English Teaching Professional, Issue 105, page 8) It is really difficult to prepare such a worksheet. That was why I created the following macro:
You can see how to insert the macro into Microsoft Word in the following video:
Type your list of words + their translation. Change the page to landscape view. Change the numberofwords value to the number of words in your list. Click Developer and find the Crosses and noughts Macro. Run the macro and your worksheet is finished. (See the video for more detailed instructions.)
Once you have this worksheet, print one for each student in your group. Moreover, you need to prepare a list of words which you used in the worksheet (a simple table with the words and their translation will do).
Tell the students to take the list of words. Read the words aloud and ask them to repeat. Do this at least twice. Then give your students about two minutes to learn the words from the list.
Then they put the list of words away and play the game noughts and crosses. One of the students plays noughts and the other crosses. Before they can place a nought or a cross anywhere in the grid, they have to say the corresponding word in English. If their partner agrees that the word is correct, they can place their symbol into the given square. However, if they do not agree, they need to check using the list and if they are wrong, they have to play somewhere else.
The aim of each player is to create a line of 5 uninterrupted symbols. These can be in line, diagonal or in a column and there must be no free spaces in the line. I usually let my students play for seven minutes and then I stop the game.
Then students have 4 minutes to write as many words into their grids as possible. They may use the word lists but they mustn’t skip any words. The best performance has been 8 full columns.
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More activities
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The grid which we create with the previous macro is very versatile. I use it for two more games.
The first one is called Spill the Beans. Each student gets the grid and 4 beans. They spill their beans on the grid and they have 30 seconds to say all the words their beans cover or touch. They get one point for each correct answer.
The second game is called Tennis. Make the middle line of the grid thicker so it looks like the one in the picture below.
Students need a bean and a pencil. One student puts the bean on her half and pushes it with her pencil to the other half. Then she has to say the words the bean covers or touches. Students get one point for each correct word. Students play for 7 minutes and the winner is the one who gets more points.
If the bean doesn´t cross the thick line, their partner gets an extra turn and she says all the words the bean covers or touches. Put simply, if the bean is on your half, you try to push over the net (the thick line) and your partner says the words. If the bean stops on the rival´s half, you say the word.
Again, when the game finishes, I ask the students to fill in as many columns as possible in four minutes.
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Microsoft Word – Remembering tables
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Remembering tables is a simple, yet effective, activity to teach new vocabulary using students’ mother tongue. For this activity you need a worksheet which consists of four pairs of tables. On the left there are tables with the English words and their translations. On the right, there are the same tables but without the English words. You can see such a table below.
Obviously, it is not easy to create such tables and that is why I asked an expert on Microsoft Word to create the macro for me. This time, you need to download the following file.
Before you open the file above, you must create a list of 16 words+their translation in Notepad. Save the list under any name but make sure that you save it as Unicode. (Don´t ask, I have no idea what this is 🙂 ) Then download the file above and Select the file you created in Notepad. Beware, the macro will not work if your file doesn’t contain exactly 16 words and they are not in Unicode. (See the video below for detailed instructions)
And how do you use the remembering tables? Start at the top. Read the English words in the first table and ask your students to repeat them. Do it at least twice. Then the students have 20 seconds to remember the 4 words from the first table. After the twenty seconds, they cover the table on the left and try to complete the table on the right. When they finish their work, they look at the table on the left and check + correct their answers. If they cannot remember any word, they can have a look and complete the table on the right with this help.
You do the same with the rest of the tables. The only difference is the time the students have for learning the words. For the second table, they have 30 seconds, for the third they have 45 seconds and for the last one they have only 40 seconds because all the words there have already been taught.
I hope you will find these macros and activities useful and that you will use them in your lessons. If you have more ideas for Macros, share them in the comments below.
Do you use Microsoft Word? Do you create worksheets and teaching materials with it? You are not the only one. Microsoft Word is the most common piece of software teachers use. It is really easy to use and it can do nearly anything. However, it can do much more! It can make your lesson preparations really easy!
In this post, I would like to share several macros I have been using for years. These macros save a lot of time and make my lessons are more interesting. I will share the add-ons and macros to create some of the activities I have been using daily (or at least weekly 🙂
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Teacher’s Pet for Microsoft Word
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Have you got a pet? No? You will!
Teacher’s Pet is a set of macros you will love. There are many things that you will be able to do. You can create crosswords, wordsearches, flashcards, jumbled texts and much more. You can download it here: Teacher’s Pet.
How does it work? Simply, download the programme and install it on your computer. There will probably be several hiccups during the installation as the original Microsoft Word tries to prevent you from making any changes but you will find instructions and help here.
Once you install it, there should appear a new tab in your Microsoft Word. It is called ADD ON and when you click it, you will see the icon with a dog and it is the Teacher´s Pet. So, what shall you do with it?
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Simple Crossword
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I often create simple crosswords for a vocabulary test. You just type the list of words + their translations (type the WORD+Translation). Add a solution at the top of the list and then click Simple Crossword and the macro will create your crossword. You can see a video of the process here.
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Flashcards
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Another Teacher’s Pet macro that I use frequently are flashcards. To create flashcards, you need to create a table with two columns first. The first column contains the words and the second can contains the translations or pictures. Then you click FLASHCARDS and two files are created. In one file, there are the words, and in the second there are the translations or pictures. Then you just print the first file, return the paper into your printer and print the second file. See the video:
There are 24 macros in Teacher’s Pet. Twenty are free and four are premium and you have to pay for them. Some of the macros do not work perfectly, for example Verb Tense Test, but most of them are fine and worth having. They will save you a lot of time.
Once I got to know Teacher’s Pet I got inspired and started programming simple macros myself.
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My original macros
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One of the activities I have been using a lot is called SWIMMING POOL vocabulary activity. You can find its description here. To do this activity, you need a worksheet with three columns for each student. In the columns, there is a random selection of the words you want your students to learn. When I started creating these worksheets they took a lot of time. So I wrote a macro and now it is a breeze. Here is the macro.
To use this macro, copy the text, open the DEVELOPER tab, Macros, Create New and paste it there. You can see the process in the video below:
Type your list of words+their translation. Click Developer, find the Swimming Pool Macro and change the value Numberofwords to the number of words you really have. This value is set to 29 by default. If you have fewer words and you do not change the value, there will be some empty squares in your worksheet. Click the run button and the grid should appear. See the video demonstration.
To teach the conjunctions of time, it is crucial that the students understand the meaning of the conjunctions. That is why I have created the following graphic organiser which I use to explain the meaning of the conjunctions:
I print the picture and hand it out to my students.
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Then I explain the meaning of the conjunctions. If I teach monolingual classes I translate the meaning of the words and then I explain how the usage differs in English. However, if you teach an international group you need to explain the meaning in English.
- AFTER means later or then.
- WHEN says that action 2 happens after action one. Moreover, action one is certain to happen.
- BEFORE means sooner.
- WHILE – the two actions happen at the same time.
- AS SOON AS – immediately after.
- IF – is similar to when, but the action 1 may not happen and then the action 2 will not happen. I like to emphasize that IF includes a decision.
I am not saying that the explanation is perfect, but it works pretty well for my students so it might work for your students, too.
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Conjunctions of time – practise
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Now your students understand the meaning of the conjunctions. But can they use them?
I suppose that there will be some exercises in your textbooks or that you can find some worksheets online. So I created two rather unusual exercises to practise the grammar.
The first one is a game. Download the following pdf document and open it in Acrobat reader by Adobe (the game will not work otherwise).
The game is called Penalty Shootout. Your task is to choose the correct answer and then score a goal.
The second unusual activity to practice the conjunctions of time is a video quiz.
Students prepare a piece of paper and watch the video and write down their answer for each sentence. There are eight sentences and the students can see the correct answers at the end.
I hope you will find these activities useful and that your students will learn the conjunctions of time and will use them correctly.
Dictations?! Really? Isn’t this method outdated, boring and non-communicative?
Yes, it certainly isn’t modern or innovative, but it is useful. It provides feedback on listening and during a dictation the skill of writing gets some practise.
Moreover, Paul Nation in his book “What Every EFL Teacher Should Know?” puts dictation among Language-Focused listening and speaking activities. He writes that “there is value in giving deliberate attention to language features in listening and speaking. This deliberate attention provides a way of learning new language features quickly and efficiently.” Put simply, dictation helps learners practise listening and writing and it improves their language at the same time.
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How to do a dictation?
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Paul Nation describes a good dictation in this way:”a teacher needs to get a text around 100 words long. This text should only contain familiar words and it could be taken from a reading text that the learners have already studied earlier in the course.”
The classroom procedure should be following. The teacher first reads the whole dictation at a normal speed, and students only listen. Then the teacher reads small chunks of the text quite naturally and students write what they hear. The teacher reads each chunk twice. In the end, the teacher reads the whole text again at a normal speed.
Once the dictation is over, there are several ways to check the writing. The teacher can collect the dictations and check them. Or they can display the correct text and students correct their own work. Or the students work in pairs and correct their partner’s writing.
I followed these instructions and I created and recorder the following dictations for my elementary students of English.
The first two dictations focus on the verb TO BE, while the last one features the verb HAVE GOT, too.
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Dictation 1
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Dictation 2
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Dictation 3
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I hope these dictations will help you in your teaching and that your students will improve their listening and writing.
Works cited:
Nation, P (2013). What Should Every EFL Teacher Know? [E-book].Compass Publishing.