Humor4u

Image source: Billboard Not too many celebrity deaths this year, but there is a variety of science, sport, celebrity gossip and, inevitably, some politics thrown in. I've tried to vary the format slightly by including, where possible, two stories on the same topic for example, two discoveries, two pregnancies, two air travel related stories etc. to see if this can facilitate recycling of some key lexis from the quiz - more on that under Eliciting / Recycling in the Teachers' notes. The quiz comes in two levels: - Intermediate (B1/2-) - Advanced (B2+/C1 or higher) The Intermediate level quiz has a multiple choice version too (with fewer questions). Both versions can be downloaded in Word format if you want to adapt them. The quiz is accompanied by a 10-page teachers' guide (scroll down) full of ideas on how to use the quiz in class and to exploit the language from the quiz. As usual, follow-up activities for vocabulary review and practice will be posted in a few days. Check

or why I've stopped teaching them (and why you shouldn't bother with them either) Photo by Emma Newman Segev via ELTpics on Flickr Like for many EFL/ESL teachers, stative verbs used to be a staple of my teaching menu. I had a great activity for focusing on them, which I have abandoned because I've come to realise that it served no purpose. The activity, which I may have picked up on my CELTA or from Dave's ESL cafe (who remembers it?), went like this. Groups of 3-4 students (Pre-Intermediate level and up) are given a stack of cards with verbs written on them. They pick up the cards, in turns, and mime the verb for other students to guess. The correct guesser keeps the card and the one with most cards at the end is the winner. But the aim of the activity is not to review vocabulary. At the end of the miming / guessing part, students are asked which verbs were easy to mime and which ones proved a bit challenging, stretching the students' artistic resources. The "