Humor4u

Activities for reviewing and recycling the language  from News Quiz 2020 Image credits: Frankie Fouganthin  [CC BY-SA 4.0],  TenAsia  [CC BY 3.0],  U.S. Secretary of Defense   [CC BY 2.0] - via Wikimedia Commons The traditional news quiz has changed its format this year so the follow up, which usually consists of paper-and-pen activities, had to follow suit. I've created a series of interactive online activities on WordWall and LearningApps, which you can adapt if necessary and share with your students. There are also 'traditional' worksheets in Word and PDF, which those of you teaching remotely can display via ScreenShare on Zoom or Teams or simply send to students by email. If you haven't seen News Quiz 2020 - click HERE . See also this Jeopardy version (Advanced level) kindly shared by a colleague of mine, Marlene Saban Accompanying Quizlet sets ( work in progress ):  https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2020/ The activities are groupe...

As the year draws to a close it’s time for various top 10, 20 etc lists. I am going to limit myself to 3 and share the web tools that have undoubtedly been my favourite this year. Three different tools - three different uses. Lyricstraining – Listening Listen to various songs and complete gaps in the lyrics. I first learned about this tool at the IATEFL conference in Brighton in 2011 – interestingly, it was mentioned during one of the Pecha Kucha presentations in the evening. I found my notes from the conference about a year later and this year it has been one of my favourite tools. I hope my students enjoy it as much as I do! How it works       Choose a song. Then choose one of three available levels (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) and click on play. As the song plays you have to complete the gaps in the lyrics. The difference between the levels is the number of gaps. Regardless of students’ level I always recommend starting with the Beginner level where y...

I have recently received an email from a colleague, an EFL teacher in Israel, about how her students find it difficult differentiating between near-synonyms. I repost here my reply alongside the original email with the author's kind permission. Hi Leo, I wonder whether you can help me. Do you know any place on the web where I can compare the meanings of near synonyms? I've used the concordance type sites which give me lots of collocations, but that isn't what I want. It doesn't help my pupils to give them 10 collocations for each word (e.g. regular, usual, routine ) some of which are identical. I need to be able to put my finger on a general rule(s) like, one is for people and the other is for abstract ideas (I know this example is irrelevant to those particular words) Thanks for any help you can provide. Renee Wahl Dear Renee, First of all, it's great to know that you use concordance software. I wouldn't give pupils 10 collocations for each word as it is a bit ...

Photo by Cleo Phas August till about mid-October is the time of the year when I enjoy a bit of a lull at work and all my usual students (I teach small groups) are on holiday. It’s also the time of the year when I get approached by some really peculiar one-on-one students. For example, this year’s summer assortment includes the following characters: an adult beginner who wants to speak perfect English by December and yet doesn’t want to do any out-of-class work; a high-powered business woman who needs help with her presentations in English an IELTS candidate who wants to practise speaking You will say: what’s so unusual about it – isn’t it the kind of students we normally teach? Yet there is a difference. My usual, longer-term students are both familiar with my expectations of them and realistic about the process of language learning and therefore willing to work hard. In contrast, my August students are less process-oriented and, for most part, are looking for quick fixes. As a result...

What should I do with these? Photo by Tzvi Meller I’ve always envied people who can whip up a blog post straight after returning from – or sometimes while still at - a conference. Although I didn’t write any IATEFL 2012 reflections there was one session that particularly resonated with me: Andrew Walkley’s Technology and principles in language learning . He talked about how trying to bring technology to our digitally native learners many teachers have lost the focus on language. He listed five things that he found particularly worrying about unprincipled integration of technology into ELT: Vocabulary and grammar are seen as separate entities Grammar domination Vocabulary taught in sets Activity overload Skills are separated from language Andrew seems to have taken the thoughts right out of my head – only I was afraid to verbalise them apart from  this post where I lightly bemoaned the lack of web tools and apps focusing on the link between grammar and vocabulary, multi-word phras...

Image by photosteve101   on  Flickr www.planetofsuccess.com/blog Diigo is a social bookmarking tool which allows you to save and access all your bookmarks online. But it's not only a great app for keeping your links in one place; its highlighting function can be used in class for drawing students attention to and keeping track of lexical chunks in online articles, texts and web pages. You will need to be in a connected classroom (computer, projector, access to the Internet). After your students have read the article for meaning - and possibly discussed it - ask them to underline lexical chunks, collocations and other useful bits of language. Then display the text on the board and highlight the chunks with the whole class on the board using the Highlight function on Diigo: For example, I recently used a BBC article about Cricket making an Olympic bid - click here At this point I should say that I have no qualms about using what might be considered an outdated article, particula...

Introducing students to the idea of lexical priming and a web tool called Netspeak Photo by Tzvi Meller In my previous post from the For the classroom category I shared a lesson idea which I developed for Honesty Day celebrated on 30 April (click  here  to see it). Apart from the song and discussion activities, students also read three articles from the  Breaking News English  website. To lead in to the articles I cut up the three headlines and asked my students to unjumble them, i.e. put the words in the right order. With hindsight I realised that I'd set up my students to fail as one of the headlines read: Homeless man in credit card honesty You often hear of  credit card fraud  (or perhaps  credit card debt )   but  credit card honesty  is an unlikely combination in a linguistic sense. The ability to unjumble sentences is not only a matter of syntactic knowledge but also lexical competence. Hence it is much easier to unjumble sen...