Resource centre - Ideas and techniques - Activities
How often do you find yourself preparing a class, racking your brain for something different, a new activity to liven up a group of tired students, or just to bring something fresh to the classroom?
If you are like most teachers, thinking of something new and exciting every day
is not easy, and often we simply don't have the time (or energy!) So we revert
to our tried and tested (and sometimes a little worn) ideas, or to following
page after page of a textbook.
Well, it doesn't have to be that difficult. A lot of ideas can be adapted to
many different language points, giving you something that can be used again and
again. If the activity has a clear focus, motivation (students need to know why
they are doing something - adding an element of competition to an activity is
one way to achieve this) and, of course, clear instructions, then you're on to a
winner.
There are many good resource books available with hundreds of quick and easy
activities requiring little or no preparation. Have a hunt around your school's
resources for books such as Five Minute Activities by
Penny Ur and Andrew Wright, or Keep Talking by
Friederike Kippel. Don't forget that your fellow teachers are good resources too
- use them!
Here are a few ideas to get you started:
1 Variation on "Backs to the board"
You may know Backs to the Board , where a representative from each of two teams
faces away from the board, while his/her teammates try to explain the word that
you have written on the board to him/her, without saying the word or any
variations of it. Well, why not extend this to whole sentences? The teams have a
minute to explain the sentence to their teammate, without using any of the
words, or spelling them, or using gestures. You can adapt this to any tense or
structure that you want to practise.
2 Sentence reduction
Write a long sentence or a short paragraph on the board, rich in vocabulary. In
teams, students take it in turns to erase either one, two or three consecutive
words. The sentence must still make sense, gramatically, afterwards. If it
doesn't, replace the words and move to the next team. Carry on until no further
reduction is possible (your students will be amazed at how short the sentence
can become, while retaining its grammatical sense!) The winning team is the one
who removes the most words. Have a look at
these examples of sentences.
(Variation: Do the opposite - start with one word and have students replace it
with two or three, expanding the sentence).
3 For spelling and vocabulary practice, try this:
Start with one letter on the board, say S . The first student then thinks of a
word beginning with S and adds the next letter, for example ST . The next
student then thinks of a word starting with ST and adds another letter, and so
on. If someone in the group thinks there is no such word, he can challenge the
writer to name his/her word. If there is no such word, the writer is out, but if
he/she was thinking of a real word, then the challenger is out. The winner is
the last student remaining.
4 Picture stories
If your students are imaginative, give each group four or five pictures cut out
from magazines, and get them to create a picture story - you can keep the
context very open, or have them focus on a particular tense or function. If you
want to focus on oral communication, don't let them write their story down! If
you also want to evaluate their writing, have them write it down as they go
along. When they've finished, have each group tell their story to the rest of
the class.
5 What's true?
As a Getting to know you exercise, ask students to write three things which are
true about themselves, and two which are not true (but believable). Students
take turns to read their sentences to the rest of the group, who must discuss,
and ask questions to the reader, and try to find out which of his/her sentences
are true. A good ice-breaker is to do this yourself first so that they get the
idea - write the five things about you on the board. (Variation: Write five
one-word facts about yourself on the board, for example 32 , Liverpool , Three ,
Bloggs , and have students, in pairs, try to guess the questions which will give
them these answers.)
6 Continue the story
Another one for imaginative students: Dictate the first line of a different
story to each of several groups. They have a few minutes to continue the story,
and then pass their piece of paper to the next group, who read the story so far
and add the next part. Carry on until the stories reach their original groups,
who then conclude and read out the stories. To focus on a particular language
point or item of vocabulary, you can do this orally as a chain story: Give the
first sentence, then have the first student continue the story. They must at
some point use the tense, or structure, or word (allocated beforehand), that you
want to work on. Carry on until all the students have contributed.
7 For some energetic writing practice...
...divide the board into three columns, and give each column a header with three
structures that you want to practise (for example first, second, third
conditional , yes/no questions, indirect questions, tag questions , present
perfect simple, present perfect continuous, past simple ). Split students into
pairs. One from each pair is the writer, the other is the runner. Give each pair
many small slips of paper and some blu-tac, and tell them that they must
construct as many gramatically correct sentences as they can, in each of the
three categories, and stick them on the board (with their initials to identify
them). Set a five or ten minute time limit. The writer writes a sentence, then
the runner takes the slip of paper and sticks it on the board. Shout CHANGE
every so often for them to swap roles. At the end, have all the pairs look at
the sentences and evaluate them. If they find an incorrect one, they tell you,
and that sentence is not counted towards that pair's score. (Variation: You can
make this activity more difficult by saying that each sentence must contain a
minimum of 10 words, for example.)
8 Secret identities
Another favourite is to give each student a secret famous identity, which they
stick to their back or forehead. They go around the class, asking yes/no
questions to establish their identity. You could make sure they practise the
past simple by making all the famous people dead ( Did I live in the USA? ), or
present perfect, by making them alive (Have I acted in many films?), or future,
by imagining that these famous people have not yet been born (Will I be an
actor?).
9 Opposites
Stand students up, and shout out two opposing ideas, or people, or concepts, or
adjectives, or places. For exanple, beach or mountains , Spielberg or Hitchcock
, red or blue , Playstation or Nintendo depending on the age/interests of your
students. Point to one side of the room for one idea, the other side for the
other. Students move to the side of the room they choose - pick a few students
each time to explain the reasons for their choices. If you like, you can let it
develop into a debate between the two groups.
10 Grammar and gap fill auctions
Do a grammar auction or gap fill auction with mistakes that students have made
(and that you've made a note of) or with a language area that you want to work
on. Split students into teams, and allocate each team $100, or 10,000 yen or any
amount you like. If you can photcopy some real money, so much the better. For
the grammar auction, give each team a worksheet with 10 (or more) sentences
(based on the mistakes they've made or the language area you're working on).
Some should be grammatically correct, others incorrect. Give teams some time to
discuss whether they think the sentences are correct or not, and then have them
gamble on that decision for each sentence. Then give them the answer - if their
decision was right, they double the amount they gambled - if not, they lose
their stake. For the gap fill, give them 10 or more gap fill sentences (again
based on the area you're practising or their mistakes) and this time they choose
the correct word to go in the gap and gamble on it.
You can find variations on these activities, and many, many others in the books
mentioned at the beginning of this article, among others. If you have an
activity that you'd like to share, or any comments about the activities above,
please post a comment below.
Classroom warmers
ESL resources
Downloadable activities
Grammar teaching ideas
What do you think of this article? Add a comment »
Hi. It sounds interesting what you have mentioned here. As teachers it is very
important to use activities while teaching because I think that activities help
the students to enjoy learning more. Actually I believe that teachers should
always be aware of motivating their students in class. Only motivated students
can reach the targets that teachers set for every lesson, and here there are
some activities given to us that help in motivating our students, so let's use
them. Thank you.
Thank you for some GREAT
ideas - theory born out of practise makes all the difference between boredom and
language acquisition. Gracias amigo!
Thanks very much for
sharing this article with me. It is a very good and valuable article. It gives
me a lot of techniques how to make my class more lively. I think all the 10
points you have given me are good, but it's a bit difficult to apply all these
techniques to students who are in developing countries like Cambodia. Generally,
students here are so weak in their productive skills-speaking and writing.
Anyway, the techniques are good and advantageous for me.
Good ideas! Activities are
the fire that sparks the students' passion and inspiration and the engine that
drives the lecture and the light that brightens the classroom. It is true that
we sometimes find it a headache to work out a good activity, one that can makes
the students not only laugh but also frown to think, because students of higher
education are not so easy to please. They will think you are taking them as a
fool or you are an empiric not responsible and wasting their time there. We do
hope that all the English teachers can gather together here and contribute their
own good ideas to share.
Holidays have just finished
in Argentina... and I have been thinking a lot of some ideas to motivate my
students... Thank you for these good tips to start classes again!
That's a great idea! Item
#6 is interesting to adopt for my students here at University of the East -
Caloocan Campus in Manila, Philippines, specifically in the subject English
112-College Reading and Writing, eight (8) kings of essays-descriptive essay.
More power! Kudos!
Sorry to put a damper on
things but I was disappointed by the article as I was told about all of these
activities during my CELTA training. I regularly do 'back to the board',
'sentence auctions' etc with my EFL / ESOL students. Perhaps there is a limit on
how many genuinely 'new' and exciting activities you can do?
On the plus side, the article has reminded me of some of the activities that I
haven't been using lately, so I will put those into use again!
A favourite with my intermediate classes is a cloze activity. I divide a text
into nouns and pronouns, verbs, and other words. Each group of students has one
set of words.
1. Read out the text. Students write as many words as they can.
2. Distribute words to the three groups a verb group, noun group and other
group. Students fill in as many gaps as possible collaboratively.
3. Read the text again.
4. Students swap groups so that each group has two sets of words.
5. Either give students a complete version of the text so that they can check
for themselves - or, one student comes to the board and asks the others to call
out what they think the correct version is. This is a good conclusion as the
whole class gets involved and there is often debate about what is right or
wrong.
Another good source of ideas is 'Five Minute Activities' by Penny Ur. She has
the sentence reduction idea in there - among many others.
Happy classes everyone!
Such a great resource for
novice teachers as well as those who have run out of ideas for use in class. I
have been in the situation when my resource bank seems to be 'overdrawn', and
from then on I have always had several activities up my sleeves. Reading your
tips, I can add some more things to my ad hoc things to use in emergencies.
Thanks so much! Van Anh, Hanoi University of Foreign Studies, Vietnam
Very interesting and
appealing ideas, but sometimes I find it difficult to apply them in large
classrooms since students become highly excited and it is difficult to control
them. But anyway, great ideas!!!
It's pretty interesting to
know all these activities and how to make your classes fun and forget routine.
Students need extra motivation to keep studying and learning English, they are
easy activities, but you can adapt them to any context or grammatical structure
to reinforce something that you have already taught.
"Thank you very much for
all these ideas. If you want an extra one. Here it is... I use the "spelling
ball" I think of a word beginning with 'a' and say 'ambition', so then I throw
the ball to a student and he/she has to think of a word with 'n' and they have
only 30 secs to do so.
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