ESL articles: TEFL activities with little preparation

Resource centre  >  Ideas and techniques  >  Activities

TEFL Activities with Little Preparation

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.

This article © eslbase.com

 Send to a friend             Comment              Share this

more resources

ESL resources
Downloadable activities
Grammar teaching ideas

Lessons from Nothing: Activities for Language Teaching with Limited Time and Resources
An invaluable resource for busy teachers everywhere who are looking for easy-to-use activities which do not require extensive facilities or preparation.

comments

"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."
Hania Ghazi Yassine

"Thank you for some GREAT ideas - theory born out of practise makes all the difference between boredom and language acquisition. Gracias amigo!"
Bruce

"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."
Sok Sangvat

"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."
Li

"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!"
Guillermina

"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!"
Mhuck

"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!"
Chloe

"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"
Nguyen Van Anh

"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!!!"
Cintia

"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."
Jorge

"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.
Japhia

post your comment

Name	optional
Email address	optional
Comment