using dictionaries. The revision or introduction of the grammatical

structures in a meaningful context is disguised since the students usually

see this is vocabulary game. Because it has a pretty tight structure and

build-up, it’s a good exercise for establishing the principle of

group/pairwork with a class that does not take readily to working in

different formats.

Note

With some classes we have asked the students to analyze their own guessing

processes. Some students have written interesting short compositions on the

best guessing strategies.

Eyes

|Grammar: |‘Second’ conditional |

|Level: |Lower to upper intermediate |

|Time: |30-45 minutes |

|Materials:|None |

In class

1. Ask a student to draw a head in profile on the board. Ask the student to

add eyes in the back of his head.

2. Give the students this sentence beginning on the board and ask them to

complete it using a grammar suggested:

If people had eyes in the back of their heads, then they …

would/might/could/would have to … (+ infinitive)

For example:

‘If people had eyes on the back of their heads they could read two

books at once’ (so two pairs of eyes).

3. Tell the students to write the above sentence stem at the top of their

paper and then complete it with fifteen separate ideas. Encourage the use

of dictionaries. Help students all you can with vocabulary and go round

checking and correcting.

4. Once students have all written a good number of sentences (at least ten)

ask them to form teams of four. In the fours they read each other’s

sentences and pick the four most interesting ones.

5. Each team puts their four best sentences on the board.

6. The students come up to the board and tick the two sentences they find

the most interesting. The team that gets the most ticks wins.

Note

Students come up with a good range of social, medical and other hypotheses.

Here are some examples:

… then they would not need driving mirrors.

… they would make really good traffic wardens.

… then you could kiss someone while looking away!

Umbrella

|Grammar: |Modals and present simple |

|Level: |Elementary to intermediate |

|Time: |30-40 minutes |

|Materials:|One large sheet of paper per student |

In class

1. Ask a student to draw a picture on the board of a person holding an

umbrella. The umbrella looks like this.

2. Explain to the class that this ‘tulip-like’ umbrella design is a new,

experimental one.

3. Ask the students to work in small groups and brainstorm all the

advantages and disadvantages of a new design. Ask them to use these

sentence stems:

It/you can/can’t…

It/you + present simple…

It/you will/won’t…

It/you may/may not…

4. For example: ‘It is easy to control in a high wind’, ‘You can see where

you’re going with this umbrella’

5. Give the students large sheets of paper and ask them to list the

advantages and disadvantages in two columns.

6. Ask the students to move around the room and read each other’s papers.

Individually they mark each idea as ‘good’, ‘bad’ or ‘intriguing’.

7. Ask the student how many advantages they came up with and how many

disadvantages. Ask the students to divide up into three groups according

to which statement applies to them:

I thought mainly of advantages.

I thought of some of both.

I thought mainly of disadvantages.

8. Ask the three groups to come up with five to ten adjectives to describe

their group state of mind and put these up n the board.

9. Round off the exercise by telling the class that when de Bono asked

different groups of people to do this kind of exercise, it turned out

that primary school children mostly saw advantages, business people had

plenty of both while groups of teachers were the most negative.

Note

Advantages the students offered:

In a hot country you can collect rain water.

It won’t drip round the edges.

You can use it for carrying shopping.

It’s not dangerous in a crowd.

It’s an optimistic umbrella.

It’s easy to hold if two people are walking together.

With this umbrella you’ll look special.

It’ll take less floor space to dry.

This umbrella makes people communicate. They can see each other.

You can paint this umbrella to look like a flower.

You’ll get a free supply of ice if it hails.

Presentation

Listening to time

|Grammar: |Time phrases |

|Level: |Upper intermediate to very advanced |

|Time: |40-50 minutes |

|Materials |None |

Preparation

Invite a native speaker to your class, preferably not a language teacher as

they sometimes distort their speech. Ask the person to speak about a topic

that has them move through time. This could be his country history. The

talk should last around twenty minutes. Explain to the speaker that the

students will be paying close attention not only to the content but to the

language form, too.

In class

1. Before the speaker arrives, explain to the students that they are to jot

down all the words and phrases they hear that express time. They don't

need to note all the words!

2. Welcome the speaker and introduce the topic.

3. The speaker takes the floor for fifteen to twenty minutes and you join

the students in taking language notes. If there are questions from the

students, make sure people continue to take notes during the questioning.

4. Put the students in threes to compare their time-phrase notes. Suggest

the speaker joins one of the groups. Some natives are delighted to look

in a ‘speech mirror’.

5. Share your own notes with the class. Round off the lesson by picking out

other useful and normal bits of language the speaker used that are not

yet part of your student’s idiolects.

Example

One speaker mentioned above produced these time words: only about ten

years/there was a gap of nine years/ at roughly the same time/over the

next few hundred years/from 1910 until the present day/it’s been way back/

within eighteen month there will be/until three years ago/when I was back

in September

Variations

Choose the speaker who is about to go off on an important trip. In speaking

about this, some of the verbs used will be in a variety of forms used to

talk about the future.

Invite someone to speak about the life and habits of someone significant to

them, but two lives separately from them, say a grandparent. This topic is

likely to evoke a rich mixture of present simple, present continuos, will

used to describe habitual events, ‘ll be –ing etc.

Note

To invite the learners to pick specific grammar features out of a stream of

live speech is a powerful form of grammar presentation. In this technique

the students ‘present’ the grammar to themselves. They go through a process

of realization which is lot stronger than what often happens in their minds

during the type of ‘grammar presentation’ required of trainees on many

teacher training courses. During the realization process, they are usually

not asleep.

Guess my grammar

|Grammar: |Varied+question form |

|Level: |Elementary to intermediate |

|Time: |55 minutes |

|Materials |None |

In class

1. Choose a grammar area the students need to review. In the example below

there are adjectives, adverbs and relative pronouns.

2. Ask each student to work alone and write a sentence of 12-16 words (the

exact length is not too important). Each sentence should contain an

adjective, and adverb and a relative pronoun, or whatever grammar you’ve

chosen to practise. For example: ‘She sat quietly by the golden river

that stretched to the sea’.

3. Now ask the students to rewrite their sentences on a separate piece of

paper, leaving in the target grammar and any punctuation, but leaving the

rest as blanks, one dash for each letter. The sentence above would look

like this:

--- --- quietly -- --- golden ----- that --------- -- --- ---.

While they are doing this ask any students who are not sure of the

correctness of their sentence to check with you.

4. Now ask the students to draw a picture or pictures which illustrate as

much of the meaning of the sentence as possible.

5. As students finish drawing, put them into groups of three. One person

shows the blanked sentence and the drawing, reserving their original

sentence for their own reference. The other should guess: ‘ Is the first

word the?’ or ask questions ‘Is the second word a verb?’ etc. The student

should only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. As they guess the words, they fill in

the blanks.

6. They continue until all the blanks are filled and then they do the other

two person’s sentences.

Note

Groups tend to finish this activity at widely different speeds. If a couple

of groups finish early, pair them across the groups, ask them to rub out

the completed blanked out sentences and try them on a new partner.

Acknowledgement

Ian Jasper originated this exercise. He’s a co-author of Teacher

Development: One group’s experience, edited by Janie Rees Miller.

Puzzle stories

|Grammar: |Simple present and simple past interrogative forms |

|Level: |Beginners |

|Time: |30 minutes |

|Materials:|Puzzle story (to be written on the board) |

Preparation

Ask a couple of students from an advanced class to come to your beginners

group. Explain that they will have some interesting interpreting to do.

In class

1. Introduce the interpreters to your class and welcome them.

2. Write this puzzle story on the board in English. Leave good spaces

between the lines :

There were three people in the room.

A man spoke.

There was a short pause.

The second man spoke.

The woman jumped up and slapped the first man in the face.

3. Ask one of the beginners to come to the board and underline the words

they know. Ask others to come and underline the ones they know. Tell the

group the words none of them know. Ask one of the interpreters to write a

translation into mother tongue. The translation should come under the

respective line of English.

4. Tell the students their task is to find out why the woman slapped the

first man. They are to ask questions that you can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

Tell them they can try and make questions directly in English, or they

can call the interpreter and ask the questions in their mother tongue.

The interpreter will whisper the English in their ear and they then ask

you in English.

5. Erase the mother tongue translation of the story from the board.

6. One of the interpreters moves round the room interpreting questions

while the other stays at the board and writes up the questions in both

English and mother tongue.

7. You should aim to let the class ask about 15-25 questions, more will

overload them linguistically. To speed the process up you should give

them clues.

8. Finally, have the students copy all the questions written on the board

into their books. You now have a presentation of the main interrogative

forms of the simple present and past.

9. After the lesson go through any problems the interpreters had-offer them

plenty of parallel translation.

The solution

The second man was an interpreter.

Further material

Do you know the one about the seven-year-old who went to the baker’s? His

Mum had told him to get three loaves. He went in, bought two and came home.

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