Could you Put the Pet in a Pot of Peat

Good afternoon. I realise it's been a while, again. Alas the perils of working and it being the new year I have been dragged into doing an awful lot of stuff. Whilst doing said stuff though my creative juices began to trickle.
I came up with a fun little game that I have found to be useful with my Spanish learners. It also adds a bit of a giggle to the class, which is always nice.

So what I do is: Using the super fun animations function on PowerPoint I make lists ten of 1 syllable words appear at 3 minute intervals. The first one I use to explain the activity.
Each of the words has to start and end in the same consenent sound or one, in Spain's case V and B, that frequently get confused.  Change the vowel sound.
Next up write numbers 0 -9 underneath the words. Make sure they understand and can pronounce the words.
Then tell them your phone number, passport number, inmate number (or something similar) using only the words. They have to then see if they got your number right.
The next step you should bring the next list of words up onto the screen. Do the same with the numbers underneath. then get the students to tell their partners their number.
Continue until everyone has had a turn and you've used all the lists of words. It took me about 20 minutes in total and was a great laugh

Until the next time my friends.

H

Where exactly was the cat sitting?

I must admit my most commonly used sentence over the past seven years is probably; "The Cat Sat on the Mat." I use it when helping students develop their imagination and write a story that is less one dimensional and I use it to show what a difference stress can make to a sentence.

Today I'm going to talk about the latter.

I write this simple sentence out on the board. Next I underline one of the words in the sentence and get the students to stress said word. Almost immediately stdents pick up on the difference the stres can make. 

For example. The CAT sat on the mat. The stress on the word cat shows us it was a feline creature and not any other beast. 

The cat SAT on the mat. With the stress lying on the verb it shows us that the cat wasn't dancing, nor was she singing and was in fact just having a nice little sit. 

I continue with the other words in the sentence then I get students to write there own sentences and choose a word to stress. Other students have to decipher the meaning and share with the class what the stressed word indicates. 

And that my friends is about that. 

If you want regular updates you can follow me on twitter @sirhofthebomb 

Don´t Talk To Me In That Tone Of Voice

Well hello there. Happy New Year. I trust you all had a wonderful break over the festive period. I most certainly did.  This year I'm going to start by looking more at tone, stress and pronuncian. 

I popped back to the UK for a wedding and to see some family. It finally dawned on me while I was there that English people, or perhaps it´s just my family, use sarcasm to such an extent that a non-native speaker would obviously struggle to even get the jist of a conversation. 
It was at this point I decided to have a look at some ideas as to how we could convey such a vital part of our language to those learning it. 
To respond properly to a native speaker, an EFL learner has to pay attention. 
One of the easiest ways to get this across to non-native speakers is to give a list of 5-10 comments that could be sarcastic or sincere, and change their meaning with your tone. Have your students work in pairs to replicate your tone, and have them practice responding to each other in turns based on their tone. Examples include:

• I just love your outfit today. Are those blue sneakers?
• I can’t wait for my workout today at the gym!
• Eating healthy just makes me feel so good. I really don’t miss cake.

Get students to write a few of their own and then let each students read them aloud in either tone and ask the other students to guess if it´s Sarcastic or sincere. 

So there we go, the first blog of the year. Have fun with it. 

Until the next time.

Pronouncing G and J (Spanish learners) from http://watersdw30.wordpress.com

Pronouncing G and J (Spanish learners) 

from  http://watersdw30.wordpress.com

I've taken the liberty of borrowing this post from Dave Waters' blog so as to get it to a slightly wider audience. I'm sure he won't mind, after all your children take from you even when they're fully grown adults right? It's a word that I feel should be spread.

Dave has been teaching English since 2004. He is qualified to teach in the UK with a Cert Ed and a  level 4 Cert ESOL and also holds the Trinity Cert TESOL.  He completed part of London Southbank University’s postgraduate certificate in ADDS (Adult Dyslexia). He is a fellow of the Institute for Learning.
He has taught all over the world most recently in Germany and Spain.


Pronunciation can drive you to drink.

Among my adult students are designers,engineers and project managers. This being Spain, single gs and js in English words cause frequent pronunciation difficulties and unfamiliar letter clusters like dg in edge render some students speechless. It’s not that they don’t know how to pronounce the sounds, it’s that often they don’t know that they do know.

If your students are d-sih-ners, en-hineers and proyect man-ahers try the following:
Write Gin Tonic on the board, not gin and tonic that is about culture, this is about pronunciation.
Ask the students to read the words aloud, usually one or more will say Gin /ʤɪn/ , if not model the word, chorus and then go round the table asking students to say the words.

When you are happy with their pronunciation write the letter G under the G in Gin, utter the /ʤ/ sound and then ask the students to repeat. If the pronunciation drifts from the target sound point at Gin Tonic and start again.

Then write engine on the board – make sure the g aligns vertically with the other Gs – I underline the letter, or write it in a different colour for emphasis. Then model engine and continue as before.

At some point it is necessary to move from g words to j words, I try to use words that are useful to my students, or familiar or both. Write a number of j words on the board, one under another, then starting at Gin Tonic run through the list, emphasising the /ʤ/ sound each time, chorus and student rounds as before.

The next stage is to tackle mid word /ʤ/ sounds. As before align the relevant letter(s) vertically and chant the words, encouraging the students to join in.

When students are having difficulties with the word written in English I supplement the word with a [this is what it sounds like] collection of letters. I use anything that is familiar to the students so in Spain c becomes s or k , th sometimes becomes z, and I will say theta, sion, tion, cian become shun and so on. Do emphasise that anything between the square brackets is not a correct English spelling, just something that helps some students pronounce the word correctly.

Tell the students that in all English words the letter j* has the same pronunciation and then move to the alternative /g/ sound, which is used in Spanish in words such as Gloria.
I have found it is necessary to give students a few familiar /g/ sound words to prevent them trying to /ʤ/ everything.

Finally when a student next haitches a j write Gin in a corner of the board and the offending word underneath, they will very quickly self correct ( and correct each other) as you reach for the gin.
Please let me know if gin works for you, or if something else works in your context.
Gin
G
engine
general
gel
gyroscope
jitter
jolt
joist
judder
jerk
edge
gauge Gloria followed by Gin
enjoyment
injection [in jek shun]
inject [in jekt]
project [pro jekt]
jam, jib, juice, January, June, July, Jesus, Jew, gypsy, Egypt, agent, Germany
Gloria – gain, gas, gauge, gear, girder, ground, gradient, grind, guarantee, aggregate
*junta, in English, can be pronounced /ʤ/ or/h/

A Little Quiz

As it's getting so close to Christmas I thought I'd give my students a break in disguise. For the really good classes we've been playing poker. With the not so great classes or the ones who had no desire whatsoever to play poker I've been doing a wonderful little quiz which combines trivia, exam practice and Christmas bits and bobs.
It takes about an hour. The trivia answers are on the answer sheet on the below link. The PowerPoint for the quiz is in the very same place.

https://sites.google.com/a/thenglishouse.com/harry/
Christmas Pub Quiz (PPT) Christmas Pub Quiz Answers

Have a great one.

TESOL Spain

So it looks like I'll be speaking at TESOL Spail on Sunday the 9th of March. Get thee down there for some fun and learning; all at the same time. http://www.tesol-spain.org/en/pages/1/convention-2014.html

'til later.

H

Just a Quick One

One of my favourite fillers is the YES/NO/MAYBE game. It's pretty simple really. Ask students some simple YES/NO questions and try and make them say YES, NO or MAYBE. If they do, they're out. At the end of a few rounds get the students to ask you questions and see if they can trip you up.
It's a great filler and really good for question formation and answer building.

Verbal Twins

Have you ever had that argument with your better half as to whose name comes first? Some of them are obvious. Brad and Angelina of course Sonny and Cher another glaringly apparent order. Others are a little less clear. There are some word pairs that just have to go in a certain order. I use this little warmer to make students aware of some of the twins that exist in our ever confusing language. Why do they exist that way? Well....... they just do. Some things are just black and white.

Put your class into pairs and give them 5 minutes to work out which pair goes with which and in what order.

Happy Teaching

'til the next time.

For more updates follow me on twitter @sirhofthebomb.

Riddle me this

Whilst puzzling out interesting ways to spice up my classes I popped onto eslprintables.com in search of ideas. I was reminded by an ESL veteran about the joy of riddles. Making students think outside the box to get them focused on class and not just throwing them in with a grammar exercise or speaking exam part jazzed up as a game. I found students used lots of the speculation language we went over last week without using the prompt sheet.

I'd done a riddle of the day a few years ago with an intensive FCE class and it had worked wondrfully well and by the end of the four week course the riddles were taking less and less time because students had started to think so far out of the box that the box had become a dot on the horizon. 

I started with this little one yesterday as we've been working on stereotypes this week.

Acting on an anonymous phone call, the police raid a house to arrest a suspected murderer. They don't know what he looks like but they know his name is John and that he is inside the house. The police bust in on a carpenter, a lorry driver, a mechanic and a fireman all playing poker. Without hesitation or communication of any kind, they immediately arrest the fireman. How did they know they'd arrested the right person?

I reminded the students we were working on stereotypes and that the carpenter, lorry driver and mechanic all had something in common. Then after stressing that HIS name was John a bright spark finally clicked and pointed out that the three former occupations were not gender specific and that they could as easily be women as men. Whereas the fireman by definition had to be a man. 

The class are now eagerly anticipating next week's riddle. I think I'll go with this little classic. 

How could a baby fall out of a twenty-story building onto the ground and live?

'til next time

Another Fun Filler - Would you Rather....

There is almost always a time when you've got 5 minutes left at the end, in the middle, at the start of your class where you just want the students to let their hair down and have fun. Rather than just turning on yourtube and watching a students favourite video, which can have little or no language pay off, why not have try this little activity.
I love playing Would you rather..... I like to start by giving a few examples. I sometimes use http://yourather.com/ to get students going. Giving students really imaginative silly options always brings out the best answers and the best questions from your students.
Would you rather have glitterball hair or a glow in the dark tongue?
I like to get my students to give a reason for their decision and make sure they choose one.
Next I get the students to write two or three of their own and go around asking their classmates.

Now don't get me wrong I'm not video bashing. I love using videos in class, rather than a filler though I prefer to use them as a planned activity and that usually takes a great deal more work than just throwing in a game.

I love this game, it never fails to make people laugh and almost always brings about lively debates on more serious subjects.

Part 1 Phrasal Verbs Battle Ships

Just a quick update for those of you who saw my recent post about Speaking Part 1 Battleships. I've recently updated it and added the new hand out here: https://sites.google.com/a/thenglishouse.com/harry/
Enjoy.

Odd One Out

do you ever find yourself drowning in a sea of exam papers marking practice exam after practice exam? I do. What's most upsetting, as I've said a great number of times before, is the fact that speaking practice in class has now drifted so far away from teaching English and deep into the rhelms of teaching exam technique.
One thing that is too often forgotten is pronunciation. Which itself is a huge part of speaking exams. Every nationality has its own little quirks when pronouncing English. Here in Spain there are a great number of them. I'll go into more detail in future posts about specific Spanish problems. With the help and input of the deeply knowledgeable font of information that is the great www.watersdw30.wordpress.com 
Today, however, I'm going to start with a universal activity that a colleage of mine, Beth Smith, introduced me to last week. It´s a great warmer or cooler and really helps students differentiate between different sounds. It's similar to the minimal pairs activity below but with a slightly more advanced twist.

As always with my classes I put students into pairs or groups and get them to read aloud the word groups below, one at a time. Students have to decide which word is the odd one out.
simple, effective and fun.

If you want more ideas or you want to tell me what I'm doing wrong. You can follow me on twitter @sirhofthebomb

Until the next time.

Parts of a Picture

Here I am then, back from the dead and ready to share more love with everyone.
I always use this picture at the start of a course. Especially with B1 whereby they have to describe a picture. I've found it useful with B2 classes as well as it gives students areas of a picture to compare and contrast. Most importantly though I actually find it useful language for students and not just exam bashing.

downlaods available above as always. (Just a few materials)

'Til tomorrow.

Speaking Part Three. What´s in Your Kitchen?

I thought today would be as agood a time as any to share one of my favourite and most successful ideas. I’ve found most books have a unit on food so I use this in conjunction with that unit. I usually do this as a two-three phased activity. First I remind students of the useful kitchen vocab before starting the task.I use either the worksheet below, or at this link https://sites.google.com/a/thenglishouse.com/harry/, or the PowerPoint on the same page. 

This actuvity, with the ppt, improves students timing during part three of the speaking exam, the discussion. It also helps with speculation(use the previous post's language grab to further aid students with speculation). The uses for the pictures are below. Have a guess at each one before you look ahead. 

Phase three of the kitchen discussion involes the students a great deal more. I ask each of them to bring their favoutire kitchen utnesil to class and then give them three minutes to answer the same question as in the activity below. This time with more confidence and a better knowledge of what the kitchen gadgets are actually used for. 


Vocab:  Phase 1

Task: Phase 2 (Works really well with speculation language grab).

1. All Round Avocado Tool. 2. Orange Squeezer. 3. Potato Masher. 4. Knife Sharpener. 5. Strawberry Huller. 6. Salt and Pepper Mill.


Students bring their own utensils: Phase 3.

As always you can follow new updates on twitter. @sirhofthebomb

Until tomorrow and more bright ideas.  

Language Grab - Speculation

Something I always find amazing is how unwilling students are to speculate. Rather than take a guess at what something might be they tend to say they don't know. Be it a picture in an exam, how people are feeling, an answer to a question or just what they're going to do at the weekend.  I use the below activity in the same way I do with my previous two posts.
Laminate, cut and pass them to your students.

I like to use them to help students describe pictures like the one below.

Ask students how the tree got like that? How long it's been there? Which animals it may have effected?

I can´t be sure but I think…	Obviously
I imagine	Probably/Perhaps….
Without a doubt	I´m pretty sure that
There’s no doubt in my mind that	It’s clearly
I guess	It must be
I don’t really know but if I had to I would choose…….	If I had to hazard a guess
It might be	It could be
To my mind	I reckon