Welcome to A Journey in TEFL

Dear Reader,

If you want to read about teaching English, you can subscribe to my newsletter.

A Vocabulary Game Idea

Today in my reading class, we played a vocabulary game before we started doing the reading activities. Students enjoyed the game a lot and when I gave them a vocabulary exercise at the end of the lesson, they managed to complete it with ease. Here is the game:

List the words you want to pre-teach.

Write them on slips of papers/cards

Put students into teams.

Distribute the cards and tell them to find and write the definitions of the words.

Monitor while they are finding the definitions of the words with more than 1 definitions

Once they finish writing the definitions, tell them they need to make up definitions for the words they have on their cards.

When they finish writing the made-up definitions, the game will start.

Team A reads the real definition and the made up definition of one of the words. Team B discusses together and chooses one of the definitions. If Team B chooses the correct definition of the word, they win a point, if they choose the made-up definition Team A  gains a point. The game continues until all the words finish.

With B2-C1/2 students you may ask the students to come up with 2 made-up definitions.

Skell: A Search Engine to Teach Writing

SKELL is a simple tool that allows students and teachers of English to quickly check if a phrase or word is being used correctly.
It is free. Simply type a word and press the button.
Example sentences, collocations, and synonyms for the word you typed in the search box will appear. The tool will be very handy while your students are writing an article, story etc as it will allow them to see word sketches besides the synonyms and the example sentences.

Grammar Games

REVISION ACTIVITIES FOR TIME CLAUSES AND TENSES

When I’m 65 (to revise tenses, time clauses)

Team your students

Prepare small cards, on small cards write random numbers such as 18, 22, 56, 38, etc.

Put the cards upside down on the desk

Tell students, take one card and make a sentence.

• When I’m 65, I’ll probably have grandchildren.

• When I was 18, I was a student at university.

I had a great holiday there (to revise tenses)

Put some postcards or photos of places on the walls and tell students to walk around and imagine they were on holiday. They have to concentrate on one picture and then go back to their seats and write a paragraph, how they spent their holiday there. Then they can read and their friends try to guess which picture he has chosen.