Lesson ideas

Pre-reading - reading: before and as you meet the text.
DICTATED TITLES Dictate the., title of the text to be read word by word.
Pause for 30 seconds between each word while the students write down all the thoughts that go through their heads about the probable content of text. The beauty of this idea is that the students have to keep revising their opinions until eventually they virtually know what they are going to read before they read it. NB. This only works for interesting titles!!

Establishing familiarity with the text
THE REALLY NEW AND THE MERELY NEW Ask students to make a list of all the words and phrases in the text that (a) they don't understand (b)they don't use in their own English but would like to. As each student finishes, they team up in pairs, put their lists together and then divide words/ phrases into 3 categories - they must choose the appropriate categories together. It's very important that they decide these for themselves and very interesting when they share them with other students.

From Familiarisation to Interpretation
KEYWORDS Keywords are a fairly common idea in language teaching, but keywords from a text are usually chosen by the teacher. But what about getting your students to select the keywords?
You could ask your students........
- which keywords can you identify to represent the text?
- which keywords not found in the text might represent it?
- Which keywords might help the reader most?
- How are these words different?

You could ask your students to select key words and then arrange them hierarchically (e.g. list the keywords according to importance), thematically or by frequency.

Working on a Text
HIDING WORDS IN THE TEXT Put students in pairs. Give each student in a pair a different text (or paragraph). Give each of them an adverb and ask them to re-write their text (or paragraph) and to 'hide' the adverb somewhere in the text. After they have re-written the text, they should challenge their partner to find which adverb has been added to the text. Instead of an adverb, you could give students an adjective or a complete sentence or get them to insert something of their own.
Both when inserting the extra words, and when trying to find out which word your partner has put in, students have to think about cohesion and coherence (or how the text fits together to create meaning).

Interrupting stories
A very simple communicative activity, but, again, one with huge potential.
Ask your student to sit on group of 4, preferably with people they don't normally sit with. Ask them to individually and silently think of an interesting thing that happened to them recently. When all have thought of a story, they should tell their group. The job of the group is to interrupt by asking question on order to stop the person from finishing their story! Can be a lot of fun.

The empty chair
Place to chairs side by side. Sit on the left hand chair yourself. Tell the students that someone is sitting in the empty chair, but that they are invisible. Invite students to ask questions to the empty chair to discover as much information as possible. When the students ask a question, you should answer as if you were the person in the chair!! (e.g. if a student asks,"What's your name?", you should answer, "My name is…", and not "His/Her name is…."
By changing the person who is in the chair, you could use activity in any number of different textbook lessons. You could choose, Issac Newton, from Tieng Anh 12, Lesson 8, or Mark Twain from English 11, Unit 9 or anyone else at all! To take the activity a step further, you could place an object on the empty chair (e.g. a pair of glasses, a watch) and answer the student's question as if you were the object. A strange, but very effective activity with lots of potential.
A conference favourite!

Past/present/future dictation
Here's a nice and simple activity which you could use as either an introduction to a reading text, or as revision for previous vocab.
Ask SS to divide a page into 3 columns and label them

Past Present Future
Shoe Baby Money
Lunch Conference Beer
train humour Crazy

Dictate a random set of words (e.g. vocab from a reading text) and ask student to write the words in a column, depending on whether they connect the word with the past, present or future. When you have dictated all the words, ask SS to from pairs/ small groups and explain why they wrote the words where they did.

Describing colleagues/family
In this activity, Peter used Cuisennaire Rods, small coloured pieces of wood used in Mathematics teaching. You could use pens or pieces of coloured paper instead.
Tell your student that you are going to tell them about your family. Hold up one rod/pen and say that it is your mother. Tell your students a little bit of information about your mother. When you have finished, stick the rod/pen to the board. Take another rod/pen and say that it is your brother/sister/mother/cat ect… Repeat until you have told them lots of information about your family.
When you have finished, draw chalk circles around the different pens and then remove the pens. Ask two students to come to the board. Give them the pens and ask them to repeat the information about your family, exactly as you said it.
Other members of the class can help them if they forget some information.
As a follow-up, you could ask SS in small groups to describe their own families in the same way.

Descriptions of language learners before the class, write an individual profile of yourself in which you describe what you could do in English when you were at the same level as your own learner. You should include what you knew, what you could do, what you liked and didn't like doing, what you tried avoid, you learning strategies, your lever of confidence etc. You should write profile at a level which your students can understand.
Distribute copies of your own profile and ask them to delete any parts which don't apply to them. More advanced learners can be asked to add details to the profile to make it fit themselves. After this, allow sufficient time for a class discussion in which the students compare their own profiles with yours. (N.B. If you cannot make copies, you could dictate your profile, or write it on the board, or you could ask students to write their own profiles and then exchange them with a partner.

Feedback

This feedback activity was used at the conference. But you could use it with your students after any lesson/ activity to find out what they thought.
Elicit some sentence heads (just the start of the sentences)
e.g. I particularly enjoyed…..
It would have been better if…..
I still keep wondering about….
The food was…….
Some sentence heads invite positive comments, some negative. Ask your students to complete the sentences and hand them in anonymously. The results are often very revealing! Here's a selection of what conference participants said:
- "The Communicative Approach we talked about requires a big change in material and in ways of learning and teaching…"
- "One thing I liked about the conference was that the lecturer made us feel confident about the future of teaching and learning English in this country…"
- "The most important thing I learnt from this conference is that learners are a very good resource of materials and ideas that a teacher can exploit…"
- "I enjoyed the activity 'The Empty Chair' very much. I can apply this activity to many classes…"
- "One thing I liked was to have the chance to meet so many other experienced teachers who come from different provinces of Vietnam…"
- "I hope there will be more conferences like this in the future…"

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