Issue 4 - May 2002
Other Issues

• VTTN provincial workshops
• What makes a good lesson?
• Classroom management pair work and group work
• Building your teaching 'repertoire'
• Grammar teaching activities
• Lesson ideas
• Other VTTN News
• Contacts
 

VTTN provincial workshops
February/ March 2002


Building your teaching 'repertoire'

In the morning session of day two, participants and trainers shared their favourite activities for teaching and practising grammar in the communicative classroom. In the following pages are descriptions of these activities, how and when to use them and other practical hints. Most of these activities are 'generic' activities - that is to say, they can be used to teach and practice a large number of different grammar points. If you can add these activities to your 'repertoire' (your bank of teaching activities and techniques), we hope it will help to make your lessons more interesting and your students more motivated and involved.

This useful list of activities appeared in the very first issue of the VTTN newsletter in November 2000.
We are reproducing it here because it is as relevant to teaching grammar now as it was back then:

Speaking activities Using pictures Using dialogues
Roleplay (open, guided)
Narratives (telling stories)
Find someone who…
Discussions:
open-ended (no conclusion); closed (some conclusion, eg ranking discussion, survival discussion, problem-solving).
Debates
Interviews
Questionnaires (class surveys)
Guessing/ speculating games
Reporting/ giving presentations
Planning an event
Giving opinions, agreeing, disagreeing
Improvising a conversation/ dialogue

Telling stories/ making dialogues
Making sentences/ writing descriptions
Asking questions/ giving answers
Fill in speech bubbles in pictures and cartoons
Guessing/ speculating/ interpreting mystery or unusual pictures
Matching spoken or written descriptions to pictures
Picture dictation
Describe and draw
Describe and arrange
Describe and identify
Find the differences/ similarities between two pictures
Discuss and compare pictures

Gap-fill dialogues (with or without multiple choice answers)
Reading gapped dialogue and predicting the missing information, then listen to check
Listen to/ read dialogue then
a) identify correct picture
b) roleplay a similar situation

One-sided dialogue (like telephone conversations) - students guess the 'hidden' part

Students create dialogue - others guess who and where they are

Listen to one line at a time with students predicting the next line

Students make a dialogue using picture prompts

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