A selection of activities from the conference is reproduced here. Other activities can be found in the VTTN resource books in your province. More still will be demonstrated at the next round of provincial workshops in February and March 2003.

Tapering* Dialogues

An activity where students can practise their writing in a real and communicative way.

1 Ask students to take a blank piece of paper and on it to write the first line of a dialogue. Tell them that they must use exactly seven words.
2 When they have done this, ask them to exchange their paper with a partner. Their partner should read the first line and then write the second line of the dialogue, this time using exactly six words.
3 Pairs continue swapping papers, writing the next lines using five, four, three, two and finally one word.
4 Students read out their completed dialogues and the class can choose their favourite.

*Tapering means getting smaller and smaller at once end.

Dictagloss

A very useful exercise, particularly for more advanced students.

Take a text or part of a text from the book. Read it out twice. Students listen and write down only the KEY words. In small groups they put together their key words and try to reconstruct the text as closely as possible to the original. When they have finished they can check with another group and then wit the textbook to see how well they did.

Example
(7) Are you enjoying reading the VTTN newsletter?
(6) Yes, I am thanks. And you?
(5) Yes, I love the activities.
(4) Will you try them?
(3) Absolutely! Monday morning!
(2) Me too.
(1) Great.

Alternative
Instead of asking students to go from seven words down to one, you could do it the other way, starting with one word and then writing longer and longer sentences.

Backwards Dictation

Choose a text from the coursebook. Tell the students you are going to START AT THE END OF THE PASSAGE AND DICTATE IT BACKWARDS, like this "BACKWARDS IT DICTATE AND PASSAGE OF END…". Dictate the passage backwards. Ask different students to read out their text. They are read it "forwards" by reading from right to left.
This is very powerful exercise that makes the students focus on spelling and grammar, since it disturbs normal habits. The exercise derives from the thinking of A.G.Orage who wrote ON LOVE AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXERCISE (Samuel Weiser, 1998).

Final world

1 Choose a sentence from a text you have been working on recently and dictate to your students.
2 Divide the class into pairs or small groups.
Explain that they will be writing sentences against the clock. Tell them each sentence must end with a word from the dictated sentence. For example, if the dictated sentence is:

There are many ways of spending free time in Australia

Ask students to write ten sentences, each sentence is to end with a different word from the sentence, e.g.
1 My uncle lives in that house over there.
2 ! don't know where my glasses are.
3 You have a lot of sweets, but I don't have many.

Give them a time limit. The winning team is the one that writes the most grammatically correct sentences with a different word at the end.

Alternative
Do the same activity but ask the students to use the words from the dictated sentence in different positions, e.g. as the first word in their sentences:
1 There you are!
2 Are you hungry?
3 Many hands make light work.
4 etc.

Lexical furniture

Alternative
Instead of drawing a plan of a house, you could ask your students to draw their journey to school, their favourite place etc.

A very interesting activity to recycle and revise vocabulary as well as to stimulate speaking. It will appeal to the students in your class with a strongly visual way of thinking.

1 Ask each student to draw a ground plan of his or her house/ flat/ home.
2 Put on the blackboard a set of about twenty words for revision (you could take words from a recently studied text)
3 Working alone, the students should then place the words in appropriate positions on their drawings.
4 In pairs, students look at each other's drawings and discuss why they have put certain words in certain places.

For example, if you take the following words (from Tieng Anh 12, Lesson 1): factory, unemployment, queuing. One student might write factory in the kitchen because this is where dinners are produced for a very large family; unemployment next to the television, because this is what you would watch a lot of if you had no job; and queuing outside the bathroom, because in the morning this is a very busy room and you have to wait your turn! Another student will have different associations with the words, so will write them down in different parts of the house.

Queuing
Bedroom living room kitchen
bathroom
factory
unemployment

Sentence plus 2

1 Tell students you want them to expand a short sentence into ten different sentences by adding two extra words, e.g.
Nancy said nothing.
Might become:
Nancy said nothing at all.
or
Nancy smiled but said nothing
or
Nancy, who said nothing, smiled.

2 Explain the rules to the students:
a) Work in pairs or small groups.
b) The original sequence of words must not be altered, except by the addition of two words
c) Students are free to change punctuation.

3 Give a time limit and check when the first team has completed ten sentences.

September minus 4

This is a very simple practice activity and one which mathematically minded students in your classes will like.

Tell students that January = 1, February = 2, March = 3 etc
Give them a 'mathematical' problem, e.g.

"What is September - 4?"
Answer: September - 4 = May

"What is June + 7?"
Answer: June + 7 = January

Put students in pairs to set problems for each other to solve.

Alternative
You can you this activity to practise any vocabulary set that occurs in a fixed sequence, for example days of the week, ranks in the army, types of school, qualifications…………

DIY* word order

In this activity, the students do all the work. The teacher only has to organise things.

1 Ask students to look at a text they have been working with recently. Ask students to secretly choose their favourite sentence from the text. Ask them to write the sentence onto a strip of paper, then to tear the strip into single words.
2 Each student mixes up the pieces and places them on their desk. Students then move around the classroom, choose a mixed up sentence, and try to reconstruct it. When they have finished ask them to remix the sentence and to choose another desk. Stop after five or six sentences.

Alternatives
1 Ask students to add an extra, irrelevant word to their sentence. When other students reconstruct the sentence, they leave out the extra word.
2 Ask them to leave out one word in the sentence and to include a blank piece of paper instead. Students have top guess what the missing word is.

*DIY = do it yourself (home improvements)

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