Sticky Grammar! #7: Gender Walls Revisited

In an earlier article on Sticky Grammar (which is more concerned with making grammar stick with learners rather than it being necessarily very complex), I looked at how to use the Gender Walls technique for helping learners of French to keep masculine and feminine nouns distinct in their minds.  Of course this can be used for [...]

Word Games & Tiny Twists #3: How do you spell…?

This is one of my favourite games which you can use at all levels and for a range of different purposes.  In a nutshell, you call out words and pupils spell them.  Sounds riveting, doesn’t it?  Well, there’s a bit more to it than that.  The basic questions which underpin any activity on this blog [...]

Word Games & Tiny Twists #2: Word Stairs

For this game, all you need is a write-on whiteboard or visualiser.  Write up dashes across and down the board so that each successive line has an extra dash: Pupils suggest words to fill in the dashes, each word being one letter longer than the previous word.  For a beginner’s class, that can be the [...]

Word Games & Tiny Twists #1: Word Chains

This is a new series of posts looking at ways of kicking off a lesson.  I’ve always preferred getting going as soon as the first pupil arrives.  It gives value to the start of the lesson rather than allowing a couple of minutes of down-time from which I’ve then got to drum up some pace.  [...]

Planning for spontaneity

In this post, I want to look at how we can review the last term to see how pupils are using classroom language and how to use that to plan for this term and next September.  This is more about how pupils are interacting than how they are advancing in their content, or topic, language.  [...]