Telling tales #1: Adverbs and adjectives

If verbs and nouns are meat and bread, adverbs and adjectives are sauce and pickles. To get my students to spice up their narrative sandwiches I decided to go way back to basics and practice placing adjectives and adverbs. This worksheet could really be adapted for any level by providing more complex sentences and encouraging more sophisticated vocabulary. Sky's the limit!

Start by brainstorming adverbs and adjectives. Students can show you what they already know, and you can take the chance to feed in new words.

Students progress to adding adverbs and adjectives to simple sentences.

Happy sandwich-making!

Click here to get the worksheet FREE
(Links open in Google Docs and you can then download, print, or save as required)

Tips for teaching early morning lessons

My earliest lessons are at 6am. The advantage is that students can fit in a class before school or work, and at least they are not tired from a stressful day at said school or work. However, as you can imagine, both teacher and students can feel a little bleary at that time in the morning and it takes a little time to get the gears oiled. Here are some ways to get the cogs turning at early o'clock.

Gauge the mood
Take the time to ask the students how they are today. Of course this is nice to do at the start of any lesson, but especially important at the start of the day when people can feel a little fragile (or tired, or cold, or hungry...). When you know how the class is feeling, you can judge which kind of approach to take to the lesson and how much encouragement they are going to need. A sleepy class will need more warming up, but if they are already bright-eyed and bushy-tailed they will be happier to jump straight in.

Make some noise
To make sure your learners are awake and have their minds fully in the classroom, do something that will make some noise. I find that a shouting dictation works well: give half the students something to dictate to a partner who is on the other side of the classroom. The classroom will get noisy as the students compete to make themselves heard, so it will get vocal cords warmed up and alleviate some of the early-morning reluctance to speak. Another option is to play some lively music. There are too many uses of music in the classroom to go into here, but for example, you can play an upbeat song and set a straightforward gist task, or simply play some music that sets the scene for the lesson and discuss it afterwards (how does it make you feel? What words or images does it make you think of? etc).

Get moving
Plan kinetic activities that either get the students out of their seats, or get them moving things around. If you have young learners, a few rounds of "change chairs" or Simon Says can do the trick. If you have adults or a more serious class, you can still incorporate kinetic elements into most types of activity. A matching exercise will be more stimulating if students have to find the answers posted around the classroom; an anagram puzzle will be more of a waker-upper if the letters are cut up and have to be manually rearranged. Anything that breaks the students out of sitting still will help.

Inject some colour
A bog-standard, run-of-the-mill black and white photocopy will not get your students woken up. If you have the luxury of a colour printer or copier, use it to make your visual aids more interesting. Alternatively, source colourful images from papers or magazines. Also, simply printing handouts onto brightly-coloured paper will make them more eye-catching and can help to focus attention. You can be nice and use pleasant colours, but obnoxious neon colours also work particularly well.

Passive vs active voice (free printable worksheet)

When I first introduced the passive to my pre-intermediate Cambodian students, their initial reaction was to look at me as if to say, "You're telling me English has another tense? Why, teacher? Why?"

They're definitely warming to it now... I think.

The Oxford textbook that we use tends to jump in at the deep end with grammar points. While the passive may be a breeze for speakers of languages that form it in the same way (eg. French or German), it will understandably take a bit more work for speakers of languages that have no such thing.

To bridge the gap, I made a handout that explains how the passive is formed and what it is used for.

It progresses to some guided practice in the present tense.

Click to get the worksheet FREE

Link opens with Google documents, you can then print or download as required

Present perfect continuous: a no-prep mingle activity

When teaching a grammar point it's important to think "When do I actually use this structure in real life?". The present perfect continuous often appears in ESL textbooks in contrived contexts such as "Why are your eyes red? - I've been crying!"... which honestly I don't think I've ever said in my life.

Being in a new town and a new job, I've found myself having the same conversation over and over. Within a few minutes the conversation generally runs to "I work at the language school - Oh, how long have you been working there?"

Teaching this usage of the present perfect continuous prepares students to have a natural, normal, real-life conversation. What could be better?

Procedure

First, have each student take a small piece of paper and write the following items. Stress: not your own name and workplace but a made-up one.

Name Place of work Small number

Example:

Sopheak Hospital 3

Take the papers in, shuffle and redistribute. Model the conversation:

"Hello, what's your name?"

"My name's..."

"Where do you work?"

"I work at the..."

"How long have you been working there?"

"I've been working there for X years!"

Now the students mingle around the classroom to practice the questions and answers using the cues on their paper. To give a motivation for speaking to everyone, challenge them to find someone who works in the same place as them. Obviously this may or may not happen depending on what the students have written, but they will have to speak to everyone to find out!

Happy mingling!