Had a fun weekend in Zagreb last weekend. As promised, here are the links to the activities we looked at together:

Grammar Drawings

1. Mexican doodles
2. Passive flashcards (full lesson plan to onto teflclips.com soon). Handout here: passive-noun-phrases.pdf

• Grammar to draw: Noun phrases; Sentences or structures from the course book (third conditionals, for example); Question forms; Prepositional phrases; etc
• Ways to present grammar drawings: Laminate them; Photocopy them: Scan them and make PDF slideshows or video clips like this one
• Grammar drawing activities: Show to students and elicit the language; Quiz; Gallery; Standard flash card games

How do YouTube?

1. Cat and goldfish surprise
2. Dream sequence clip 1
3. Dream sequence clip 2
4. Road runner and Coyote
5. Western spaghetti

• How to use Wordle
• How to screen capture
• How to capture / download clips

Thank you very much to Profil for inviting me to Zagreb and thank you for being great conference participants! Any questions or queries, please leave a comment below

Surely one of the most fascinating subjects for the language classroom is the subject of language itself. By that, I’m not referring to those all-too-familiar grammar explanations in which the teacher uses images of winning the lottery to explain the second conditional (we’ve all done it!) I am referring to the topics that might be found within the subject of linguistics itself. This could be any of the following:

• Variation in language
• Evolution of language
• Prescriptive versus descriptive approaches towards language
• English as a lingua franca
• Word borrowing

These are some of the things that poet Dizraeli explores in this performance that was commissioned by Macmillan dictionary:

.

If you are interested in using the poem in the classroom, I have created three worksheets to accompany the video. They can be downloaded from the Macmillan dictionary site. Would love to know how you get on.

My new Onestopenglish series on using art in the language classroom starts today. The first part is free to non-subscribers.

Homer Simpson once said something along the lines of: “If God had wanted us to be vegetarians, he wouldn’t have made animals out of meat.”

This is the starting point for a lesson plan on the third conditional.

third-conditional.pdf

In the activity, students are given a homework task in which they have to use a search engine to find other examples of sentences that start with the words, “If God had wanted …“. Here are a few examples that were found earlier:

• If God had wanted us to fly, he would have given us wings.
• If God had wanted us to enjoy Mondays, he wouldn’t have given us weekends.
•  If God had wanted us to run around naked, we would have been born that way.
• If God had wanted me to touch my toes, he would have put them on my knees.
• If God had wanted us to think for ourselves, he wouldn’t have invented television.
• If God had wanted journalists to get everything right the first time, he wouldn’t have given us copy editors.
• If God had wanted us to learn about science stuff, he would have made it easier to understand.
  
• If God had wanted the Scots to rule the world, he would never have given them whisky.
  

And now, a disclaimer: Apart from the fact that some students may feel that such a lesson plan presents trivialises religion, the example sentences that students bring back to the classroom may be sexist, homophobic, religious and anti-religious not to mention anti-vegetarianist. Only you can judge whether or not an activity is suitable. As always, teachers should:

• Get to know their students.
• Make professional decisions about classroom content.
• Not hold me responsible when things go horribly wrong.

A part of this posting was going to be taken up with a discussion on the merits of teaching the third conditional. Any comments on that?

Here is the end product of a lesson plan in which a group of adult learners created their own Mr Men and Little Miss characters:

The artists were: Ana, Carlos, Elena, Eva, Inés, Juana, Marián, Marta, Pilar, Silvia, Silvia and Verónica. As well as making a drawings of their character, everyone had to write a short story or description. After correcting the stories/descriptions, the next stage was to put the pictures up around the classroom walls. Each student then read out their story without mentioning the name of their character:

This Mr Man is very dangerous. He is the owner of the city. But no one can trust him. Get on the wrong side of him and he will send one of his hit men to ‘take care’ of you. Don’t mess with this Mr Man, unless you want to come to a nasty end!

Other students had to guess the character (in this case, Mr Dodgy).

[NB All adjectives came from the students themselves by the way via a peer teaching game. I will post that some time soon.]

Eylem, a Turkish teacher friend of mine is looking for help:

“We have started a Comenius project: Life Beyond the Borders: Building Bridges of Friendship. We are partners from Turkey, Portugal, Trinidad, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania and UK. We want to enrich our partnership with the contribution of schools from other countries.

Students aged between 6 and 12 will be involved in the project. We will exchange projects, paper work and experience with the teachers and the students. We can exchange students as well but it is not compulsory.”

* * * * * * * * * * *

Please leave a comment below if you are interested and I can pass on Eylem’s contact details.

Jamie =)