I demonstrated this activity a couple of weeks ago at TESOL-Spain in Lleida. It’s very similar to a standard picture dictation.
During a standard picture dictation, the teacher describes an image to the students who then attempt to draw it based on the teacher’s description. During the description, the teacher will probably be looking at the […]

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A headline from the Guardian reads: Rubber banned: Keep Britain Tidy wages war on Royal Mail elastic bands (read article here).

The exploitation of homophones for play-on-word newspaper headlines is common practice. In this case, one of the words is a regular -ed past participle (banned) and that makes it extra clever. Here are other examples […]

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I have an article in the current Guardian Weekly which looks at websites that allow learners to work with words (read it here). It mentions the following sites:

Wordle: I’ve written about this site before (see here, here and here)
Wordia: I’ll be posting a full article about this recently-launched video dictionary on teflclips in the next […]

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A Hyperlinked Headlines document is a Word file containing a number of thematically-selected newspaper headlines each linked to the news story or article to which it pertains. Here is an example:
climate-change-hyperlinked-headlines.doc
Here is one possible way of using such a file in class:
Day 1

Download the file.
If you have a projector in your classroom, display […]

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Last August saw the launch of the Guardian Weekly Global Network, an international community of thousands of Guardian Weekly readers and website users. The aim of the network is to stimulate discussion and close the gap between international news headlines and the personal experiences of real people.
For teachers of English, there are a number of […]

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