My favourite ice breaker for using on the first day of a new course is the personalised true and false statements activity. This works best when the students already know each other and the teacher is the newcomer. Here is the handout that I used with a new group of Italian students in Norwich last […]

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Simon Says exemplifies the total physical response method better than any activity for the language classroom I can think of. The game is versatile and allows us to teach a wide range of grammatical/lexical items. I used it recently to teach a few uses of the verb look which had been confusing my learners:
Simon says:

Look […]

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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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(This lesson plan can be downloaded on pdf file here:
15-things-to-do-before-you-die.pdf)
Here is an idea for raising awareness of the pronunciation of the past and past participle forms of regular verbs.
1. Write the following verbs on the board

Plant
Write
Milk
Appear
Catch
Do
Donate
Dye
Have
Invent
Meet
Participate
Photocopy
Save
Visit

2. Write “101 things to do before you die” on the board and tell your students that it is […]

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Learner course books and learner grammars would lead us to believe that there are two kinds of English noun: Countable and Uncountable. This causes students and trainees to see the situation in the following way:

This is misleading for 2 reasons:

If English nouns are to be described grammatically, the most fundamental way to do so is […]

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