Tag Archives: vocabulary

Lesson Plan: Dating , Family and Friends

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Listening, Speaking, Vocabulary, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
Level: Intermediate
Topic: Dating, Family and Friends
Aim: To develop all four skills – listening, reading, writing and speaking .

Has our lifestyle changed so much that it has affected the way we socialise, date and  communicate with our family? Here is a nice visual lesson plan to talk about these issues TASK 1 Look at the picture below. Which of these adjectives would you use to describe the picture? Give reasons

Awesome   disgusting   funny   unreal   pornographic  sexist

romantic   interesting     unusual      provocative     depressing

Can you think of any more adjectives?

Task 2.  Introducing &Revising Vocabulary :   Dictogloss.

(Dictogloss technique here )

As I normally have large classes I have written two texts containing the target language so I will divide the class into two groups and I’ll dictate the texts in turns, following the dictogloss technique. Texts will be then written on the board or /and a copy of the texts handed out.

Vocabulary Handout 

TASK 3 SPEAKING

Has traditional dating become a thing of the past? Look at the pictures below showing different ways of dating. In pairs, discuss which ones you prefer, which ones you wouldn’t mind trying and which ones you would never try, giving reasons to support your opinion.

TASK 4. LISTENING: What makes for a good friend.  See on youtube

Time to improve your listening abilities. This time we are going to listen for specific vocabulary. Ready?

Listen to a man talking about  What Makes a Good Friend and fill in the spaces in the exercise embedded below.

 

 

 

TASK 5 . SPEAKING: A CLOSE FRIEND. Think of one of your close friends. In pairs, ask and answer these questions

  • How long have you known him?
  • Where did you meet?
  • Do you get on well? What do you have in common?
  • Do you ever argue? What about?
  • How often do you see each other?
  • How do you keep in touch? Have you ever lost touch? Why?

TASK 6. SPEAKING.

Students sit facing each other using the speed-dating technique. Some students remain seated during the whole event ( in real speed dating, women remain seated). When the bell rings, students sit across from another student and they use their questions to start a conversation. They need to keep on talking for 3 minutes. Then a bell rings and “men” need to stand up and move to their right to start a new conversation with a different partner and the whole process is repeated again. Instead of a  bell so I use a Class Timer (here).

Display with the OHP, on the whiteboard, the pictures with the questions and ask students to talk about the question on the picture for about three minutes. When the time’s up,  students change partners and a new picture is displayed.

I have created this slideshow with Google Sites.

 

TASK  5 Writing. Choose any of the questions in the exercise above and write an essay making sure you use the vocabulary you have learnt in this lesson. Do you need some inspiration? See what other students have written  here, here, here and here

I hope you’ve enjoyed the lesson!!

Six Wonderful Sites to Help you Write, Speak and Sound Better

Dictionaries, Phonetics, Resources, Speaking, Writing, Writing skill, , , ,

I’m not a native speaker. Even though I read, write, work and I would almost dare say live  and dream in  English, I haven’t learned the language from birth and sometimes have moments of self-doubt. These websites I am going to share in this post have been an invaluable help.

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♥Howjsay  and Forvo: The world’s largest dictionaries of English Pronunciation

How often have you come across a proper name you had no clue how to pronounce and you desperately needed to know the  correct standard  pronunciation of or perhaps  a variant pronunciation of this word?  Let’s say you want to know the pronunciation of the word “selion”. You go to the most important online dictionaries offering pronunciation, but the word you’re looking up is not there and you suddenly begin to panic. At this stage you can do three things: panic, pretend you know how to pronounce it ( you just know how to sound British, no problem there) or look up the word in any of these two amazing sites that have saved my skin countless times.

♥Linguee

We all know how difficult it is to write, even more in a foreign language. More often than not we look up words in dictionaries only to find that it offers so many possibilities for the translation of the word that  we don’t know which one to choose for the context we need. In fact, sometimes it doesn’t help us at all but makes things more complicated as we don’t know which word to use to mean what we want to express and we end up completely frustrated. Here, Linguee can help us as it is a bilingual dictionary but  in context

♥Phraseup

Sometimes we know what we want to write, the sentence is phrased in our mind, but we can’t figure out some of the words we need. This is where phraseup*comes in. It assists you with writing, by suggesting possible combinations to fill-in the words you can’t remember. Each suggestion is accompanied by definitions, synonyms and translations to other languages.
Imagine you know there is an expression containing the words ” take” and “granted” but you have forgotten what goes in the middle, PhraseUp can help you here, too. Just type the words that you remember and put an asterisk * where you want the application to insert something. Very useful, isn’t it?

Or maybe  you want to use the verb+preposition combination “cope with” but you are just not sure which words it collocates with, just type it in PhraseUp and options will be provided.

♥Ozdic.com

I have been using ozdic.com for years and this is a dictionary I cannot live without. It is not any dictionary, it also help you to sound more natural when speaking or writing in English. Let’s  say you don’t know the preposition that collocates with the verb “insist”, or which adverbs sound  more natural with this verb; let’s imagine you need to use the word “idea” but you have no clue what adjective to use  apart from the overused “good “. Go to the dictionary now, this is just a sample of what you’ll find : bright, brilliant, clever, excellent,, marvellous | valuable, worthwhile | exciting, inspirational, interesting, stimulating | constructive, positive | absurd, bad, mistaken, ridiculous | , crazy, mad, outlandish, wild | half-baked | ambitious, big, grand.

The dictionary contains over 150,000 collocations for nearly 9,000 headwords and it is based on the 100 million word British National Corpus.

♥Text2Phonetics 

It is a wonderful tool that can save a lot of time if you need to transcribe something. I have tried it with small texts (two or three lines) and it’s incredible! You will be able to  pronounce a whole text perfectly .
Just paste the text you want to transcribe and click the Transcribe Button to get the transcription.

Lesson Plan : Talking about Mobiles and Technology

Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Listening, Speaking, , , , , ,

Level : B1-B2

In this lesson we talk about mobiles and the Internet, about the use or overuse of this new technology in our lives. The lesson aims at developing their listening and speaking skills and also provides them with the vocabulary and expressions needed to talk about this increasing and, in some cases, worrying phenomenon. This Lesson Plan has two parts. In the first half of the lesson students are presented with two food- for- thought videos related  to the use or overuse of mobiles phones. In the second half students are asked to talk about their own experiences using mobiles and the Internet.

PDF here

PART  1.

Warm up: Do a quick survey to find how many students are carrying their mobile phones. Ask how many have them on their desks.

Video 1. I forgot my phone. (Lasts 2:10) Explain they are going to watch a video and after it, they’ll have to discuss in pairs their feelings and reactions to what they have seen. Get feedback. Follow-up questions: Are mobiles killing conversation? Are they replacing face-face communication?

Video 2. Nomophobia. (lasts 1:00) Ask students if they have ever heard the term nomophobia. Ask them to predict what kind of phobia it might refer to. Play the video and ask students to make a summary of what it says, and encourage students to discuss the question posed in the video:  What would you do a week if you didn’t have access to your mobile phone?
https://youtu.be/7r343O7LT7k?si=rfH2EM-lsj9IkLbk

PART 2

Working on Vocabulary. Introduce vocabulary by displaying the word cloud and ask students to make sentences with the words displayed. For a more interactive approach, we might want to ask students to first work in pairs, asking them to choose words from the word cloud to make sentences. Get feedback to solve doubts.

Discussion Questions. Handout photocopy with the questions to be discussed. There are quite a number of questions on the hand-out. I’d suggest doing the first part, which is more mobile oriented, on the first session and the second part, which is more computer oriented, on the second session.  Hand-out here.

A Guess the Word Game to Practise Relative Sentences and Paraphrasing

Create your own stuff, Funny Stuff, Games, Lesson Plan: Intermediate, Slides, Speaking, Students' Corner, Vocabulary, Vocabulary Games, , , , , ,

What do you normally do when you are talking to a person in English and you don’t know the word? I guess you don’t tell the person ” OK, right, hold on! I am going to look it up on my mobile phone”. You might be tempted to do it, but know that the person you are talking to might lose interest in what you are saying.
So, the thing to do would be Paraphrasing.

How do we paraphrase?? There are some expressions you can use
It’s A KIND OF house
It’s THE OPPOSITE OF lazy
It’s LIKE cleaning but… trying to explain what you want to say but using other words you know. That’s calle
It’s SIMILAR TO book but..
FOR EXAMPLE, you do this when
It’s A SYNONYM OF..
It’s A PERSON/SOMEBODY WHO…
It’s a THING/SOMETHING WHICH…
It’s SOMEWHERE/A PLACE WHERE

It can also help to say “ It’s a noun, or an adjective…. “ If it’s an expression, you can also say “ It’s an expression and there are three words in it”

Right, now we are ready to play the game. It’s called WHAT’S THE WORD?

How we play the game:

  • Divide the class into two teams
  • Ask a member of Team A to sit on chair with his back to the whiteboard.
  • Display the first word on the screen
  • The members of the team have two minutes to describe the word but they cannot use any parts of the words on the screen. For example if it is “teacher” they cannot use the word “teach”.The aim is for the student to guess as many words as possible in one minute. Every word in black scores one point , the ones in red score two points.
  • Then, it is the other team’s turn to choose someone to take the hot seat.
  • Needless to say, you keep the score on the board for everybody to see. Have fun!!!

 

Word of the day: Dream Of/About, Get Married/Marry

Word of the Day, , ,

Although my favourite expression in class is ” It is very easy”, there’s no point in denying English prepositions are hard to learn, if you can ever say you learn them. I don’t know about other languages but Spanish students seem to consistently make mistakes when using prepositions after these two verbs. Let’s study them:

 

♥TO MARRY AND TO BE/GET MARRIED 

  •  marry somebody (no preposition required)

Please, marry me !! he said

I married a person I am still in love with

  • be/get married to somebody. (not with)

She used to be married to my brother

I got married to my childhood sweetheart

♥ TO DREAM 

  • dream about sth /sb when you are sleeping

Last night I dreamt about the exam

  • dream of  you are awake, you think about something pleasant you would like to happen .

I have always dreamt of visiting Japan

She had this romantic dream of changing the world

Hope it helps!! 🙂

 A little quiz , perhaps?
She dreamed ___becoming a chef.

of

[collapse]
I dreamt ___ you last night.

about

[collapse]
I married__ Alex because I love him.

(-)

[collapse]
I got married __ Peter in Asturias (Spain)

to

[collapse]
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