Tag Archives: AI

Personality Adjectives at B2: From Word Cloud to Bingo (with a Little Help from AI)

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Has this ever happened to you? You’re chatting with your B2 students about personality, and someone proudly announces, “I’m very sensible!” Wait, do they mean sensitive? Or do they really mean they’re a model of good judgement? Chaos!

Personality adjectives look so easy on paper. They already know loads of them, right? And then the false friends sneak in and everything gets messy. That’s exactly why I love this topic. You can talk about yourself, have a laugh, get to know your classmates, and hunt down those sneaky mistakes all in one go.

Here’s how I do it, step by step. Let’s get into it!

Step 0: The coursebook

I start the way most of us do. We open the book, look at the adjectives in the unit, say them out loud, and chat about what they mean. Nothing fancy. Think of it as the warm-up before the real fun

Step 1: Build a word cloud

Now, they close their books and  I want all the adjectives they can remember from the book.  You’ve got two options here:

  • The classic way: students shout out words and you write them on the board in a cloud shape. Old school, but it works every time.
  • The lazy-teacher way (that’s me, I’m a bit lazy when it comes to writing on the board!): I use Wooclap, which has a free version. I  create the activity in Wooclap, show the QR code, students send their adjectives from their phones, and the cloud builds itself on screen. The more times a word is sent, the bigger it gets.

Two minutes later and the board (or the screen) is full of vocabulary

Step 2: Spotting the false friends

With the cloud in front of us, it’s time to zoom in on the adjectives that love to trip us up. My usual suspects:

  • sensitive vs. sensible
  • considerate vs. thoughtful

How do I explain them without spending my whole evening making slides? I let AI do the heavy lifting:

  1. I open Gemini and ask it to explain the difference between these four adjectives.
  2. Once I’m happy with the explanation, I ask it to build an HTML presentation with multiple-choice questions and gap-fill exercises.
  3. Done! A ready-to-project presentation with theory and practice included.

And because the words come from the cloud they created, it all feels much closer to them.

Step 3: Personality bingo

Time to play! Each student draws a 6-square bingo grid and fills it with adjectives from the cloud that describe them:

  • 4/5 positive ones
  • 1/2 negative ones

Yes, negative too. Honesty hour has officially begun! 😄

I have a bag ready with all the adjectives written on little papers. I pull them out one by one and, instead of just saying the word, I define it or give the opposite . Students have to work out which adjective I mean, and if it’s in their grid, they cross it off.

 The first student to complete the cross off all the adjectives in their grid,calls “Bingo!” The teacher verifies the card before awarding a prize ( a sweet?)

Step 4: Let’s talk!

Now we reach the speaking part, which is where everything clicks. Every student has chosen six adjectives to describe themselves, so they have to tell their classmates why:

  • Why did you choose “easy-going”?
  • Can you give me an example of a time you were stubborn?

To help them sound richer, I hand out an infographic with adjective modifiers: fairly, quite, rather, pretty, extremely… Because saying I’m shy isn’t the same as saying I’m fairly shy or I’m rather shy, is it? Suddenly they sound way more natural.

Little secret: I make this infographic with ChatGPT. For now it’s the best one for the job because it doesn’t hallucinate typographically.

Step 5: Writing. Homework

This is what they”ll have to do this weekend.  Keep posted if you want to know how I am planning to correct it!

Write an email responding to an online ad for a room in a shared apartment. You must introduce yourself, explain why you are a great fit using two positive personality traits, and confess one negative trait.

To soften the negative adjective,

1. Use language of tendency instead of the verb to be.Target Structures: I tend to be…, I have a tendency to…, I can occasionally come across as…

2. Use modifiers (e.g., slightly indecisive, a bit stubborn, somewhat forgetful).

Write 100-120 words

Wrapping up

In just one session, your students have reviewed vocabulary, cleared up false friends, played a game, spoken, and added nuance like proper B2 learners.

So next time personality adjectives come up in your syllabus, give this a go.

Confession Time: I’m Useless With Names (So I Invented a Game That Reviews Vocab and Grammar Too)

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Okay, I’ll confess: we’re in the first days of the new course and I, the teacher, cannot for the life of me remember half my students’ names. Does this happen to you too? That moment when you point at someone and go “hey… you, yes, you, the one in the blue hoodie” because the name has completely vanished from your brain. A classic September moment. Well, and in my case, February moment, too.

So I started turning it over in my head (because yes, I have that habit of mine of turning any everyday problem into a classroom activity, it’s a blessing and a curse in equal measure) and I came up with something that kills two birds with one stone: we learn names AND we review grammar and vocabulary. Yay! Because why settle for one thing when you can have both, right?

And guess how I’m going to run it? Exactly how I like it: mixing tech and old-school tradition. Not fully digital, not fully analogue, a bit of both. But hey!!! You don’t like tech. It can all be done in the traditional way.

VOCABULARY ACROSTIC DUEL

Objective: learning students’ names and revising grammar and vocabulary.

Setting it up

  • A WordCloud. Split the class into two teams and create two word clouds, one per team, with the names of their members. You can do this by hand on the board or you can bring in the tech like I do (because for this bit, I admit I’m a little lazy) and use Wooclap to generate the cloud on the spot. Well, two clouds, one per team,
  • A buzzer. Some noise? Yes! Each team needs a buzzer within reach. A real buzzer, one of those that goes “ding!” and gives the whole thing that game-show feel that hooks everyone instantly.
How to play

(click on the image)

  1. Pick a student’s name at random from either word cloud (it doesn’t matter which team they’re on).
  2. Assign a challenge or if you use my wheel above, spin the wheel: for example, each letter has to be a past tense verb, or a descriptive adjective. You’ve got total freedom here to adapt it to whatever grammar point you’re working on.

An example with the name LUCAS and past tense verbs

  • L – Learned
  • U – Understood
  • C – Called
  • A – Asked
  • S – Saw

3.  Within each team, students can work solo, in pairs, or in groups of three, whatever       they prefer.

4. As soon as someone finishes the acrostic, they hit the buzzer.Let’s say it is a student from Team A.  If it’s correct, their team wins the round and  crosses out a name from Team B’s  cloud,  and picks the next name plus the next grammar or lexical category.

NOTE: If the student from Team A makes a mistake, then the other team wins (Team B) wins and crosses out a name from Team A’s cloud

And so, round after round, and without even realizing it, they’re repeating names over and over while working on structure and vocabulary. By the end of the class, I promise even I’ll have picked up a few more names.

Verb Tenses: The TV Show That Became a Grammar Game

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My brain doesn’t switch off. Ever. I’ll be watching TV and — boom — I’m already thinking, “How can I use this in class?” Is it a blessing or a curse? Honestly? Both. But mostly a blessing, because sometimes it leads to something really cool. Like this.

There’s a programme on Asturian TV called El Picu — and picu means “peak” or “mountaintop” in Asturian. The concept is simple: contestants answer questions, and with each correct answer, they climb a little higher up the mountain. First team to reach the summit wins.

I watched it and thought: my students would go absolutely mad for this. 

I have the idea, Gemini builds the app

 I have zero coding skills. But I do have Gemini, and  that’s all I needed.

I won’t pretend it requires no preparation at all — you do need a bit of know-how about how to prompt it effectively — but the process itself is surprisingly straightforward. I described what I wanted, iterated a little, and before long I had a fully functional classroom game called The Picu: B2 ESL Alpine Expedition.

How to play

Here’s the game

I show the game  on the interactive whiteboard and the moment students see those mountain tracks, something shifts. Smiles appear. Someone always goes “Yuhuuu, we’re playing today!” — and yes, we are. But we’re also learning. That’s the whole point.

Here’s my low-tech twist on it:

  • I divide the class into 4 teams
  • Each group has paper and a pen
  • When the sentence appears, they discuss and write their answer. They have 30 seconds for this.
  • At my signal, everyone holds up their paper at the same time (no copying!)
  • Groups that got it right? Their climber moves up the mountain
  • First team to reach the Picu wins

What I particularly love is that multiple teams can be awarded points in the same round  And if a question is too hard? Just hit Skip and move on. No fuss.

Cool Speaking Cards, Indirect Questions, a Spinning Wheel and Speed Chatting: One Lesson, Endless Engagement

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Remember those awful photocopies? You know the ones. A photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, with a blurry black-and-white image that was somehow supposed to inspire deep conversation in class? Yeah… same. And honestly? The students’ faces said everything before the activity had even started

Lately, I’ve completely transformed the way I approach speaking activities, and AI has become a huge part of that process. But probably not in the way people imagine. It’s not about clicking a button and magically producing the perfect lesson. I wish! It still takes creativity, tweaking, experimenting, and sometimes a lot of failed prompts along the way. But the process itself? It’s fun.

GENERATING THE QUESTIONS

I could explain but I’d rather you watch the video and see for yourself how easy it is to generate some cool cards. And for “free”.

You will find the prompt I used to generate the cards, in the first comment of the video. And please, leave a comment , I love hearing from you!
AND THE GRAMMAR: INDIRECT QUESTIONS

Once we have our conversation questions, I like to use them to revise indirect questions — it’s the perfect excuse. The questions are already there, they already have context, so why not squeeze a bit of grammar out of them too?

To make the revision more engaging, I built a little website — also with Gemini — where students can practise the structure interactively. First we revisit the rules, then we activate.

Spin the Wheel. Then Speed Chat.

After the grammar input, we present the first question and… spin the wheel — built with AI, loaded with examples of indirect questions.

  1. Show the card with the question they need to answer
  2. Spin the wheel

Example: I was wondering … (do you believe that online shopping will completely  replace…?) if you believe that online shopping…

And to wrap it all up? Speed chatting. Signal sounds, they rotate, new partner, new indirect question, new conversation question. Dynamic, social, and it always gets a smile out of them.

What more can you ask from one single activity? Give it a go and let me know. 👇shopping

Teaching How to Write a Report. Create your own Worksheets and Make it more Palatable for your Students

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It’s Sunday evening, I’m prepping for the week, and I open my B2.1 students’ textbook to the report writing unit. Five seconds in, I want to close the book, pour myself a glass of wine, and pretend it doesn’t exist.

You know the kind of page I mean. Dense. Overwhelming. A chart nobody asked for. Vocabulary that even I have to look up. My students wouldn’t read it — they’d survive it. Barely. And I’d spend the entire lesson firefighting confusion instead of actually teaching anything useful.

So I did what any self-respecting language teacher does: I refused to accept it and went rogue.

Step 1: I Went Textbook Shopping

Before I even thought about creating anything, I did a little research mission. I pulled out a few different textbooks — because no single textbook has all the answers— and I started gathering:

  • The core structure of a report
  • Realistic vocabulary my students can actually use without sounding like a lawyer
  • Task types that make sense for where my students are right now

Step 2: Hello, Gemini and Hello ChatGPT

1. Generating the Text

Once I had my notes, I headed over to Gemini and copy/pasted my notes and asked it to generate clean,  level-appropriate content. Exactly the kind of thing I wished was in the textbook in the first place.

2- Generating the worksheets

So now i have the text; but, in the era of AI, why give them a boring document when you can give them a beautifully structured worksheet? Because — even well-written content, if it looks like a photocopied page from 1998, is going to kill the vibe before we even start.

So I took my Gemini-generated content and went straight to ChatGPT — a if you haven’t tried the new image generation model in ChatGPT yet, close this tab and go do that first. I’ll wait.  It is genuinely the best option out there when your worksheet involves formatted text, tables, or any kind of visual structure.

I want you to create a worksheet with  the content pasted under these lines. Include all the information pasted. Title “Writing a report _ B2 www.cristinacabal.com” . Use images related to the content to make it more visually appealing. Clean design.

And the result? A worksheet my students actually picked up and looked at. With curiosity. Not dread.

To get the worksheets, Right click on the image and Save as…

It has everything they need:

  • A model text at the right level
  • Guided vocabulary in context
  • A clear framework they can replicate
  • A writing task that feels achievable

 

Step 3: And why not an interactive website for those who prefer interactive content?

Because apparently a gorgeous worksheet wasn’t enough for me, I also went ahead and built an interactive website to go with it with a Drag and Drop exercise

Step 4. They Know the Theory. Now They Need to Write.

Knowing the structure is one thing. Producing it under exam conditions is a completely different story. Report writing doesn’t come naturally to B2 students — it needs practice. Lots of it. And they can’t do that without me in the room, monitoring, nudging, redirecting. What works for me is collaborative guided practice: students work together within a clear framework, which lowers the anxiety AND means I can actually see what’s happening before they write a single word. The activity below is exactly that. Does it guarantee a perfect report? No. But it gives them a fighting chanc

Note: Click here for a more user-friendly view of the webpage with the step-by-step  activity