Teacher’s corner

1. Tongue twisters

Procedure: Pronunciation. Write a tongue twister on the board, and read it with the students slowly at first, then faster. Make sure the students’ pronunciation is acceptable. Then individual volunteers try to say it quickly three times.

Examples:

1. She sells sea shells on the sea shore.

2. Mixed biscuits, mixed biscuits.

3. Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather.

4. A proper copper coffee pot.

5. Three gray geese in a green field grazing.

6. Swan swam over the pond, swim swan swim; swan swam back again – well swum swan!

7. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper.

Did Peter Piper pick a peck of pickled pepper?

If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper,

Where’s the peck of pickled pepper Peter

Piper picked?

2. Associations

Procedure: Vocabulary review and enrichment through imaginative association. Start by suggesting an evocative word: «storm», for example. A student says what the word suggests to him or her – it might be ‘dark’, and so on round the class.

Other words you might start with: sea, fire, tired, holiday, morning, English, family, home, angry. Or use an item of vocabulary the class has recently learnt.

If there is time, after you have completed a chain of about 15-25 associations, take the final word suggested, write it on the board, and, together with the group, try to reconstruct the entire chain back to the original idea.

3. Brainstorm round a word

Procedure: Vocabulary review and enrichment. Take a word the class has recently learnt, and ask the students to suggest all the words they associate with it. Write each suggestion on the board with a line joining it to the original word, in a circle, so that you get a ‘sunray’ effect. If the original word was a ‘decision’, for example, you might get:

The same activity can, of course, be done as individual or pairwork instead of in the full group. Take a central theme or concept of a story (or a technical text) you are planning to read with the group, and brainstorm association in order to open and direct students’ thinking towards the ideas that they will encounter in the text.

Variation 1: Instead of inviting free association, limit it in some way. For example, invite only adjectives that can apply to the central noun, so ‘decision’ might get words like; free, final, acceptable, wrong, right. Or invite verbs that can apply to the noun, for example: you can take, make, agree with, cancel or confirm a decision.

Variation 2: A central adjective can be associated with nouns, for example, ‘warm’ could be linked with: day, food, hand, personality. Or a verb can be associated with adverbs, for example, ‘speak’ can lead to: angrily, softly, clearly, convincingly, sadly.

4. Damaged property

Procedure: Guessing; using the past tense and passives. Present a brief description of a piece of property that is damaged: a watch that has stopped. You need to have in your mind the reason for the damage; the students try to guess what it is. Allow ‘narrowing-down’ questions (‘Did it happen because of carelessness?’) and give hints (‘It happened while I was cooking..’) to maintain pace and ensure the students’ ultimate success in guessing. The successful guesser can suggest the next damaged item.

You may use the examples given below:

1. A watch that has stopped (dropped into the soup while I was cooking).

2. An umbrella with a hole in it (someone’s lighted cigarette fell on it).

3. Jeans that are torn and faded (done on purpose to be more fashionable).

4. A squashed cake at a picnic (the youngest member of the family sat on it).

5. A hole in the roof (a small meteor fell through it).

6. A broken window (a tree fell onto it during a storm).