Practice your and your students pronunciation!

The International Phonetic Alphabet can look like a monster to many students and teachers. Just look at it:

It does look pretty scary, but calm down! This chart can be your friend and help you and your students improve their pronunciation skills. It is important to add here that I value all types of your pronunciation. I believe, however, that mispronunciation can sometimes lead to problems in communication, but if students are able to take advantage of the context their in and the uses of language they can make themselves understood to others.

Treasure Chest

I found this idea on the website Busy Teacher and I absolutely loved it! It is more suitable for intermediate and advanced students, but it can be adapted for more basic level students. 

                              

On the first day of class I bring a small paper box to class to represent a treasure chest. Then, I ask students to answer on a piece of paper some questions related to their expectations for the course and their English skills. Some questions that I usually ask students are: What are your expectations for the course; What are your strong skills in English? Why?; What are your weak skills in English? Why?; Which skills would you like to improve?; Why are you learning English; etc. After they finish writing, I collect their answers and put them in the box. Then, I record the students answering the same questions (if you have big groups, you can put students in pairs and ask them to record themselves) and I save all videos. I assist my students during both moments, but I try not to interfere and make a lot of corrections. On the last day of the class, I open the treasure chest and I give them back their paragraph and I play their videos again to see how much they have improved their English skills. 

This activity is always a blast! Students have a lot of fun, especially when I open the box. I also usually ask students to correct their own mistakes, talk about their learning process and think about if their expectations for the course were met or not and why. 

The Polite Robber - Reported Speech

Sometimes teaching grammar can be tricky. I don't want to get stuck only repeating rules with my students. I want them to understand rules by using them and realizing how that grammar point can be used in real life. With that in mind, I've found this great powerpoint presentation posted by the user Gaby141 on the website Busy Teacher to practice Reported Speech (you can download the presentation at the end of this post). The activity is based on the video "The Most Polite Robbery Ever" (video below) in which a robber is very polite when robbing the owner of a shop. Gaby141 has broken down the interactions from the video in slides. Students should pay attention to the dialogue in each of the slides and then, guided by a question, report what the people in the slides are saying or asking. For example:

Different ways to say hi!

Are you tired of only teaching "Hi, how are you?"? Here's different and commonly used greetings to teach your students!

Cellphones are not enemies!

Have you ever felt frustrated when you were in front of the classroom excitedly teaching, but students were on their phones texting their friends? Well, I have and this feeling is surely shared by many EFL teachers. That can be a bit annoying, but that should also be an inspiration for us, teachers. Students have this amazing gadget with them at almost all times: their cellphones! We already know students love their phones, how about using this feeling to engage them in exciting english language classes? I've found this article on Oxford University Press blog  on 25 ideas for using Whatsapp with students! Which idea is your favorite?