Great Vocabulary Board Games
Whether you want to do a nice vocabulary review or you just want your students to have fun for a day, here are some games we recommend for finding, creating, explaining, demonstrating, and guessing words.
Student Projects
Tag: communication
Translating Noun Cases
Many languages have noun cases. We don’t teach cases in English, but there definitely are some correlations between cases and English grammar. Maybe it would be a good idea to acknowledge some of the cases used in the students’ native tongue(s) and explain what English uses instead.
Is It Okay to Break Grammar Rules?
People break grammar rules all the time. Is that okay? Which rules can we break? In what situations is it okay to break rules? Are there rules to breaking rules? Here’s a look at which rules you can break in casual writing.
Review Activities
Here are some activities that you can use with your class to review vocabulary and grammar. There are quite a few to choose from, and each is customizable; use whatever is best for your class!
Top-Down vs Bottom-Up Processing
We generally teach the structure of a grammar point, and the usage follows. That works well enough for receptive skills, but for productive skills, it feels backward. Maybe we should try the reverse approach.
Identifying Grammar vs Using It
Learning a grammar point shouldn’t just be about knowing how to use it. How to use a grammar structure doesn’t matter until after they’ve determined what they want to say.
Grammar vs Vocab: where to place your focus
Is it better for teachers to focus on grammar or on vocabulary for elementary/intermediate students? Both are important, of course, but there’s only so much a learner can learn at a time.
Why You Don’t Need to Speak Another Language to Teach English
Have you ever been asked, “How can you teach students English if you don’t speak their language?” I get that a lot. It’s not necessary to know the native tongue to teach English. Here’s why.
Communicating Without Words
Using words is the most obvious way to communicate, but it’s not the only way. It may not even necessarily be the best way. Using alternate ways of communicating may be more fun or more effective.
Using Voice to Convey Meaning
We communicate not only by the words we say, but also by the way in which we say them. Tone and inflection can affect the meaning of a word or phrase. Here are some exercises on using your voice in different ways.
Define Your Own Terms
There are lots of long, strange-sounding, technical terms that we don’t use outside the classroom, so why confuse students by teaching them? Instead, make up your own terms for for those concepts.
In Favor of the Oxford Comma
The comma which comes between the last two entries of a list is called the Oxford Comma. Many people omit it, but including this comma may improve communication
Can You End a Sentence with a Preposition?
Ending a sentence with a preposition is considered a bit of a faux pas among some of the more sophisticated circles, yet most English speakers do it on a regular basis. Is it such a problem after all?
Context Matters
Are tomatoes fruit or vegetables?
The answers to many questions depend on context, so clearly establish the context first.
Writing with Colors
Colors can be used to create associations in the minds of learners. By doing so, students are quicker to find mistakes or identify what they’re supposed to do.