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!
Teaching Tips
Word Puzzle Tactics
Word Puzzles and Word Games are a fun, engaging, and effective way to practice vocabulary, spelling pronunciation, word-building, and more. If you’d like to try some with your students, here are some tips to give them.
Verb Lists to Have on Hand
As a teacher, you sometimes need to come up with examples on the spot. Sometimes it’s hard to think of a particular example, especially when more common alternatives (ones that don’t fit your category) come to mind far too easily. That’s why it’s good to have some word lists on hand.
Practice Rearranging Sentences Often
If you have access to mini-whiteboards, those can be great. Note cards are also good. Your students can use these to quickly restructure sentences.
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.
Teach Aspects instead of Tense Combinations
It’s hard to keep all the tenses straight when they’re taught independently. Try instead to teach the patterns: What is a continuous tense? What is a perfect tense? After you answer those, try applying more specific tenses.
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.
Always Keep Dice with You
When practicing a grammar structure with my class, I often use dice to randomize prompts. This way, students don’t know what they’re supposed to say or write until I tell them the results of a roll, which keeps them on their toes.
3 Alternate Ways to Teach Idioms
With idioms, students already know the words that make up the expression. But since idioms aren’t to be taken literally, they still need to learn the meaning. Instead of teaching idioms like you would other vocabulary terms, why not build off what they already know?
How to Get Students to Accidentally Write Essays
Very few students enjoy writing essays. For most, it’s a rather daunting task. Often it’s the composition that throws students off, so cast that aside at first and simply get them to tell you what they think without a pen and paper.
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.
Comics Can Grow Reading Skills and Habits
For any student who can’t read very well or doesn’t like to read, I recommend comic books. This medium has advantages that picture books, chapter books, and novels don’t have. Comics can both provide motivation and aid in reading comprehension.
Save ‘To Be’ for Later
‘To be’ so often is drilled into students’ minds that they end up using it far more that they should, as if it’s a requirement for every sentence. Starting off with some simple sentences that don’t have am/is/are might be a better way to get started.
Vocab-Building through Associations
There’s a lot of vocabulary to learn, but thankfully plenty of words are related to each other. Learning words by associating them with each other helps us to remember those words later. You can help students establish and strengthen those connections in your students’ minds.
Mistakes on Purpose
When students have the opportunity to correct the teacher, it reinforces that language point, assesses the students’ understanding of that language point, gives the learner confidence, and teaches students to problem-solve.