(upbeat music)
(students chattering)
- Hello, TEFL students.
In this video,
I wanna give you two tips for helping to brainstorm
for practice activities for your classes.
Tip number one would be to ask yourself
if you've included all four skills.
Do you have a little bit of reading,
a little bit of writing,
a little bit of speaking,
and while we're on that topic,
you might wanna think about if you've gone beyond
that standard worksheet.
There's many ways to address those four skills,
worksheets is just one of them.
Some other tasks that a lot of my students have found
or my TEFL trainees have found useful,
is rather than sticking at the practice
would be to look ahead and build backwards.
So looking ahead to that production task
and building practices based on
what they feel the students will need
in order to be successful in that production task.
So I'm gonna give you the three sample production tasks,
and then work backwards to give you example practices
that could match up to that production task.
Production number one would be role playing.
Let's imagine that our chapter deals with getting a job
and I want my students to do a role play on a job interview.
I'm gonna pair them up and they have to do a role play,
employer interviewing a potential employee.
And so in order to do that,
I need to do lots of practices to help me prepare them
for that final speaking role play task.
One practice that I could do among other practices
would be for instance,
having the students write out questions
that the employer could ask the employee.
Because it's a practice activity,
I'm gonna put some criteria on there,
maybe I'm looking for specific vocabulary,
maybe I'm looking for specific grammar or both,
and we're gonna go over them as a class to help.
I'm going to give them feedback on those questions.
That would be an example of practice
that will hopefully help them prepare for that production.
Production example number two would be for example,
maybe I want my students to write an email complaining
to their landlord about some problem in their house.
For some reason that goes with my chapter
or that is the task that we feel
that we need it in the class.
In order to have them be able
to write their own creative email complaining
to their landlord,
we need to have a lot of practices
to help prepare us for that.
One practice activity we could do with the students
is have them read a model email
of someone who wrote a complaint to their landlord.
We can have students answer comprehension questions
on the text, or do other types of reading activities.
We'll learn more about what reading activities
they are to do in future chapters.
It's important when you do the read to write activities
that sometimes you take that reading away
so that you eliminate any unnecessary copying
in their production task.
So you could do a reading of the model
to write production task.
And the third one would be
imaging we have perhaps one of our lower level students
to describe to their partner
in a little paired presentation their morning routine.
So we're working up to that goal.
One example practice activity I could use
would be listening.
I could prepare a paragraph about my own morning routine
and cut out some corresponding pictures,
I could then read that morning routine to students
and try to have them sort out the events
in the correct order that they hear them.
I could do it again perhaps and have them match them
to corresponding times, for example.
That would be one activity.
After that maybe I'll have them try
to write sentences based on those pictures
where they describe those pictures.
So helping my lower level students prepare
for their morning routine,
I have a listening activity
and a structured writing activity,
as two or perhaps maybe four practice tasks
that I happen to do.
So my goal for this little lecture was to hopefully show you
that thinking about all skills
will help you perhaps brainstorm more practice activities,
and perhaps maybe looking ahead
at that production activity
in the end of your lesson may also help you
to brainstorm activities for your practice.
Thanks, I hope you got something out of that.
(upbeat music)