I'd like to tell you about an activity I use on the OHP for which you will need the OHP,
some sheets of OHTs and four different coloured pens.
Students on four tables, give them all a sheet of paper and a pen...sheet of OHT. Give them
all a sheet of OHT and a pen. They write down whatever activity you've got
for them, be it essay or paragraph of essay or letter...
(Students) How do you spell weapon? W-e-a-p-o-n. A spelling mistake or not? Yeah, spelling
mistake. P-o-l-i-c-y. P-o-l-i-c-e.
(Students talking) ...the next day they were...they were brought
to the court. High court! The bankers in the bank just pressed the alarm
and the police came... The security guard.
No the police came... The officers were frightened so they followed
the instructions of the robbers.
You collect in the OHTs, change them round, the next team correct with a different coloured
pen. Wait five minutes, ten minutes, change them round again. The next team correct the
corrections with a different coloured pen. Same thing, keep going until everybody's written
on your OHT.
(Students) ..and girls who... the girl, not girls.
And sometimes I get them to write little comments at the bottom as well, different handwriting,
they draw little smiley faces if they've got little correction to do. Everybody's on the
same level, you don't have a computer whizzkid and then somebody going 'I can't do it so
he's going to do it." Then you feed back at the front on the OHP.
It's good because it can take a short time, it can take a long time, you can use it for
high levels, IELTS, exam classes, you can plan essays on it, you can do letters. All
the students have written something on that OHT so they're all interested to know what
their answers are going to be. Are they right or wrong? You don't get people sitting around
thinking "I'm bored. I'm going to go to sleep, this is somebody else's stuff"
(Student) They were bought (all students laugh)
What kind of mistake is this? Buy. (Teacher)
Should this be are or were? (Student) Are.
Everybody's focused, teacher's at the front, you can feed back on the grammar if you like,
you can feed back on functions or connectors, whatever you like. It's really flexible, the
students like it, and there's not much to go wrong! You can do this kind of thing on
the computer but in my experience the computers break down or they don't arrive or people
start doing Facebook on them. This, everybody's doing the same thing, they're looking at you,
they're in lockstep with the teacher. Any problems you can hit them right away.