To do or to be doing , that is the question !

A full class this morning in a rather narrow room - which makes it tricky to squeeze past and listen for mistakes or good bits during spoken pairwork. We were reviewing present simple and present continuous and when to use which. I put the first names of 6 of my friends and family members on the board and got them to ask these 3 questions for each:

Who is ........... ?

What do they do ?

What are they doing now ?


so the answers included THE PRESENT SIMPLE AND THE PRESENT CONTINUOUS:

He is my husband.

He is a driving instructor.

He is probably still sleeping right now as it is only 10am !

They then thought of 6 of their own friends or family and asked each other the 3 questions. This was a good opportunity for spoken work and practice of the tenses.

We also listened to a CD conversation of two people meeting each other again after some time and catching up with each other's news. It included lots of phrases like : So do I , Me too , Me neither. The class then prepared some questions to ask each other about various topics - home, daily routine, interests etc and practised asking these, paying particular attention to the tenses and responding to one another using those phrases.

We then prepared a written piece of work - an email written to an old friend they had just recently got into contact with again ( via Facebook ) giving their news and asking about their friend. This also gave practice of the tenses: What are you doing now ? I'm studying at Mayflower college etc. All the students worked carefully and diligently on this and I went round helping with grammar and spelling. When I got to student O's work, I found that rather than asking for news from and giving news to his old friend, he filled the whole email with insults about how the friend ( an ex-girlfriend ) had obviously changed since he last saw her, as the photo on Facebook shows her now "with a face falling down like rabbits ears" etc !

The afternoon's lesson was with a higher level class and we did describing objects in detail and then having conversations at the lost property office to find their lost belongings. They enjoyed this task and learnt and used quite a lot of new vocabulary. After the afternoon break I descibed a scene for them to draw, then after comparing the different pictures drawn, they listened to a description of a journey on the CD, and imagined the scene in their mind's eye. They enjoyed relaxing, closing their eyes and using their imaginations for this. They then wrote their own description of a short journey for others to listen to and imagine, and this worked really well as they produced some really nice descriptive passages with lots of adjectives and other vocabulary, and enjoyed listening to each other's and imagining themselves on the various journeys.

Still teaching !

It's been a while ! I am still teaching - now at Mayflower college in Plymouth, doing between 3 and 4 days a week. It is a private language school, so more EFL than ESOL , no asylum seekers or refugees any more ( sadly ), but lots of students who want to take the IELTS test and go on to do Masters Degrees here in the UK or just improve their general English, sometimes teenagers in the Summer School too. The college also trains air traffic controllers and pilots for their TEA tests .

I had two lessons today - the first , a 3 hour lesson, with an upper intermediate class of 7 students, which involved reviewing relative clauses. I wanted to brighten the grammar lesson up a bit , so did a boxes spelling team game at the beginning, reviewing vocabulary that they had covered in Monday's lesson , including extreme adjectives. They enjoyed this and it set a nice tone for the rest of the lesson. The text book we are using is New Cutting Edge and the topic for this Module is events and celebrations, so I then got them to think of festivals/ special days that take place in the UK, as many as they could, through the calendar year. This brought out some discussion about similarities in their own countries and cultures. ( They had talked about and described festivals in their own countries the day before ).

Once we got onto relative clauses, they had lots of questions regarding when to use the relative pronoun "that" and when to omit it, and where to put prepositions in relative clauses. I had printed off some helpful explanations and practice exercises for these from other sources, which were very useful. I think I would try to spread this over more lessons in the future though, as it may have been a bit too much to take in for the weaker students. I used a different coloured pen to highlight the relative clauses on the white board , and especially in non-defining relative clauses, to show that the sentence still made sense if the relative clause was removed. Most of the students seemed to have grasped the difference between non-defining and defining relative clauses by the end, but I have also asked the teacher who will take the class tomorrow to check that with them.

Break and lunch time were spent in the staff room helping to eat the copious amount of chocolate on offer today as one teacher, Jan celebrated a big birthday, and another, Katy, is leaving.

After lunch I had an intermediate class of 7 students ( from Saudi Arabia, Colombia, France, Turkey, and Kuwait ) and the topic was writing emails or letters to book hotel rooms. I began the lesson by sharing a funny experience I once had at a guest house in Norfolk - where the guest house turned out to be the house of an old couple, with no facilities and a huge St Bernard dog ! They then shared good or bad hotel experiences, which got them speaking a bit. I then used the set text book pages ( from Real Writing 2 ) which focussed on the order of an email and the formal structures and phrases/vocab needed for booking a room. Once these things were looked at, I gave them a couple of authentic adverts for guest houses in Plymouth and got them to write an email asking re availability of rooms and for other information. This gave me an opportunity to go round and check specific problems of grammar and spelling. I was also able to work individually for a few moments with the weakest student.

I then got them to practise a hotel dialogue in pairs ( written by me ) and then checked pronunciation and word stress as a whole class of the various vocab (eg: available, en suite, facilities etc ) They then wrote their own dialogue in pairs and then acted it out . In the future I would get them to do this in front of the class, so that the others can hear better, and also I would set the others a listening task whilst watching/listening - ie how many rooms, which dates , price etc. I worked with the weakest student , as there was an odd number, though I don't usually like to do this during pairwork, as I want to be able to listen to the others, but it was ok for a few moments, especially as they were presenting it to the class later , when I could make notes and comment on any problems then.

The lesson ended with a student from Kuwait giving me a jar of curry sauce. He had told me the day before that he wanted to show me a special Indian sauce, as he knows I like Indian food, I thought he was going to bring in a recipe ! I may try it for tea though ......