Quiz Challenge: 30 Common Phrasal Verbs that you Really Need to Know Can we still be friends if today’s post is on phrasal verbs? I know, I know, I’ve been a student, too. I know what you’re thinking. How, for goodness sake, one is supposed to learn that a car pulls in/off/over/out/up/away and into something and be expected not to make a mistake? When I was a student at university, they made us learn like two thousand phrasal verbs or maybe more. I cannot remember exactly how many, but what I do remember is that I had them sellotaped -sticky notes hadn’t been invented yet- on the walls of every single room in the flat I was sharing. Anyway, I am not planning to ask my students to memorise long lists of phrasal verbs out of context. This quiz below is a good example of that. Do you have any others to add to the list? This is how I suggest you work with the quiz: Thanks for reading.
Relative Pronouns with comics and jokes: who, which, that, when and where | Edutaining English Learners We use relative clauses to provide more information about a person, a thing or a place. We use WHO to give more information about people. We use WHICH when we want to provide more information about a thing. We can use THAT instead of WHO or WHICH. We use WHERE for places. And WHEN for time. NB! Also notice that we put the relative pronouns immediaty after the noun about which we are giving more information. If you want to see all this gathered together and more, then check the grammar s-show below that I created for my B1 students. You can also hear me going through the slideshow in a video that was made for the university I am currently teaching at. Like this: Like Loading... Related Relative Clauses - Games and Activities In a previous post I covered the use of relative pronouns and the difference between each of them (Relative Pronouns with comics and jokes) Here are some activities for you (or your students) to play around and to hone the skills. In "Grammar Games" To Like and To Be Like In "B1"
Noam Chomsky on the Dangers of Standardized Testing “The assessment itself is completely artificial. It’s not ranking teachers in accordance with their ability to help develop children who will reach their potential, explore their creative interests. Those things you’re not testing.. it’s a rank that’s mostly meaningless. And the very ranking itself is harmful. It’s turning us into individuals who devote our lives to achieving a rank. The following is a partial transcript for an interview with Noam Chomsky uploaded to youtube by The Progressive Magazine. “You take what is happening in education. That’s guaranteed to destroy any meaningful educational process. The people sitting in the offices, the bureaucrats designing this, they’re not evil people, but they’re working within a system of ideology and doctrines that turns what they’re doing into something extremely harmful. First of all, you don’t have to assess people all the time… People don’t have to be ranked in terms of some artificial [standards]. What kind of human being is that?
20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery. As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge. Who and Whom This one opens a big can of worms. Which and That This is one of the most common mistakes out there, and understandably so. Lay and Lie This is the crown jewel of all grammatical errors. Moot
ING gerunds vs. infinitive game ING gerunds vs. infinitive : Practice ING gerunds vs. infinitive using this ESL fun Game.This game is also excellent for classroom teaching. Teachers can engage students in a classroom vocabulary or grammar review. It is suitable for intermediate and advanced esl learners. It can be used to energize a dull class, to review work that was done or simply as a reward for good classroom work. Games are great for motivating students to learn. More Games Is It Time To Go Back To Basics With Writing Instruction? | MindShift | KQED News Most educators acknowledge that literacy is important, but often the focus is on reading because for a long time that is what achievement tests measured. In the last few years there has been more focus on writing in classrooms and on tests, but many students still have difficulty expressing their ideas on paper. Often students struggle to begin writing, so some teachers have shifted assignments to allow students to write about something they care about, or to provide an authentic audience for written work. While these strategies are important parts of making learning relevant to students, they may not be enough on their own to improve the quality of writing. Nell Scharff Panero taught high school English for 13 years before going back to school to get her Ph.D. in educational leadership. “If language was breaking down at the level of the sentence, I didn’t know how to break it down or what to do about it,” Scharff Panero said. “They just kind of naturally grabbed on,” Salamone said.
Learn the collocations with have Jason R. Levine produces some of the best videos for teaching and learning English online. You probably know his super famous rap on irregular verbs. However, for this post we agreed to create materials for another one of his videos. In the post you can find the following activities: a video with the song (by Jason), the lyrics worksheet, an infographic with all the collocations, an interactive quiz and a game. Have collocations – video Watch the video and complete the following worksheet with the lyrics. This post covers only the first two verses of the song so stop the video after the two verses.Have collocations song Have collocations – infographic Go through the following infographic. Then ask the students to work in pairs or small groups and to ask and answer the questions in the outer circles. Have collocations – interactive quizzes To play on the full screen click the button: Game – full screen The second game is an interactive quiz.
24 defining and non-defining relative clause games 1. Trivia sentence building challenge Give or brainstorm a list of things that trivia questions are often about, e.g. the Amazon, the Statue of Liberty and Einstein. Students should choose one of the things from the list and say something true about that thing or person, e.g. “The Amazon is in South America”. 1. Give or brainstorm a list of things that trivia questions are often about, e.g. the Amazon, the Statue of Liberty and Einstein. 2. This is similar to Trivia Sentence Building Challenge above, but students work in threes and fours and take turns expanding true sentences about one of the people in the group, e.g. 3. Prepare true sentences similar to the ones in Trivia Sentence Building Challenge above and split each sentence into three parts (“Tokyo Tower/, which is a copy of the Eiffel Tower, /is taller than the original”) and put them into a table with three columns in a word processor program. 4. Prepare a worksheet to tell one particular kind of story, e.g. a fairy story. 5.
The Revision Game Revisions just have to be fun! And FlipQuiz is a great tool to use for revising language or content. After signing up, one begins by creating a new quiz board, give it a name, and with the choice of six categories, there will be five questions for each. Then, for each question, the creator of the quiz board, adds the correct answer. Save, and it's ready to go. In class, before projecting the quiz, I give each small group a laminated white board and their own marker. Flipquiz works well on iPads as well, so that is another bonus using it, if you happen to be teaching with iPads. Revisions?
SVOMPT - word order in English SVOMPT rule is one of the most important rules in English. If students learn to follow this rule, their English will improve dramatically, and they will be understood. Once a student knows some words and follows the SVOMPT rule, we can say that he/she can speak English. I love Darren Crown’s explanation of the origin of the SVOMPT word order. SVOMPT – games and quizzes At the moment you feel you understand the grammar it is time to put your knowledge into practice. If you want to play the quiz on the full screen, click on the button below. SVOMPT – what is this word In the second quiz your task is to put the sentence into the correct order. SVOMPT – Arrange the sentence Both games and quizzes are in HTML5 so they should play on all mobile devices.
1 WORKSHEET – 10 GAMES | ELT-CATION Make drilling more meaningful and fun. All you need is a sheet of paper. This post shows how the use of game mechanics can help a teacher design better drilling activities and turn repeated practice of target grammar or vocabulary into a cognitively engaging exercise. Focus on the material to be practised and learning outcomes for your group of students: e.g. irregular verbs It is essential to clearly see the ‘why’ in terms of language learning and use games and game techniques as a means to an end, rather than for their own sake. Form of interaction: two or three students alternating between the roles. Learning irregular verbs requires much memorization, drilling and practice. Work less: Engage learners in the process of preparation for the game Teachers typically carry the full load of preparation. Think of the game elements to add: points, levels, goals, competition, uncertainty, taking turns, specific rules, time limit, game pieces, etc. – What did you write first in your sheet?