ياكويت

Teaching Tip 15: Brainstorming

How:

1. Ask the students to think of all the words they know connected with the topic.
2. Tell the students to write them on a piece of paper.

3. Give them a couple of minutes to do so.

4. Put them in pairs or small groups to compare their vocabulary and transfer words they hadn’t
thought of from their partner’s list to their own.

5. Feedback (see TT8) on to the board.

6. Or you could do it all on the board in the first place - just ask the class to give you words to write
on the board. (Or give board pens to one or more students and get them to do the writing!)


Why:

1. If students have already activated their vocabulary related to the topic they will not be searching
for words so much when they start the speaking activities. This should enable them to be more
fluent.
Extra info:
Brainstorming can be used as a warmer (a five minute activity at the start of the lesson) just to
get them in the mood and to start them thinking about the topic or as a filler (a five minute
activity at the end of the lesson) to see how many words they remember from the lesson. It
can also be used as revision - ‘Write down all the words you can remember about X (which
we studied last month)’! (The students’ll love you for that - not!)
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Teaching Tip 16: Personalising

How:
1. It’s been done for you on the worksheets. All the gap-fill exercises, question-forming
exercises and even the majority of the grammar analysis exercises have been made to include
that ever-important word ‘I’. The discussion questions are mostly aimed at encouraging the
students to give their personal opinon on aspects of the topic.

Why:

1. In my experience, students like talking about themselves. And why not? Who doesn’t?

2. They will remember new words etc. better if they have had the opportunity to use them in
exercises, both written and spoken, that are relevant to their own experience in some way.

3. Apparently, when mother-tongue speakers talk, some of the most frequently used words are
I, me, you.

Extra info:
A lot of coursebooks seem to try to make things look ‘realistic’ for the students in this way. They
show a photo of a man and a woman and say something like ‘This is Bob and Pam’. Then they
provide some sort of exercise which features ‘Bob’ and ‘Pam’ which may go something like this:
Write the following verbs in the sentences below: get up go

1. Bob and Pam ____________ very early every morning.

2. Bob and Pam ____________ to work by bus.

In my view, the chances of the students being really interested in ‘Bob’ and ‘Pam’ are slim
and so are the chances of them remembering the target language (target language is the words
and/or grammar structureyou are trying to teach them).
There may well be nice colour photos of people supposedly called ‘Bob’ and ‘Pam’ but,
correct me if I’m wrong, it’s hardly realistic. The students know full well that the people in the
photos are called just about anything except ‘Bob’ and ‘Pam’ because they are models or
actors or whatever. They certainly don’t care what time they get up and how they get to work.
That’s where personalising comes in. Sentences like: ‘My partner ______ very early every
morning’ can be turned into questions (Do you get up very early every morning?) which will
begin a real, personally relevant conversation between two students in which they can talk to
each other about themselves. (Yes, I do, I have to be at work by 8.15 every day including
Saturday; really? What do you do? etc.)
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Teaching Tip 17: Translating

How to avoid doing it:

1. Refuse to give translations for new vocabulary yourself. Pretend/Admit you don’t speak
the student’s language.

2. Encourage the students to guess the meaning of words they don’t know or to ask each other
for help or to look it up in a monolingual dictionary instead. (See TT6 , TT9 and TT20 for further
explanation).

3. Explain that you are a teacher, not an interpreter.

4. Remind students that you are a teacher, not a dictionary.

Why to avoid doing it:

1. If student’s translate words and you don’t speak their language you won’t know if they’ve
really understood or if they’ve translated it correctly.

2. There often isn’t a direct translation for a word or phrase, there is only an ‘equivalent’, sometimes
not even that. Try translating a couple of modal verbs (like ‘must’ or ‘would’ and you’ll see what
I mean) and I doubt very much that there is a translation for ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ in any
language (because it’s something solely British so other countries will presumably never
have needed a word for it). ‘get’ is hard to translate, as are phrasal verbs.
3. Translating some things word for word doesn’ t help. For example: My mother -in-law once
told me that my husband is a ‘pezzo di pane’ which translates as ‘a piece of bread’. I was
none the wiser for having translated this. Did it mean he was soft, I asked myself? Or stale?
(It actually means he’s a good sort, apparently).
4. Translating slows students down which means you run the risk of getting bogged down in
the fruitless pursuit of a word which isn’t English anyway.
5. Thinking in two languages simultaneously (which is necessary for translating) is very hard.
People pay simultaneous interpreters quite a lot of money to do this and you need to be
very good at both languages to do it successfully. (‘If you are a professional interpreter you
may translate in my lessons, no problem’ - funnily enough I haven’t come across any such
students yet!)
6. False friends can cause problems. In Italian the word ‘sensibile’ means sensitive. Not
sensible. The word ‘conveniente’ means cheap. Not convenient. I could go on...
7. Often there is only one word in the students’ language to translate two English words.
For example: the Italian for make is ‘fare’ and so is the Italian for ‘do’. The Italian for ‘job’ is
‘lavoro’ and so the Italian for ‘work’. In such cases translating is actually the origin of the
students’ confusion over the words, not the solution to it.
Extra info:
If I encounter students who are convinced that translating English into their own language
is an essential part of learning English I try to discourage them by explaining like this:
Let’s imagine that I am a piano-teacher and a student wants to learn to play the piano so
s/he has piano lessons with me. S/he may not be able to play the piano but s/he is an
expert guitarist and brings his/her guitar to the lesson. I play a tune on the piano and s/he
tries to copy it on the guitar. But it doesn’t sound the same. In fact it doesn’t sound like
a piano at all. Well, it wouldn’t, would it?
I suggest that s/he tries playing it on the piano but s/he tells me that s/he will only be able
to play it on the piano if s/he can play it on the guitar first. The lesson continues with me
playing the piano and the student ‘translating’ the tunes onto the guitar. At the end of this
course of piano lessons, do you think the student will be able to play the piano? I think not.
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Teaching Tip 18: Pacing

How:

1. Change the pace of the lesson by breaking things up a bit. Instead of simply doing one activity
straight after another, allow a little time for something different (pronunciation work, for example -
see TT4 for further information).

2. You can also change the pace during a lesson by allowing time for a brainstorming session (see
TT15 for further explanation).

3. Another way to liven up the pace is to put a time limit on some activities - ‘You have 2 minutes
for this, so get going!’ Or introducing an element of competition - put the class into small groups
and tell them that these are teams and the first team to finish this activity is the winner. (Prize =
no homework, or something like that). Maybe the activities which involve matching words with
pictures would be a good one for this).

4. Use other material during the lesson - your coursebook etc.

5. Wake people up by giving them a 2 minute test on last week’s vocabulary.

6. Allow silence at appropriate times during the lesson - while students are reading the questions
or during speaking activities when students are formulating a response (thinking of something to
say). Silence in the classroom can be a bit unnerving at first but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing
your job - students need time to absorb information and time to think. We all do.

Why:

1. The lesson will become rather monotonous if it’s just a case of ‘Do Activity 1, then do Activity 2,
then (lo and behold) do Activity 3’!
2. The lesson will become even more monotonous if the students spend all lesson with the same
partner - change the partners over, make small groups instead, or (especially in a brainstorming
session) have the group brainstorming directly to you.
Extra info:
Exercises may be numbered 1, 2, 3 etc but that doesn’t mean you have to do them in that order
or feedback (see TT8) in that order. In the discussion activities I often tell students to read all the
questions, select the 3 that interest them most and talk about them. When feeding back from
another exercise I may ask for the answer to number 5 then number 2 then number 4 - keeps
the students on their toes!
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Teaching Tip 19: Concept checking

How:

1. Ask the students a question closely related to the target concept. For example:
If you are working on a third conditional sentence like this: ‘I would have done my homework
if I had had enough time’ , your concept checking questions could be these: Did you do your
homework? Did you have enough time? If you’re checking the understanding of instructions which
say ‘Guess your partner’s answers to the true or false questions below’ you could ask ‘Do you
need to speak to your partner at this stage?’
Why:
1. It’s another way of checking understanding (see TT3 for further explanation).

Extra info:
I suggest thinking up concept check questions before the lesson and jot them down somewhere.
I don’t know about you but they never come to me spontaneously when I need them in a lesson.
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Teaching Tip 20: Using Dictionaries

How:

1. If possible, give the students each an English-English dictionary.

2. Make sure they know how to use it. If not, teach them how. (If you don’t know how to teach them
how, see Extra Info below for some ideas).

3. Encourage the students to refer to their dictionary whenever appropriate during the lesson, though
they should try to guess the meaning from the context first where possible (See TT 6 for further
info).

Why:

1. A dictionary is an extra teacher for the student.

2. It helps the students to realise that you are not a dictionary and therefore shouldn’t be treated
like one (seeTT9 for further comment).

3. It makes the student more independent - not relying on the teacher the whole time - and more
able to study outside the classroom, at home, or whatever, and to continue studying after the
course has finished.

Extra info:
I help students get to grips with dictionary work and start to appreciate just how useful one can
be by giving them some words to look up and then discuss in pairs. I often give the students
different dictionaries too, different levels, different publishers, the lot, so they get the chance to
develop a preference. If they do decide to go and invest money in a dictionary as a result of the
lesson they have a better chance of buying one that is right for them and therefore a better
chance of making friends with it.
The words I give students to look up are false friends - what do they mean?, confusing words -
what’s the difference between them? (I use ‘job’ and ‘work’ in the sentences ‘I enjoy my job/ I
enjoy my work’ - the nouns ‘job’ and ‘work’ mean pretty much the same here but there is a
difference because between them, what is it? Words which are impossible to know
how to pronounce - ‘thorough’ is a good one, - how do we say it? Sentences to complete - I’’m
good ___ using a dictionary’ - what’s the missing preposition? Phrasal verbs like ‘put up with’ -
do they know which word to look up? Words with more than one meaning - I use ‘get’ - what
does it mean? And does their dictionary give too much information about it or too little or just right?
The aim of the game is to get students to realise that using a bi-lingual dictionary to translate a
word is no way to go about dictionary work, especially if it is more than 5 years old - for a start,
if they look up the word ‘mouse’ it’ll probably just say ‘small furry animal’ and not mention
computers at all. Using a mono-lingual English dictionary could really help them with their studying.
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