Teaching adults (or mature students) offers different challenges and rewards to teaching teenagers and young learners. This article looks at some of the issues and considerations involved. Needs With many teenagers and young learners the needs of the students are...
Alphabet Dictation is a simple way to have your students practice pronouncing the letters of the English alphabet. This is ideal with a beginner level class as what they learn in this activity will help later when it comes to you spelling out new words for them....
Split Infinitives are a construction in English when the infinitive of a verb is cut in half by another word. For example: Infinitive: to see Split Infinitive: to barely see The infinitive is most often split by an adverb or adverbial phrase. I attempted to...
Remembering Student Names is important in building up a good relationship with your students. If you know their names and use them it makes you more approachable. Over time you will remember their names, but it's important to try and get them off pat as soon as you...
Crazy Comparatives is a simple activity to practice comparatives with your class. It can be used with most levels. Preparation Prepare a set of flashcards. On each one have a noun which will be used for comparison. You should make as many as you can and there's no...
Ad Break is a simple activity which gets students working together in a project-like way. It can be completed in a longer lesson (say 2 hours). The idea is that students will practice language they've been learning by putting it together to create a television...
Banana is a fun activity for young learners (and even above!) to help practice asking and answering questions. It needs no preparation and is easy to run. Pre-Teaching With your class, go over how to ask and answer questions. These can be as simple as you like but...
WordWeb is an extremely useful piece of freeware dictionary and thesaurus software. It installs on your Windows PC or as an Android App (however, it's not available for Macs) and runs in the background. Then, each time you want the definition or the spelling of a...
Talking Dictionaries or Describing Words is a simple word game which teaches students how to describe words. It's a useful skill which lets students talk about something they do not necessarily know the correct word for. Preparation Either on slips of paper or...
Superheroes is a good speaking activity for the TEFL class. This is all about the students inventing a new superhero and testing them out in various scenarios to find out who has the most successful. Preparation You will need to prepare beforehand a number of...
