Something Just Like This

A listening activity based on a Coldplay's song, which can be optionally followed by jigsaw reading.

This is a song activity based on a surprise collaboration between Coldplay and the Chainsmokers from a couple of years ago. I've used it successfully with students of different ages: teenagers and young adults, who complimented me on my musical taste (!)

Note that the teacher's notes are not provided because the student worksheet is pretty self-explanatory. To check the answers for the While Listening activities, see this lyrics video:

Zoom activity: Photos of the week

Photos of the Week section in The Atlantic

Although the lockdown restrictions are gradually being eased in many countries, remote teaching is still in effect - and looks set to continue for the unforeseeable future. Here is an activity I’ve been using a lot at the beginning of my Zoom lessons lately. I suppose you can call it a warmer.

3 ideas for synchronous online lessons on Zoom

Photo by Caroline Feelgood on Unsplash

Now that many schools around the Coronavirus-stricken globe have been closed, teachers have had to come to grips with the idea that many have heard about or maybe even experimented with, but never really implemented in earnest - teaching online. I've lost count of how many webinars and online tutorials on various online tools and platforms I have attended in the past week. Most of them were organised by various institutions I work for with each one choosing to use a different synchronous learning platform. The fact that most of these webinars were delivered by tech people exemplifies pretty much how you should not go about implementing edtech: instead of inviting (and paying!) a teacher experienced in remote teaching to do the job, let's ask the college's Moodle guy!

On the other hand, teachers have taken to Twitter sharing activities, ideas and advice that is more pedagogy- rather than technology-driven. In a matter of a few days, the somewhat morbid hashtag #coronavirusteaching has gone viral (pun intended!).

So consider me jumping on the bandwagon. In this post, I'd like to share some activities that have worked well for me in this past week under a partial lockdown.

News Quiz 2019 - Follow Up

Image credits: Frankie Fouganthin; Milliped; SounderBruce;
under Creative Commons license [CC BY-SA 4.0]

Activities for reviewing lexis from News Quiz 2019

Some of my followers have already been asking me for follow-up activities, particularly Quizlet sets, for the traditional end-of-year news quiz, which I posted last week. Incidentally, it was the 10th News Quiz I'd posted here, on my blog (you can see all of them HERE), since I first launched the blog at the end of 2010...  by posting News Quiz 2010. So, how's that for a #10yearchallenge? I'm actually surprised I've kept at it for so long!

News Quiz 2019

Traditional end-of-year news quiz for the first lesson of the new year

Photo by Katherine Cheng
[CC BY-ND 2.0] via Flickr 

Just as I finished working on this, a thought crossed my mind: perhaps it should have been an end-of-decade news quiz this time? Ah well... Anyhow, in keeping with the tradition, here's an end-of-year quiz based on the hottest news stories of the past year.

It's a usual mix of politics, sports and entertainment - but no mention of Brexit whatsoever!

And as usual, it's packed with lots of lexical chunks and other vocabulary items for your students to explore.

10 paper-and-pencil activities using Quizlet

I first mentioned Quizlet in a blog post in 2013. Over the past six years it has become a staple in many EFL/ESL classrooms. These days whenever I ask participants of my workshops to indicate by a show of hands whether they are familiar with Quizlet, almost every hand in the room goes up. That is with a rare exception of my recent session at TESOL Italy, where, to my utter surprise, none of the 10  or so participants had heard of this wonderful online tool. But even those who do actively use Quizlet are not always aware of the 'offline' opportunities it affords. In this post I'd like to share 10 'offline'  (i.e. paper-based) activities you can do in the classroom using your Quizlet sets.

Still blogging - but elsewhere

CUP booth at IATEFL Poland in Wroclaw (September 2018)
Can you spot my book?

This is just a quick update. I know it seems like I haven't been blogging much since my book came out, except for the traditional News Quiz. But, in fact, I've written a few pieces that have appeared elsewhere in the past few months, mostly on the Cambridge University Press (CUP) World of Better Learning blog. Here are the links to my latest posts:

News Quiz 2018 - Follow Up

Activities for reviewing lexis from News Quiz 2018

Image credits: John Bauld  flic.kr/p/McsiQi [CC BY 2.0];
Alisdare Hickson flic.kr/p/24W89b5 [CC BY-SA 2.0];
NASA [PD image]

I hope you and - your students - liked the end-of-year news quiz, which I posted last week. As always, it is followed up by lots of activities aimed at reviewing and consolidating the language from the quiz, which I share below.

If you haven't seen the news quiz, it's not to late - click HERE

You can preview the activities below or download them in Word format and edit/adapt them as you wish. The key (answers) and teachers' notes are provided at the end of each level.

UPDATE: a Quizlet set for advanced level: quizlet.com/_5wm0we 

News Quiz 2018

Photo by KRIS AUS67 on Flickr [CC BY 2.0]

Although I haven't been a very active blogger this year - but check my posts on the CUP blog -  the traditional end-of-year news quiz is here as always! Focusing on key news stories from 2018 I tried to keep a balance between politics, showbiz and sports. And as usual, it's packed with lots of lexical chunks and other vocabulary items for your students to explore.

Present Simple or Hard Present ?

'The sun rises in the east' -
a commonly used example of the Present Simple
Photo by @CliveSir via ELTpics on Flickr

In a recent discussion in one of the Facebook groups (this is what seems to prompt my occasional posts these days), the Present Simple was referred to as 'one of the hardest tenses for students to get'. This made me wonder whether the Present Simple, contrary to what its name suggests, is indeed not so simple, or it is just another one of those teacher-induced neuroses. Let's see why there's so much ado about the most common, unmarked English tense.

8 dictionary activities

Photo by Hana Ticha
via eltpics on Flickr

A friend of mine has mastered English - which is attested by a CPE certificate - by looking up a word and carefully studying examples in a dictionary every day before going to bed. It was before the days of online dictionaries, so he was using a copy of the excellent Longman Dictionary for Advanced Learners. In the 1990s learners' dictionaries, such as Longman or Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (OALD), started breaking away from the native speaker dictionary format (such as dictionary.com) by introducing two innovations. First, they started providing definitions using a controlled vocabulary - in the case of Longman it was the Longman Defining Vocabulary (LDV), a carefully graded list of the 2000 most frequent words in English, similar to West's General Service List (GSL). Second, they shifted the emphasis from purely defining meanings to highlighting usage through carefully chosen examples.

As dictionary publishers moved increasingly towards online platforms in the 2000s - and some discontinued the printed version, for example Macmillan - learners' dictionaries made further strides towards improving learner experience. Today's online learners' dictionaries (see the list in my Essential lexical tools) not only offer natural examples and highlight co-text, their entries come complete with collocation boxes, grammar information and common error warnings. All this makes a good learner’s dictionary an essential, indeed indispensable, learning tool. Yet, despite their obvious benefits, I find, much to my regret, that online dictionaries are underused by learners and teachers alike. Here are some activities to get your students using learner's dictionaries and hopefully starting to appreciate their value.

News Quiz 2017 - Follow Up

Activities for reviewing the language from News Quiz 2017

Collage made with photos by www.kremlin.ru [CC BY 4.0], 

Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Instagram [fair use],

Alex Fau on Flickr https://flic.kr/p/qKyoQ2 [CC BY 2.0]

I hope you enjoyed the traditional end-of-year news quiz I posted last week. As promised, here's a follow up: lots of activities aimed at reviewing and practising vocabulary (and a bit of grammar) from the quiz. If you haven't seen the news quiz, click HERE.

You can preview the activities below or download them in Word format and edit/adapt them as you wish. This year, the key (answers) and teachers' notes are provided at the end of each level - not as a separate file.

For a suggested sequence of activities, see last year's News Quiz Follow Up - click HERE

Update: Vocabulary from the quiz on Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2017/

News Quiz 2017

Image source: Billboard

Not too many celebrity deaths this year, but there is a variety of science, sport, celebrity gossip and, inevitably, some politics thrown in. I've tried to vary the format slightly by including, where possible, two stories on the same topic for example, two discoveries, two pregnancies, two air travel related stories etc. to see if this can facilitate recycling of some key lexis from the quiz - more on that under Eliciting / Recycling in the Teachers' notes.

The state of stative verbs

or why I've stopped teaching them (and why you shouldn't bother with them either)

Photo by Emma Newman Segev
via ELTpics on Flickr

Like for many EFL/ESL teachers, stative verbs used to be a staple of my teaching menu. I had a great activity for focusing on them, which I have abandoned because I've come to realise that it served no purpose.

The double life of the asterisk sign

A small glyph with lots of functions

An article in Time magazine entitled The History of #—and 6 Other Symbols that Rule Twitter and the Web (published 4 years ago, but which I came across this year) talks about how various little known or underused punctuation symbols have gained more prominence after being adopted in computing and, more recently, on the social media. We learn that the at sign, @, was given a new lease of life in 1971 thanks to the creation of email, and the hash/pound sign, #, the formal name of which is octothorpe, was rehabilitated thanks to Twitter.

Four 'back-to-school' activities

Going back to school: some ideas for your first lesson(s)  

It’s September, the time when many are heading back to school (in the Northern Hemisphere). I thought it would be a good time to share some lexical (and lexico-grammatical) activities to start the year.

Powerful tea and other (im)possible collocations

Photo by Christina Martidou
via ELTpics on Flickr

How do you explain the notion of collocation to your students? Apart from using this great song, I often employ this simple technique: I write on the board: make and do (in the left column), homework and a mistake (in the right) and ask students to match.

Trendy terms, tantalizing techniques and talented teachers in Thessaloniki

A report from the 24th TESOL Macedonia-Thrace convention, which took place in Thessaloniki on 11-12 February

Earlier this month I had the pleasure to attend and the honour to present, for the first time, at the TESOL Macedonia-Thrace international convention in Thessaloniki. While the best thing about the conference - like with most ELT conferences lately - was catching up with teachers from my PLN, making new friends and connecting with professionals from all over Europe, here are highlights from some of the sessions I attended.

News quiz 2016 - Follow up

Photo by iphonedigital via Flickr 

flic.kr/p/J6zv2j [CC BY-SA 2.0]

Activities for reviewing the language from News Quiz 2016

Like in previous years, here's the follow-up to last week's news quiz: 13 pages of practice activities and exercises aimed at reviewing and consolidating lexis from the quiz (in 2 levels).

I hope you and students enjoy them as much as you enjoyed the quiz. If you still haven't seen this quiz, it's not to late - click HERE.

Update: Vocabulary from the quiz on Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/leosel/folders/news-quiz-2016

News quiz 2016

Photos by Chatham House [CC BY 2.0], 
Marie Lan-Nguyen [CC BY 2.0], 
wowser [CC BY-BC 2.0] on Flickr

There has been an unusually high number of celebrity deaths this year - so many that I could have built the whole quiz around it! Anyhow, here's my end-of-year offering in its traditional format, focusing on some key news stories of 2016. Like last year, I've tried to keep it light-hearted as much as possible. Politics is still there, but it's fairly evenly balanced by sports, travel and technology news.

One is better than none

One of my students showed her vocabulary (and grammar) notebook to her private tutor, who was surprised at the way new vocabulary was recorded in it. The student then conveyed the tutor's concerns to me, for example, that "pack in" doesn't have to go necessarily with the job (I'd taught the group "she's packed in her job"). She said, "it means 'finish' or 'give up'". I agreed. But where does it get you? If "pack in" can be substituted for "finish" or one of the other alleged synonyms (alleged because no two or more words are ever absolute synonyms - see HERE), can we say "I've packed in my homework"?

When we were young

Based on Adele's song from her third album 25, this activity can be used with Intermediate level and up. The main focus is listening to chunks, followed by discussion of the song and reviewing the use of like/as.

UPDATE (23.7.2019): After consulting Adele's official website it does seem that the bridge of the song goes It's hard to admit that... and not "It's had to win me back" as previously believed - thank you to my wonderful teacher trainees for pointing it out. The handout and the teacher's notes have been updated accordingly.

Does the chunk argument trump the plagiarism allegations?

Photo by Marc Nozell via Flickr

[CC BY 2.0]

One of the hottest news this week has been Melania Trumps’ allegedly plagiarized speech. Why allegedly? Because although Donald Trump’s wife address at the 2016 Republican Convention bears marked similarities to Michele Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention, there is not much in it that would effectively constitute stealing in the linguistic sense.

The L in ELT

A report from the International ETAI Conference "Engage Enhance Energize" which took place in Ashkelon, Israel, between 4 and 6 July 2016

When Naomi Epstein asked everyone who was planning to attend and present at ETAI 2014 Summer conference to sum up their teaching career and life in seven words, I wrote “Let’s put the L back in ELT” as my 7-word bio. Nobody seemed to mind or make a big deal. This is unlike LexicalLab's similar-sounding strap-line "Putting the Language back into Language Teaching" which has drawn criticism from some who found it arrogant and insulting.