ESL in China!

For TEFL teachers to get free games and ideas

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What Young Learners Need

Young ESL Learners are young children who are just venturing out into the world and learning new things everyday. Coming to a language school might be a little frightening for some younger ones, so it is important that you create an environment in the classroom which is fun and relaxed. Read on...

Although Younger Learner students are often learning very basic words and sentences, you can (and should) plan some really creative and fun things for the children to do in class to get them using the language and interacting with one another and you.

Movement and Music

Young Learners always love movement, music, things to sing along to and active games. They will follow your lead, so it is important that you personally break down the barriers as an adult and sing and dance along with them! Make sure that you are giving lots of encouragement and reward good behavior at every turn.

A little star sticker on the back of the hand can do wonders for a child's self-confidence and self-belief. Create a safe, fun and stress-free classroom and remember to involve everyone, especially the naturally shy ones.

Young Learner Behavior

Young Learners have short attention spans and are easily distracted, so be sure to make your exercises and classroom activities fun and short. Even the best thought-out activities lasting 25 minutes are probably doomed to failure because childrens' brains just are not designed to stay focused that long. Make sure that you stay active, with energetic expressions to keep the kids focused on you and the activity in hand.

Get your students used to how to behave in your classes. Teach them early on to raise their hands before asking questions and not to talk over you. It is worth spending time getting this right in the first few lessons, as a well-organized, happy group of children will learn far more language over the time spent with you than if kids are allowed speak over you and generally be a bit too noisy.

Children will naturally look to teachers and adults for guidance on how to behave, so set your stall out early and get a well-behaved atmosphere going quickly.

Organise Houses

Organizing the class into three of four teams or 'houses' works well, as you can award points for good behavior or take points away for lapses. The young children love this kind of competition and it will be harder for children to misbehave if they feel that the whole team may lose points. In general, your teaching will be far more productive, as will their learning, if you create good class rules and have a good routine.

What Should You Focus On?

The main focus on your lessons should be communication and laying a good foundation for maintaining an interest in English. Students should practice pronunciation of the words (its 'book', not 'book-aaa'), as getting this right early will have huge benefits to their language skills throughout their life.

Young Learners should also learn material such as the alphabet, numbers, colours, fruits, animals and so on. There are some great flashcards out there, so make sure you use these in class. Many children are very visual learners, so these flashcards will help, in addition to all the fun games you can play with them.

Introducing New Language

Introduce new vocabulary slowly and choose simple sentences that the children can practice with each other and where they can replace key vocabulary with new material. This will help the students to retain the vocabulary, as well as getting the sentences right. Make sure that part of your class reviews what was learnt in the class before. This will help the students to retain and recall language. Give out praise often.

Little Tips

There are a couple of extra things you can do to make your little ones really succeed. Chinese parents expect homework to be set and the kids are used to it, even from a very young age. Although you may feel that this is wrong, it is the cultural norm here, so please get used to it and don't feel bad in any way. Use the homework you set to reinforce what you have taught in that day's class. It will help each child to retain what you have taught and you'll get good results and children feeling good about themselves when they remember the words.

  Make the homework fun and not too hard. Encourage students to do their best and not to worry about making mistakes. Check the homework at the same time in the every class. Create a routine and stick to it.

Create and Review

Create games and activities that are fun and interesting. Help students to interact well with each other by doing pair-work, group work and team games; mix things up. Try to review material often and add new material slowly with lots of repetition. You will see marvelous results!

The most important thing I can say is to make sure you have fun in each class. Use flashcards and puppets which talk to each other! Put a big smile on your face and keep it there. Make the children feel special and they'll soon be rushing in for your classes. Make your classes the highlight of their week!

By Stuart Allen

[esl-in-china]

Message on a Lollypop!

This Young Learner activity is for kids who are just beginning to read and write in English. You can easily grade this activity to make it super easy or a bit more challenging. It is best suited with a maximum of 12 or so students.

In a nutshell, your students will be given a lollypop each with a small, secret message wrapped around the lolly stick. They need to unravel this, and then go to the board to work out what the message says from the key you have stuck to the white board. They then have to write down this message on a piece of paper to show you. When they have sussed it out, they can have their lolly.

Preparation

A few days before class, pop into a corner shop and buy one lollypop per student in your class. They are only 1RMB each, so no big sweat. 

Choose a suitable word or small sentence for your class. If you have 5 year-olds, this might be 'dog', 'cat', cow', whatever.

For slightly older classes, it could be 'My name is', or 'I like .....'. I'll leave this to you.

First prepare your key for the whiteboard. In the teachers' office, jump onto Microsoft Word and type out on one page letters A-Z in Arial font and then type each letter A-Z again out using the WEBDINGS font (Webdings are little fun pictures instead of A, B, C, D, etc). You should be left with the whole alphabet and the corresponding symbols from Webdings. 26 letters, 26 matching symbols. 

Print this page, go to the photocopier and print it out to A3. You now have a big, clear key to stick on the whiteboard for your students to follow.

Now for the messages. Jump back on the computer and type out short words or messages using the Webdings font on Microsoft Word. You can either choose them all the same, or have a couple of different messages. This is more fun for the kids in my view. 

Print out the page of coded messages, cut them into individual strips (one strip per student) and wrap them around the lolly stick. Job done! 

The whole thing should take no more than 10 minutes to prepare and your Young Learner students will lose their mind with this activity! They'll be writing and reading simple words with a bit of a twist, and a lolly after....what could be better?!

Have fun!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Teaching English with No Lesson Plan

Yes, you've received a phone call to come in and teach with no time to prepare your lesson...PANIC!! There can be times when you may need to teach a lesson with no materials. As English teachers, we always strive to plan good lessons, but sometimes things can go wrong on us and we need to think quickly, improvise and go and teach ESL classes with little or no materials.

Read on...

There can be a number of reasons why teachers may have to do this. You might find yourself being asked to cover a class for a sick teacher at short notice, you may have looked at last week’s schedule by accident or the photocopier might jam up on you.

Whatever the reason you need to teach with no lesson plan, there is no need to panic and you can still have a great class.

Here are some ideas if you have to teach a class with no lesson plan or materials:

The Greatest Invention Ever

Get your students into pairs and ask them to write down 15 inventions that changed the world e.g. soap, mobile phones, glasses, paper, scissors, the internet. Give them a few minutes to think and then take 2-3 inventions from each pair and write them on the board. Try to fill the board with at least 20-30 different inventions.

Now, explain that the class needs to find the one invention that has changed the world the most and become ‘The Greatest Invention’. Students must come to the board one by one and rub out one invention which they think is least important still on the board and explain why. This will create a lot of talking once they start rubbing out certain inventions and you can encourage this debate. Keep going until there is one remaining invention. This is a fantastic speaking class without any materials.

Mixed Dialogues

  Divide your class into pairs and give each pair of students eight strips of paper. Ask them to write an eight-part dialogue between two people, with each part of the dialogue on a separate piece of paper. Lower levels can just use one sentence on each paper. Higher levels can write more. If you want to help your students out, you can give them a topic i.e. two people having an argument on a first date, an angry customer in a supermarket, a lady asking for directions in her car, etc.

Once they have finished writing the dialogue, pairs should mix up the strips of paper and hand them to another group to try and put together.

Once the dialogue has been put in the right order, the new pairs can practice the dialogues or perform them in front of the class. Depending on how long your ESL class is, you can keep swapping up the dialogues multiple times and get lots of speaking, reading and comprehension practice.

Again, this English class with no materials is easy to set up and just requires paper.

Random Story Words

Write around 10-15 words on the board. Make them quite random, for example, bus, India, plastic bag, bicycle lock, thief, underwear, tennis ball, etc.

Now ask students to write a story with some of these words in the story. They should use as many words within the story as they can and encourage them to be imaginative.

Students can then read out their stories and if you have enough time, you could ask them to role-play the funniest stories.

It needn't be stressful!

Teaching English with no plan or materials can be a whole lot of fun and it is good to have a few ideas up your sleeve for when you least expect it. New teachers will especially find having to teach English with no plan very daunting and stressful, but actually you can sometimes have a fantastic class with no materials.

Good luck!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

Remember to invite your school colleagues to ESL in China today.

[esl-in-china]

Half!

This is a quick warmer for adult and teen students. It allows students to be creative without too much hassle or pressure.

Teacher dictates half a sentence, students complete the other half by themselves and read out at the end.

"As soon as she walked into the room….."

"I’m having a lot of trouble deciding…."

"One Saturday morning in late summer…."

"If you want to lose all of your friends…."

"All through history, people have….."

"Nobody knows who really…."

"If you climb to the top of a high mountain….."

"I believe that everybody should…."

"They all started laughing because…."

Students check spelling with each other (great for class rapport!), then with the teacher.

Want to get even more creative? You could also stick the sentence halves on the students' backs, get them to mingle and copy them down.

That should wake them up and get them fired up for an awesome class!

Thanks,

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

@ESL_in_China

[esl-in-china]

4 Classroom Games for Adults

Classroom games are perfect for people of any age. Games are proven to not only help improve memory, but also to allow students to enjoy themselves. It is a great way to get everyone involved and help out the visual learners.

  Here is a great list of popular classroom games for adults that are perfect to get everyone interested in the lesson. Read on...

#1 - Jeopardy

Jeopardy is a great game that splits up adults into teams in order to answer a series of questions. Similar to the popular television show, categories are set up with a series of answers (not questions!) that are tied to point values. After each answer, groups decide what the question possibly is, and the first team to answer correctly receives points.

This is a great way to test adults on their understanding of certain material while helping to reinforce their memory.

Example answer (worth four points): China

Question for students to guess:Which country has the largest population?

#2 - Frying Pan

To begin the game of Frying Pan, all adults need to put their names into a hat. Following this, an instructor asks a simple question. This question does not need to be hard to answer, but it needs to elicit more than a "yes" or "no".

After asking the question, the instructor pulls a name out of the hat and asks the person chosen to come up and answer the question. Other adults in the room are encouraged to ask additional questions of the chosen person that are pertinent to the subject matter.

#3 - Charades

  The game of Charades is a great way to teach adults vocabulary in a fun way. Divide the adults into two separate teams, and fill up a hat with a list of vocabulary terms on small pieces of paper. The challenge is that each team member must act out the term without speaking. A point is awarded for each correct guess.

#4 - White Board

  White Board is another great team-focused game that has students competing quickly for correct answers. This game works perfectly for grammar questions or vocabulary terms. Begin by splitting the adults into two teams and giving each team a single white board. After asking a question, turn on a timer that is set for two minutes, and have each team write their answer down on the white board. The first team with the correct answer receives a point.

So Why Use Games with Adults?

Incorporating classroom games for adults is a great way to get everyone involved outside of a routine class. While most adults attempt to pay close attention, many are often bored by the traditional style of teaching and need more interactivity.

Use any one these games on this list to help teach your next lesson while having fun.

Have a great day,

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Warmer of the Day: The Race!

This is a fun, fast-paced warmer which will give your lessons this week an excellent start. In a nutshell, groups have to write down seven things from a category you give them.

What to do

Divide your students into teams and have them sit in small groups.

Choose one person from each team to come to the front of the class.

The teacher shows (not speaking) a piece of paper with a category on it. This should be appropriate to age and level. For example: 7 animals, 7 Things You Do Before Going to Bed, 7 Items of Clothing, 7 Sports, 7 Oscar-Winning Movies, whatever.

The students then have to run back and tel their group the category and their team writes down seven items in this category.

The first team to finish is the winner.

Job done!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

The Toilet Roll!

This activity is great as a warmer or a first class icebreaker.

By a toilet roll from the shop amd bring it to class. Sit everyone in a circle and hand the toilet roll to the first student. The toilet roll is obviously a very unusual thing to bring to class, so everyone will be wondering what is going on and you'll have their interest.

Give the roll to the first student and tell them to tear off between 1-4 sheets. Don't say why just yet. The roll then traves around the room, with every student choosing to tear off between 1-4 sheets each. When it gets back to you, you also can either take 1, 2, 3 or 4 sheets of toliet paper.

Students (and you) then have to say something about themselves. If they have one sheet, they must tell the class one thing about themselves. Two sheets, two things about themselves. Three sheets, three things, and so on.

This is a fun and simple way for everyone to say something about themselves and to break to ice for a class.

Have fun!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

The Paper Plane Game

Draw a target (with points - like a dart board) on the white board or use a cardboard box in the middle of the room. Students then make paper aeroplanes and get to launch them after they answer your question in the form of a sentence. Encourage students to answer in sentences, rather than single word utterances.

You will be suprised just how hard students will try to say the answer, repeat your sentence, or whatever,  just so they can throw their paper plane!

I recommend giving a prize to make the target points mean something, thus peaking their interest in the activity.

Lastly, use scrap paper for this activity. Large packs of new A4 paper are costly for schools and a ball-ache to go and buy, so get some use out of the scrap paper box.

Have fun!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Name Six

Level: Any Level

This game is fun and challenging at the same time. It can be adapted for virtually any subject and any grade level. It allows the students to review material they've learned, without having to get out a pencil and paper and answer questions from the text.

What to Do

Arrange 6 chairs in a circle with students seated in them and choose one person, the teacher or another student, to stand outside the circle.

Give someone sitting in the circle a stuffed animal - the funnier the animal the better! If you don't have a teddy, then find some other cool passable object, it doesn't really matter.

The person outside the circle states what the person holding the animal has to name six of, for example, six classroom objects, or six things in the city, or six verbs, etc.

The person then starts passing the animal around the circle from student to student as fast as possible.

The person standing in the middle must name six of the objects before the animal gets back to him or her.

If the player can say six items before the teddy gets back to the first student, then he/she has won. If the teddy gets back first before the player has said six things, then the player in the middle loses!

That's your weekend warmer now planned for you....100% GOLD!!!

Have fun!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Are you a TEFL teacher? Welcome to ESL in China!

This blog will have daily new games and activities for TEFL teachers to use in their classroom. Welcome and don't be afraid to say hello!

[esl-in-china]

Jobs Draw!

As English teachers, pretty quickly you'll find yourself teaching jobs or occupations. No matter the age of student you have, you'll come across 'Jobs'in one of your units at some point.

This activity is a great way to review jobs which you have recently studied. Get a photo of a teacher, a dentist, an engineer, a doctor, what ever the jobs you are teaching, and divide the class into teams. If you have larger class, you can make 3 or 4 teams.

How to Play

Ask one student to come to the board and show this student one of your pictures. They then have 15 seconds to draw the job. At 15 seconds, stop the student.

Their team now have one guess at what the job is. Don't allow shouting out, be strict that the team only has one guess. If they get it right, then they get5 points. If they get it wrong, then you can ask the other team. They get 5 points if they get it right.

Teams take turns until you have gone through your pictures. This is a fun way to review your job unit.

Have fun!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Go Bananas!

This is a really funny classroom game which your classes are guaranteed not to have done before. It is a mix of a sentence structure game and an unusal Indian sport called Kabadi!

In a nutshell, your students will be putting a cut up sentence back into order while holding their breath! Sounds bananas?! Read on...

The Set Up

Get a sentence or two of a recently studied topic, or just something level appropriate.

Photocopy this out so you have the same sentence twice. Try to make the words nice and big, at least size 48 on Word.

Cut the sentences up into individual words and put them into two separate envelopes. Both envelopes should contain all the words needed to make the original sentence.

Divide the class into two teams. If you have a big class, make three teams and three envelopes.

Put all envelopes on a table at the other end of the classroom.

How to Play

Get teams into lines

One student from each team must race out to try to put the sentence into order at the table. However, while they do this, they must not breathe in!! To prove they are not cheating, they must constantly say 'Banana' over and over and over again!

As soon as they can't go on, they must run back to their line and tag-in the next student who runs in and takes over from where the last student left off. Again, they must say 'Banana' constantly until they can not go on and have to return for the next person.

The first team to get all of their words into the correct order wins!

Tips

Don't make the sentence too short, otherwise the first few students will finish it with the rest of the class not getting a go and feel disappointed.

Similarly, don't make it too long that it becomes an impossible exercise. You may have to experiment a little here to get the right balance. Perhaps go to the class armed with two sentences.

If you plan to use this with multiple classes, consider using a different coloured font for each team. That way, at the end of the class, you can whack all the words back into the right envelopes according to colour rather than having a big, mixed-up pile of random words to sort out on your precious break between classes!

No colour printer? No worries, simply run a different coloured felt-pen on the reverse side of the sentence before you cut it up.

Go bananas!!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Human Bingo!

This is a brilliant ESL warmer which will get your class speaking straight away! The best thing is that you can adjust the difficulty to suit any age or any level...so you can all use this today!

What to Do

Give each student a sheet of A4 paper.

Each student uses a pen to divide the sheet into 9 sections, like a naughts and crosses board - two lines across, two lines going down.

The teacher writes around 15 questions of the board to suit the level of the students. Easy for small kids, harder for advanced students.

Each student chooses eight of these questions and writes the questions in the squares, leaving the centre space blank.

Students then must speak to eight different students to get their answers. These answers are written on their paper.

At the end of the activity, have feedback. For example:

Teacher: Who spoke to Lucky?

Student 1: Me

Student 2: I did

Teacher: What did you ask her?

Student 1: What time do you wake up?

Student 2: Tell me three shops.

Teacher: What did Lucky say?

Student 1: She wakes up at 7am

Student 2: Supermarket, greengrocers, bookstore

This will get loads of speaking and dead easy to set up and do!

Have a great Saturday!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

  p.s. A special shoutout to EF English First Urumqi today, who I hear have almost all of their academic team using 'ESL in China' to help with their lesson planning. You guys are awesome! Have a great day!

[esl-in-china]

Pairing up students

During your classes, teachers will need to pair up ESL students. This often means just pairing up students with the person they are sitting next to. This should be avoided.

Always having the same pairs means students miss out on interacting with one another and the class dynamic won't be as strong and fun. Try to mix things up.

Ball o' String

I got this idea from an English teacher who is teaching in Spain. It is really simple and will guarantee that you will have different pairs each time you try it.

Get a ball of string from the shop and cut several lengths of string, a few metres long each. If your class is 20, cut 10 bits of string. If your class is 14, cut 7 lengths of string and so on - one length of string per pair. If you have odd numbers, put one group into a three or you join in yourself.

Get everyone to stand up in a large circle. Have all of the string bunched up in a ball in your hand (but not tangled up) with the ends poking out.

Ask each student to grab one end of a piece of string and gradually walk backwards. They will be left holding the string with their new partner at the other end...so easy!

This is a very fun and original way to choose partners and you'll be the coolest teacher in your school for sure!

Have fun!

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

What are the Darwin Awards?

The Darwin Awards are given out to very, very stupid people who help the human race by taking themselves out of the gene pool by either death or by sterilizing themselves i.e. a man dangling his nuts in a golf ball cleaning machine for a laugh (this has happened....the machine pulled his balls 2ft down into the machine before returning them to him in a worse state than before he began!)

Have a read today of some Darwin Award Winners and you'll be in stitches!! Read on...

Using the Darwin Awards in the Classroom

About ten years ago, I was teaching an adults class for EF English First Xi'an. The unit was about 'Greatest Human Achievements' and the language point for comparatives and superlatives. I flicked through the pages in the office and decided that the unit was incredibly boring, but had a felling that it needn't be...

I decided to put a twist on it and do the Darwin Awards to contrast with the Greatest Achievements. We looked at the Darwin Awards and some of the winners and what they had done 'to win'. The students absolutely loved it!

What we did

Following reading through a couple of real award winners, students were put into groups and had to invent their own Darwin Award stories (using the language point) - they were really creative here! Some stories were amazing!

At the end, they acted out their stories for the class. It worked perfectly; lots of smiles.

If you have an adults class this week, a university class, or a Salon Class in an adults language centre, then try out using The Darwin Awards!

Have fun,

Stuart Allen

ESL in China!

[esl-in-china]

Icebreaker: Skittles!!

An Ice Breaker is a simple activity for the first class of a new term.

In a new class students may well not know each other yet (and nor will you know them). They may well be shy about speaking also.

An ice breaker is designed to do several things. Good ones will relax the class and create a friendly atmosphere. They will also allow you to get a good idea of the level of the class and see how different students work together (or not, as the case may be).

An ideal ice breaker will, therefore, be fun, simple and productive.

Skittles!

Buy a big pack of Skittles (enough for five Skittles per student) and go around the class giving each student five Skittles.

Important: Tell your students they can't eat their Skittles yet!

Now go to the board and wite the following:

Red Skittle = Favourite hobby

Blue Skittle = Dream job

Yellow Skittle = Favourite place

Orange Skittle = Favourite film

Purple Skittle = Wildcard - ask any question you like

Students now have to go and meet other students.

Student A offers Student B a skittle to eat and this student must choose one and ask the matching question e.g. Takes a blue Skittle and asks "What is your dream job?" . Student A then takes one of Student B's skittles to eat and also asks a question.

After this, both students must walk off and find a new partners.

Keep going until each student has spoken to five other students and all the Skittles are gone!

This is a great ice-breaker for new classes, try it out!

Taste the Rainbow!

[esl-in-china]

Website of the Day: ESL Games +

I just stumbled across this site this morning, and it is absolutely stunning! www.eslgamesplus.com

This website is totally free and has printable worksheets, PowerPoint flashcards, ESL flashcards to print, English games and puzzles, and mobile/iPad stuff.

Best of all, it has free cartoon dialogue videos for kids from Pre-School/Kindergarten to Upper Elementary/Pre-Intermediate. If you have an interactive whiteboard or iPad with Wifi in your school, then you are cooking with gas today!!

This is certainly one of the best English teaching websites I've seen in a long time! Did I mention that its free??