Level: Medium to Advanced

• Time: o­ne hour, including follow-up debate.
• Language: As many speech acts as are possible. "Divergent" approach (see The Internet TESL Journal" for a good article by Patricia K. Tompkins).
• Organization: Small group (in my case, 7).
• Warm-up/Preparation: Each student compiles a fictitious character profile or merely thinks up a few ideas o­n what he might say in the context).
• Procedure: Teacher asks for volunteers, or appoints them if the students are stalling too much.

The following therefore are some of those lesson ideas-by no means exhaustive- which can be tailored to your class, and which I believe show the versatility of Youtube as a teaching tool.

Level: Medium

Here is a simple idea to generate chat among your students. We all know
that there are moments during the day when we have nothing to do, no plans.
For example, when you are waiting for a teacher, a friend and so o­n. How do
we occupy these periods of time, either mentally or physically? For
example:

Level: Any Level

You can use use this with any subject.

Level: Easy to Medium

Here is a light-hearted idea to get pupils talking in conversation class. I have adapted an idea I found in a gossip magazine.

Think, Pair, Share is a structure first developed by Professor Frank Lyman at the University of Maryland in 1981 and adopted by many writers in the field of co-operative learning since then. It introduces into the peer interaction element of co-operative learning the idea of ‘wait or think’ time, which has been demonstrated to be a powerful factor in improving student responses to questions

Level: Any Level

Rationale: Students develop vocabulary and, at higher levels, practise proper word order by forming sentences.

Materials: Standard deck of playing cards.

Games have been popular in language teaching for decades. As Thornbury notes (2006), “many non-classroom games are language-based and therefore lend themselves to use (or adaptation) in the language classroom.”

Level: Any Level

Each student is given a card with a familiar adverb o­n it--i.e. quickly, angrily, loudly, happily. Then the class tells the student to do something so they can guess what adverb is o­n the card. They can tell the student to do things in pantomime, like drink a bowl of soup, or really do it in class, like open a door or take a book from the teacher. (Can't recall where I read this idea, but it is fun and can be played in teams.)

Discussion is very often used as a tool in classrooms. When designed properly and used thoughtfully, discussion tasks can be an effective learning tool that promote creativity, as well as generate meaningful interaction and understanding for the learner. Well-designed discussion tasks lead to progressive knowledge-seeking inquiry (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994) or expansive learning (Engestrom, 1999) where learners are actively synthesizing new information with prior knowledge and experiences in the process of creating not o­nly new knowledge but also new understanding of the learning process.

If English as a Second Language instructors want to stimulate active student learning of pronunciation, grammar, or even culture, music is a fine way to reach those aims.

The application of magic to teaching English is based o­n the distinction between a 'trick' and an 'illusion'. A trick is just the bare action-be it guessing a card, reading someone's mind or escaping from a locked chain-while the illusion is how you dress it up, how you enrich it. Take a simple trick which may require o­nly a few seconds to perform, add an introduction and a story to it, and Shazam! It is an illusion

There was a wealthy American executive who had practically everything in life

These are the ideas included in Hall Houston's Random ESL Idea Generator. If you have a JavaScript-enabled browser, you can use the generator to get a randomly-selected idea from this list. Perhaps you will find it useful to print out this list and refer to it from time to time.

THERE IS AN INTIMATE and necessary relation between the processes of actual experience and education" (Dewey, 1938)There are many ways to learn and for some of us we learn better by doing.

Ice Breakers can be an effective way of starting a training session or team-building event. As interactive and often fun sessions run before the main proceedings, they help people get to know each other and buy into the purpose of the event.

The Tech Tip this month is an expansion of the February, 2000 Tech Tip: Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary. This Tip will focus on some of the many freeware and shareware vocabulary games that are available, where to find them, and how to make use of them in the classroom.

In this classroom, children use concrete, real-world examples to illustrate core knowledge.