As teachers our native habitat is the classroom, yet our students want to learn English to use it out in the real world. If all the examples we use are in the classroom, we lose authenticity.
Glenn Standish has been a teacher and academic manager for many years, and shares some of his ideas of how to “make English real”!
A taster is below, but for all the detail and explanation read the full article in the IH Journal here.
Dining in English
You could work with a local restaurant and ask the waiting staff to speak only in English, and use English menus. The students simply have to order their meals in English.
Escape in English!
Escape rooms are very popular worldwide. Could you work with your local one, translate clues into English and work with the groups so they only speak in English.
Walking tour
Could you get your students to plan a walking tour for their teachers in their home town? They could work in groups to plan the tour to take in places they like the best – it doesn’t have to be significant tourist attractions. Some lessons are in class planning, some are actually doing the walking tour!
School magazine
Taking a step up from the conventional student work photocopied on A4, there are a host of technological solutions these days that you can use to create professional looking “real” online magazines ( try www.yumpu.com).
Treasure hunt
Writing and solving clues is a very engaging task for students. To make it very real you can integrate the clues around your town, and even have staff dressed up at key points.
Postcard exchange
Even in the electronic era, good old fashioned postcards can create a genuine buzz of excitement. If you can arrange a postcard swap with a school (or schools) in different parts of the world, you can find your students excited to read, and write, messaged to each other.
City Webcams
To make things more exciting than just looking at a picture a in text book and describing what is happening, try using real webcams. Thousands of towns, cities and other attractions have live feeds – Times Square in New York, Edinburgh Zoo – nearly anywhere you can think of!
We hope you can make the most of these ideas in your classroom. For for all the detail and explanation read the full article in the IH Journal here.