You have taken a job at an NGO in a developing country, and you're so excited to be making a difference. Before class your mind wonders about who your students might be, how you can help them, and the lesson you've planned. You enter the classroom and staring at you is a large class with dozens of faces curiously observing you. You quickly realize that the level is mixed, some students can happily chatter away about a range of topics, others can't say their name correctly. The ages are mixed too, roughly between the ages of 9 and 14. You quickly realize all that you learnt from the safety of your CELTA hasn't prepared you, nor has any prior experience in language centres. You want to help these kids and open doors but you face a huge challenge, which has thrown you in the deep end.
In much of the world English is not learned in state of the art language centres or nice comfortable private schools. It is learned in contexts like public schools, charities, or private business classes. It is learned in rooms with chalk, a board, a dated book, and some tables. Technology is scarce or non-existant and class sizes are large. This presents challenges for speaking, listening, error correction, classroom management, and individualized learning. Having worked extensively in public schools and for NGOS, I am all too familiar with the challenges. Too often students have to follow the audio lingual method, put up, don't have teachers with a decent level of English, or are forgotten about because money is short. Learning can still be personalized, interesting, and profound and I hope the 33 ideas below will help those of you in this situation.
Classroom Management
Castles - Put students into teams of between 6 and 10 students. Each team gets a castle, if they behave well and answer questions well they can build their own castle piece by piece or destroy the other teams castles piece by piece.
Rules - At the start of the course elicit rules like: Speak English, Listen, Be nice... Make a poster later with these and put it next to the board every class (Keep the rules positive rather than negative).Warmers + Fillers
Stop the Bus - Write 5 categories on the board and give students a letter. On a piece of paper they must think of a word with that letter for each category. You can also do this with phonemes without letters to practice pronunciation.
Bang Bang - Write 7 - 12 words on the board and get some students to come to the front. Say the words.
Mystery box - Get a few boxes (you can decorate them to make them more exciting) and put inside things students can smell or touch. Use this to introduce topics.
Riddles + Jokes - These can be written on the board and students can try to decipher them.
Vocabulary
Board race - Give one piece of chalk to each team and write on the board a vocabulary topic. Students run, write a word, then run back and change person. (This is great for both eliciting and reviewing).
Hangman - Everyone knows hangman. You can get students to run this activity sometimes too ;)
Noughts and crosses - Draw a grid and write a word in each square. Students work in two teams and guess the letters. When they guess the word, they get to put their nought or cross in that box.
Pictionary - Draw something and students guess. Students can also run this activity.
Grammar
Ball toss - Get students to make a sentence by passing the ball. Students then say a word or clause and the next student with the ball says the next word or clause.
Slap the board - Write down a few grammatical terms on the board e.g. tenses past, present, future, perfect. Give a fly swatter to one person in each team. You say a sentence with that grammar point and students hit the correct category. the fastest wins points, and students change.
Funny phrase challenge - Students work in pairs with paper and a pen and you get them to complete a sentence with the funniest answer. The students with the funniest answer wins that round. For example for passives you may write 'by Justin Bieber' and students have to write a silly sentence ending with this.
Pronunciation
Tongue twisters - Write down one or two tongue twisters with the phonemes you are practicing. Practice together first then team by team. Finally make it a competition where the team that says it the fastest wins. Time each team separately and make sure they do it properly.
Stop the Bus - See above
Shouting dictation - Students make 2 lines at opposite ends of the classroom and take it in turns to shout information. The other side writes down what they hear. This is also great for listening and speaking.
Listening
Listen and draw - Describe a scene and students draw it alone. This can be used with any vocabulary and is great for prepositions of place. You can also get students to do this in pairs to practice speaking and personalize learning. All your students need is imagination.
Bingo - Give students a grid and get students to complete a grid with the vocabulary and they learned. You then say sentences and they have to listen and cross the words when they hear them.
Dictagloss - You speak and students write down what they hear. You can also scaffold this and get them to just listen for key words, or give them a word class in groups e.g. person 1 verb, person 2 noun, Person 3 adjective. Students then listen and write and finally reconstruct what they heard. This is great for stories.
Shouting dictation - see above
Reading
Corners - Put information around the room about the topic. Students work in pairs, one person runs and one writes. After each go they change. You can set tasks like find 5 facts or answer the true and false questions.
Jigsaw - Students have scrambled up pieces of paper and have to reconstruct the reading. You can then ask follow up questions.
Speaking
Questions on the board - Fairly self explanatory.
Dialogue - Students write a dialogue on the topic.
Writing
Circle writing - Students start a story on their paper and after 2 minutes (time can be adjusted), they pass it along.
Postcard - Students have to write a postcard for travel, what they have learned or about what they did. You can turn this into a project see below.
Recipe - Great for modifiers, quantifiers, cooking verbs, and food. You can turn this into a project see below.Dialogue - see above
Haiku - Students have to write a Haiku about a topic.
Projects
Exchange - Students can write postcards to a class in another country. You can do this every few classes and hopefully build international friendships.
Recipe book - Students create a recipe book for the whole class. Photocopy it and give everyone a copy.
Magazine - Give students a topic and different approaches. Encourage them to make a magazine that can be photocopied.
Novel - Students work in pairs or groups to write chapters of a few pages each. Combine this and photocopy.
Poster and art gallery - Students make a poster about a topic and present on the board. Students then go and look around.
Book of poetry - Get students to write haikus and make it into a book.
Expo - Get some boxes, tubes, tinfoil and get students to make an invention. Do an expo at the end where other classes come and ask students questions.
Crafts - Get some paper plates, straws, scissors, and a stapler. Make animal masks, sundials, monsters, and anything else you can imagine.
