danielmartin67

Vocabulary review

Today I would like to share a highly productive way to revise vocabulary with our students in class. This can work really well as a warmer for the first ten minutes of the lesson. We can select off-the-cuff language items that have cropped up in class, and we can also choose language items from the coursebook.

Mining reading passages for collocations 2

In an earlier post we mined a reading passage from a coursebook series for collocations for the students to do some work around those collocations prior to the reading activity. This time I am going to use the same reading material to share a few ideas on other types of activities that we can take to the language class for the students to do after they have read the passage.

Ask the expert

Throughout my 34-year career as an English teacher, I have taught adult students from all walks of life: doctors, lawyers, farmers, the unemployed… Their interests have been just as varied, ranging from Formula 1 racing and fashion to videogames and techno music.

Open-ended grammar exercises

Grammar exercises in coursebooks tend to be close-ended or controlled, leaving little to no room for creativity. The main reason for this is that such exercises are easier to check, whether in class or at home, where students can correct them by looking at the answer key. Today I would like to explore how to turn close-ended grammar exercises into open-ended ones and also take advantage of Gen.AI to create examples for the students. I will be focusing on the elementary level.

Mining reading passages for collocations 1

Today we are going to ask Claude to generate collocations (clusters of two or three words that commonly appear together in spoken and written English more frequently than they would occur by chance) aligned with reading passages from coursebooks or the web. The aim is to use this material for both communicative activities and raising awareness of collocations before the reading task.

Conditional sentences

Today I will be adapting 3 types of activities focusing on practicing conditional sentences to involve our language assistant –ChatGPT- to, in turn, engage and provide extra motivation for our students live in class.

Class debates 2

This is the second blog post on how we can get Gen.AI to create content for debates in the language classroom and then how we can use that material when we see our students later on and how the lesson could unfold. The potential is endless!

From reading to speaking practice

With the rise of Gen.AI, language learners now have countless ways to practice speaking and conversational skills. They could simply hold voice conversations with the sole intent of having someone to talk to in order to use the language they are gradually acquiring. These conversational exchanges could also take a more structured format. Today I am going to share an idea for our students to try in a quiet place for a few minutes, in combination with reading material.

Graded readers

Today I’d like to share a couple of games inspired by graded readers that can be played live in class with no prior material preparation. All we need to do is type a prompt into ChatGPT (or copy and paste it from a Word or online document). I can guarantee maximum student participation and engagement.

Dice-rolls grid

A dice-roll grid is a table with 6 rows and 6 columns and a total of 36 cells representing the outcome of a roll of two six-sided dice. The 6 rows and 6 columns correspond to each die’s roll. Dice-roll grids are often used in board games and speaking activities in the language classroom. Students roll a die twice to get the coordinates for the task. Gen. AI can create these grids in a split second, ready to be printed or copied and pasted into a digital document for later classroom use.