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SPECIAL Supplement Explorations in ELT
Editorial
In the spirit of networking and encouraging
members to get involved by contributing to the
ETAS Journal Mini-Supplement, the Regional
and SIG Coordinators will be teaming up to
draw on the members under their respective
domains. This is the first offering – a joint
effort of the St. Gallen Region and the
Research SIG members.
The topic for this edition was Explorations in
ELT, and we advertised for adventurous,
creative authors to write articles on:
� Exploits in bringing classbooks to life
through supplementary tasks/games
� Ferreting out successful revision tasks
� Creating/adapting materials for the smaller
classroom
The following articles were drawn from the
authors’ personal research, and are based
on what they found worked for them in their
classes.
Starting off we have Caroline Bauer’s article
Revising Vocabulary Task, which offers not
only a new twist on getting students involved
in activating their vocabulary, but an easy and
valid filler for those often ten to fifteen minutes
extra time at the end of a lesson.
Following this theme, Caroline Grünig has
written Vocab Taboo, an activity which can be
used at any age and level, in small groups
or larger ones. The purpose is to revise
vocabulary the students have been working
on in their course material (e.g. end of unit,
book, article).
Next up, we have three different pieces
submitted by Elsbeth Mäder, Pairwork; in
Small Groups?, Exploiting Your Students’
Experiences and Creating a Picture Book for
Adult Students. Each one, in its own way,
offers practical ways to involve your students
in meaningful exchanges of information. The
last one is particularly intriguing as it gives
guidelines and examples of one of her classes
revising writing and speaking by using
language they had learned to invent to
describe characters.
John Raggett, in his piece Earning a Crust...,
begins by explaining why he doesn’t feel he
fits into the mold of a ‘proper teacher’. Yet he
is able to draw on his past managerial experi-
8 ETAS Journal 25/1 Winter 2007
ence to help professional executives achieve
their specific language-learning goals as well
as improve their career prospects.
Tracy Tobler offers a fresh genre of text in
Bringing Your Books To Life. She tells the tale
of a beautiful princess, I mean teacher, who
heard tiny voices groaning about having to
write, and how the heroine succeeded in
turning lifeless writing tasks into creative
ones.
Last but not least, JoAnn Salvisberg offers
practical guidelines to transform a simple
pairwork fluency task into an assessment
tool to see how well the students are able
to exchange meaningful information (e.g.
negotiations).
We hope that you, the ETAS members, will
find something interesting and useful to try out
in your lessons. Future ideas that members
have found useful can be submitted to the
Editor, Steve Landers, for the Member Mix
section of the Journal.
Vanessa Ostertag
Regional Coordinator – St. Gallen
JoAnn Salvisberg
Research SIG Coordinator
Revising Vocabulary Task
Whenever I see, towards the end of a lesson,
that my lesson plan is about to exhale its last
breath and my class and I will be left with ten
to fifteen idle minutes, I give my students the
following vocabulary revision activity to do.
Without any preparation I pick enough
recently learned words and phrases from
my past lesson notes, the wordlist or the
coursebook so that there are about three per
student. I dictate the words around the class
fairly quickly until each student has written
down their three. Students now have about
five to ten minutes to write short definitions of
the words (not including any elements of the
word or phrase itself, of course). So, for
example, if the word is ‘experience’, the
student can write, “When you know a lot about
something because you’ve done it many
times.” (pre-intermediate and up) or “You
know a lot. You did many things.” (elementary).
The definitions do not have to be sophisticated
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