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SPECIAL Supplement Explorations in ELT
� An encounter with an animal, ……during
the past five weeks.
Exploiting Your Students’ Experiences
Emergency
One of my private A1-level students is a
professional firefighter. The other week he
had to rush off because of some emergency
before his lesson was finished. So the
following week I, of course, wanted to know
more about it. Thanks to my curiosity we both
learned something: I found out that there are
actually all-female ambulance teams (driver
and nurse) and that in case strong arms are
needed, they just call the firefighters (that day
my student had to help carry an injured man
from the fourth floor down to the ambulance).
My student learnt the use of female/male in
connection with jobs and some more vocabulary
to do with emergencies. Plus, he had to
use past and present tenses in a meaningful
context.
Lift
A student of an A2-level group of six arrived
first and since I knew that she sometimes
came on foot and the weather was bad that
night, I asked her whether she had walked,
just to get her into speaking English. She
turned out to have been given a lift by her
husband, so I put ‘give a lift’, ‘get a lift’ on the
board and when her co-students arrived by
and by, they wondered about these strange
expressions and the first student could explain
and therefore repeat it several times. The
following weeks we kept repeating, just by
briefly asking how students had come here
and now, several months later, all of them
remember.
My advice: find out as much as you can about
your individual students in whatever possible
ways and supplement your coursebooks by
exploiting your knowledge. If necessary, start
by giving them all kinds of information about
yourself and your past week and they will start
doing the same.
Creating a Picture Book for Adult Students
... or: How to supplement a course book and
get students to revise writing and speaking.
A group of five adult beginner/false-beginner
students of various ages and gender were
willing to do some extra homework besides
working with Hueber English Elements Basic
10 ETAS Journal 25/1 Winter 2007
Course. As this very recommendable coursebook
for beginners gives instructions in
German as well as in English and includes
CDs and a home study section with answers
and, as I also encourage them to do whatever
bits of the units they can understand, what
they feel like doing and find time for as homework,
the students are very motivated to get
as much as possible done and, thus, make
faster progress. So in our 90-minute weekly
lessons, we can focus our efforts on all kinds
of speaking tasks linked to the vocabulary and
grammar of the various coursebook units.
In order to give them an extra incentive for
writing and speaking, I first make them create
a character in the following way:
1. I let them choose a postcard of a place
from my collection.
2. I did a drawing dictation where students
had to pass on their paper after each single
step: draw a circle – draw eyes – draw a nose
– draw a mouth, etc. (At the time my students
didn’t know any English body words yet, so I
just pointed to my own head.)
When we had finished I told them to take
one drawing and their postcard home and
create a character, which we then used in the
following lesson for speaking practice in pairs
and to which we kept adding, as you’ll see
below, while we were progressing through our
coursebook.
The group have meanwhile started working
with English Elements A1 and some students
are still happy to add anything linked somehow
to the Units of their coursebook, like
e.g., the recipe of their individual character’s
favourite dish, description of a wedding their
character attended, a trip in a luxury train, etc.
The ultimate goal is for the students to have
a picture book which contains a personalised
summary of topics, vocabulary and structures
they’ve been working with throughout the
course while, at the same time, providing
them with their own useful material for further
oral practice.
Character (Beginners’ Group)
1. Portrait character 1 (drawing on white
paper): name, age, job, family, home place,
likes/dislikes
2. Home (picture of house door): Where?
How many rooms?, etc.
3. Postcard from rich relative (hotel
description from brochure* + photo of a person):
the person in the photo is a rich
relative of character 1 and writes a postcard
to character 1 from the hotel. The person is on
holiday in this hotel.
4. Daily routine/weekly routine
a) What does character 1 do every day/
every week?
b) What does the rich relative (photo) do
every day on holiday?
5. Poor relative (drawing on yellow paper)
a) portrait (see 1 above)
b) home (see 2 above)
c) daily/weekly routine
6. Yesterday/last Monday/last weekend
a) character 1
b) rich relative
c) poor relative
7. Biographies
a) character 1
b) rich relative
c) poor relative
8. At work (find a picture of a workplace):
Where does he/she work? (describe the
place: there is/there are ...)
How does he/she get to work? (by car …, etc.)
What does he/she do every day/every week?
When does he/she work?
How long does he/she work?
a) character 1
b) rich relative
c) poor relative
9. Holidays (2 postcards)
Where did he/she go on holiday?
Who did he/she go on holiday with?
How did he/she go on holiday?
What did he/she do on holiday?
What did he/she see on holiday?
How long did he/she go on holiday for?
What was the weather like on holiday?
What was the hotel/holiday house/campsite
... like?
*Concerning the hotel description: each
student had one page from an authentic
brochure giving lots of information about
each hotel. As homework, the students first
highlighted all the words they actually could
understand. In our lesson they tried to tell
their partner as much as possible about the
hotel. We worked without dictionaries and
they realised that they could pick out all the
relevant information. From the work in their
coursebooks they had already learnt the
structure ‘there is/there are’ plus how to write
postcards.