All articles by Jim Scrivener – Page 2

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Skills: bringing dialogues alive

You can find short dialogues in many course books. How can you exploit these scripts and get them to come alive?
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Skills: teaching English using anecdotes

Learners are often keen to hear stories about the teacher's life (even if they are not 100% true!). Here are some ideas for creating richer, more varied personal anecdotes.
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Grammar: around town: vocabulary, prepositions and directions

Teachers often make use of maps or real information about the town/district students are studying in when teaching prepositions, giving directions or town vocabulary. Here are a few ideas that might help add a spark to those lessons
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Skills: assessing speaking skills

Teachers are often asked to evaluate learner progress during courses, maybe by preparing progress tests. Teachers often feel unsure as to the best way to do this. Here are some ideas.
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Imaginative materials: teaching with authentic materials

Catalogues, shop brochures and leaflets are a type of authentic material often available free and in quantity. Here are some ideas for using these, whether printed in English or another language.
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Imaginative materials: teaching with simple props: bags

Teachers and learners carry books and equipment to their lessons in a variety of smart or scruffy bags. Here are some ways you could make use of these unassuming objects in class.
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Imaginative materials: board games for teaching English

Learners are often familiar with popular board games. Inventing new games (or adapting familiar games) can often produce materials that motivate students to talk and practise language.
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General: teaching idioms and collocations

Break away from predictable coursebook topics! How about basing a whole morning round a single word? These ideas would work for many items.
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Grammar: teaching comparatives in English

Coursebook lessons on comparative forms often ask students to make random comparisons between things for no obvious reason. Here are some typical real-life contexts when we are genuinely likely to compare.
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Imaginative materials: using computers to teach English

Mulitmedia presentation programs (e.g. Microsoft PowerPoint) are a good way of storing and showing images and text in unusual ways – as a high-tech slide show. Here are some teaching ideas, all suitable for classrooms with only a single computer.
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Grammar: teaching conditionals

Conditional structures that begin If + present tense offer lots of possibilities for interesting tasks, presentations or practice activities. Here are a few ideas.
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General: controlling lesson time

It can feel unsatisfactory to suddenly rush an activity at the end of a lesson. Here are some strategies for taking control of time and shortening over-long stages.
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General: teaching with coursebooks

If your relationship with your coursebook is going a little stale, here are a baker’s dozen of ideas to inspire and provoke you.
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General: holiday English courses

Many teachers do summer work teaching on short intensive courses. Such courses often have more of a holiday atmosphere than normal classes and teachers may look for jollier, summery activities.
Warmer/Filler
First Day: Name games

Here are some fun games to help your new class get to know each other and learn their classmates’ names.
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Debate: Is it possible to teach grammar?

Jim Scrivener has twenty-five years' teaching experience and if he's still unsure of how to teach grammar, is it possible at all?
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Imaginative materials: teaching with simple props: dice

Some of the most useful teaching props are the simplest. Most ELT teachers will have used dice at some time, perhaps when groups are playing a board game. Here are three ideas for more unusual uses of dice in class.
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Skills: dictation for teaching English

Traditional dictation - where the teacher reads a text aloud and the learners must write it down accurately - is often quite unpopular with learners. It can feel like an unfair test. Could we make it more enjoyable and useful?
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Skills: whole-class discussions in English

Have you ever tried a whole-class discussion and, instead of speaking to each other, the learners direct all comments to you? How can you get more student-student interaction in such activities?
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Imaginative materials: teaching resources: sound effects

Sound-effect CDs are an exciting teaching resource. These are recordings that have hardly any words on - but instead contain a sequence of noises such as crashes, bumps, bangs, whistles, screams etc. Here are some ideas for using sound-effects in the classroom.