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Issue 95 
November
2014
The Leading Practical Magazine For English Language Teachers Worldwide
Heads up, heads down, 
heads together 
Lindsay Clandfield
Swimming, not sinking 
Tim Thompson
Value your voice 
Ming E Wong
Flip, follow and feedback 
Laura Nanna
• practical methodology 
• fresh ideas & innovations 
• classroom resources 
• new technology 
• teacher development 
• tips & techniques 
• photocopiable materials 
• competitions & reviews
w w w . e t p r o f e s s i o n a l . c o m
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detection  bandwidth No more than 10% of the signalstrength is lost in the connection to the amplifier input.sig·nal2 /ˈsɪɡnəl/ verb (-ll-, US -l-) 1 [T] to be a sign thatsth exists or is likely to happen  INDICATE (2): ~ sth Theproposal for a new, looser union of sovereign states sig-nalled the end of the old USSR.  ~ that… The crisis sig-nalled that some important changes were taking place inEnglish political culture. 2 [T] to show sth such as a feel-ing or opinion through your actions or attitude: ~ sth Hisgovernment signalled a willingness to abandon the UK'snational veto.  ~ that… The company raised its pricessignificantly, signalling that it did not want a prolongedcostly price war. 3 [I, T] to make a movement or sound togive sb a message, an instruction or a warning: The othership signalled back.  ~ to sb He was waving his arm,signalling to his wife.  ~ (to) sb to do sth The emperorsignalled his chamberlain to show in another delegation. ~ sth The charge was signalled by trumpets.  ~ that… Asthe driver could not see the road behind him, it was theduty of the conductor to signal that the road was clear.sig·na·ture /ˈsɪɡnətʃə(r)/ noun 1 [C] your name as youusually write it, for example at the end of a letter: Twoweeks later, the newspaper delivered a petition to thePrime Minister containing 1.5 million signatures.  sb's ~The artist's signature appears on the picture. 2 [U] the actof signing sth: Under the terms of the Treaty, this agree-ment should have been concluded within 18 months ofsignature.  for ~ (by sb/sth) The Convention is open forsignature by countries which are not members of the Coun-cil of Europe.  ~ of sth Stalin achieved the signature of theJapanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact in April 1941. 3 [C] a par-ticular quality that makes sth different from other similarthings and makes it easy to recognize: sb's ~ Over a groupof films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent charac-teristics of style, which serve as his signature.  ~ (of sth)The vast assemblages of different molecules making up aliving organism can give a form of molecular signature ofthat life for the fossil record.  + noun Vollin also recallsLugosi's signature role, Count Dracula.
sig·nifi·cance  /sɪɡˈnɪfɪkəns/ noun [U,C] 1 theimportance of sth, especially when this has an effect onwhat happens in the future: ~ (of sth) (for sb/sth) Thesignificance of these findings has yet to be fully determined. This legislation has particular significance for olderworkers.  In the Berlin of the early 20th century, this formof architecture had acquired a special significance.  of…~ Two developments in the 1990s were of major signifi-cance.  INSIGNIFICANCE 2 ~ (of sth) the meaning ofsth: There are several scenes in the novel in which Nickponders the significance of a word.  Like so many scien-tific terms, it has taken on a more precise significance. 3(also staˌtistical sigˈnificance) (statistics) the extent to whicha result is different from what would be expected fromRANDOM variation or errors: However, no tests were madefor statistical significance, and no comparison with otherschools was included.  reach ~ Among 18–64 year-oldrespondents, however, this discrepancy did not reachsignificance.
d ADJECTIVE + SIGNIFICANCE great  major  considerable particular  special  real  relative  full  increasing increased The important contributions to astronomy byKuiper were also of great significance for the geologicalsciences.  practical  functional  symbolic  political social  historical  cultural  economic  moral  religious legal  biological  clinical This finding has practicalsignificance, in that empathy can be learned and appliedin real-life situations.
d VERB + SIGNIFICANCE have  understand  explain  discussIt must be established that the car owner understood thesignificance of a notice warning that parked cars would beclamped.  assume  acquire  attach  recognize, see,acknowledge  appreciate  consider, examine  assess,evaluate  determine  emphasize, highlight  test demonstrate, show, indicate  lose  give It is a disease
that will assume increasing significance as the populationages.
sig·nifi·cant  /sɪɡˈnɪfɪkənt/adj. 1 large or important enough tohave an effect or to be noticed:These voters could have a significanteffect on the outcome of the election. Although population ageing is aglobal phenomenon, there are sig-nificant regional differences.  ~ forsb/sth The contributions of Islamiccivilization proved to be as signifi-cant for the West.  it is ~ that… Itwas significant that its nearest rival only had a 5.5 per centshare of the market.  INSIGNIFICANT  thesaurus note atIMPORTANT 2 having a particular meaning: The lighting ofa candle may be symbolically significant if it denotes thebringing of light, that is, enlightenment.  it is ~ that… It isparticularly significant that Branagh selected Belfast forthe play's United Kingdom debut. 3 (statistics) having stat-istical significance  see also SIGNIFICANCE (3): After 3 years,results for breast cancer were no longer statistically signifi-cant.  Munafo et al. (2003) found significant associationsbetween personality and polymorphisms in three genes. INSIGNIFICANT
d SIGNIFICANT + NOUN number  amount  part  proportion way  effect, impact, influence  difference  change variation  increase  decrease, reduction improvement  role  factor  contribution  risk problem Shopping centres bring significant increases intraffic.  This graph highlights the significantimprovements in human development throughout muchof the world.  association, relationship, correlation interaction  predictor The percentage of managers andprofessionals in a neighbourhood is a significant predictorof educational outcomes for children (Crane, 2008).d ADVERB + SIGNIFICANT highly, extremely  particularly potentially Their choice of the word ‘degrade’ is highlysignificant.  especially  increasingly  equally politically  socially  historically  culturally economically  morally Three technological changes areespecially significant.  strongly  consistently statistically It turns out, however, that this relationship isstrongly significant (Figure 3.2).
sig·nifi·cant·ly  /sɪɡˈnɪfɪkəntli/ adv. 1 in a waythat is large or important enough to have an effect onsth or to be noticed: At that time, the sea level was signifi-cantly higher than it is today.  The party systems in Eng-land, Scotland and Wales differ significantly.  A smallchange that lowers the temperature below the meltingpoint significantly reduces water production. 2 in a waythat has a particular meaning: Significantly, however, theLaw Commission recommended that the offence should beregarded as a relatively minor one. 3 (statistics) in a waythat has statistical significance  see also SIGNIFICANCE (3):The sum of the two coefficients is positive, but it is notstatistically significantly different from zero.  The breedingpair density was significantly correlated with the numberof fledglings.
sig·nify  /ˈsɪɡnɪfaɪ/ verb (sig·ni·fies, sig·ni·fy·ing, sig-ni·fied, sig·ni·fied) (formal) 1 [T] to be a sign of sth MEAN1 (1): ~ sth Some saw Obama's election as signi-fying the end of racism in America.  ~ that… Consult-ation signifies that the other person or group is important.2 [T] to show or state sth such as a feeling or intention: ~sth The most widespread of gestures signifying an agree-ment is the handshake.  ~ that…the Imagination, 
and Invigorates the Soul Penguin 2010
Burghardt, G M and Sutton-Smith, B 
Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits 
MIT Press 2005
Csikszentmihalyi, M Creativity 
HarperCollins 1996
Fanselow, J Breaking Rules Longman 
1987
Johnstone, K Impro: Improvisation and 
the Theatre Methuen 1981
Johnstone, K Impro for Storytellers Faber 
and Faber 1999
Jung, C and Wilhelm, R The Secret of the 
Golden Flower Mariner Books 1962
Mourão, S ‘Taking play seriously in the 
pre-primary English classroom’ ELT 
Journal 68 (3) 2014
Hitomi Masuhara is 
Deputy Director of MA 
Applied Linguistics and 
MA TESOL in the 
University of Liverpool, 
UK, and Secretary of 
MATSDA (www.matsda.
org). While banging her 
head against brick walls 
in research, teaching, 
teacher and materials 
development, she has 
been fascinated by what 
creative brains can do in 
Japan, the UK, Singapore, 
Oman and many other 
parts of the world.
Alan Maley, after over 
50 years in the field, 
now has no job but 
occasionally has work. 
He lived and worked in 
ten countries, including 
China, India, Singapore 
and Thailand. He helps 
run a creative writing 
group for Asian teachers 
(http://flexiblelearning.
auckland.ac.nz/cw). 
His main occupation is 
pottering with intent.
Chaz Pugliese is a 
teacher and trainer 
working out of Paris. He 
has lived and worked in 
six countries. His first 
book, Being Creative, 
was published by DELTA 
in 2010. A second title, 
with Jane Arnold and 
Zoltán Dörnyei, will be 
published by Helbling.
When he is not working, 
he likes to indulge in long 
distance running and 
jazz guitar, though not 
both at the same time.
hitomi.masuhara@gmail.com
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
chazpugliese@gmail.com
Nachmanovitch, S Free Play: Improvisation in 
Life and Art Tarker/Putnam 1990
Narey, T ‘One thing leads to another: 
Evolution, play, and technology’ ERIC 
ED521381 2010
Read, C ‘Seven ways to promote creativity in 
the classroom’ IATEFL Voices 234 (3) 2013
Root-Bernstein, M and Root-Bernstein, R 
‘Imaginary world play in childhood and 
maturity and its impact on adult creativity’ 
Creativity Research Journal 18 (4) 2006
Spiro, J Creative Poetry Writing OUP 2004
Sternberg, R ‘Creativity as a decision’ 
American Psychologist 4 2002
Torrance, E P The Torrance Tests of Creative 
Thinking STS 1974
Wenner, M ‘The serious need for play’ 
Scientific American 28 2009
Wilson, K Drama and Improvisation OUP 
2008
Zhang, X and Head, K ‘Dealing with learner 
reticence in the speaking class’ ELT Journal 
64 (1) 2010
Conclusion 
by Brian Tomlinson
We hope that in our article we’ve 
stimulated thought about creativity, 
provided useful sources for further 
investigation and suggested practical 
ways of making the language class a more 
creative experience. Carol Read suggests 
seven ideas for promoting creativity in the 
classroom, including the teacher modelling 
brianjohntomlinson@googlemail.com
Brian Tomlinson has been 
a teacher, teacher trainer, 
curriculum developer, 
university academic and 
football coach in many 
different countries. He is 
now a TESOL Professor 
at Anaheim University, 
USA, and the President 
of MATSDA, the 
Materials Development 
Association. His 
numerous publications 
focus mainly on materials 
development.
creativity herself in the way she teaches. 
This, I think, is the most important point. 
I’ve found that just by giving a little thought 
to how I can be creative prior to each 
lesson, I can help my learners to be 
creative, too. The fact that it’s not that 
difficult or time-consuming for all of us to 
be a little more creative seems to be one 
of the points linking together all the 
contributions to our ‘collage’.
We hope you enjoy being creative.
Do you have ideas you’d like to share 
with colleagues around the world? 
Tips, techniques and activities; 
simple or sophisticated; well-tried 
or innovative; something that has 
worked well for you? All published 
contributions receive a prize! 
Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE
This is your magazine.
We want to hear from you!
TALKBACK!
Do you have something to say about 
an article in the current issue of ETp? 
This is your magazine and we would 
really like to hear from you. 
Write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp? We are 
always interested in new writers and 
fresh ideas. For guidelines and advice, 
write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
It really worked 
for me!
Did you get inspired by something 
you read in ETp? Did you do 
something similiar with your students? 
Did it really work in practice?
Do share it with us ...
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
English TEaching professional
Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd,
Rayford House, School Road,
Hove BN3 5HX, UK
Fax: +44 (0)1273 227308
Email: admin@pavpub.com
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18 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
I N T H E C L A S S R O O M
Keep 
 moving 
 on!
Keep 
 moving 
 on! 22
G
iven the likelihood that your 
students often talk to people 
who have a lower level of 
English than they do, there 
is much to be said for even intermediate-
level students getting some practice in 
simplifying their language in order to 
accommodate the people they are 
speaking to. However, even in the 
‘English as a lingua franca’ world in 
which we live, I still think our main 
emphasis should be on persuading our 
students to move quickly on from 
language they know well in order to try 
out something new, especially while they 
are in the perfect place in which to do so 
– our classrooms. For one thing, even 
students who usually communicate with 
other non-native speakers often say that 
interacting with native speakers is their 
main challenge – and trying to use the 
kinds of ‘tricky’ language that native 
speakers do is the best way of 
remembering it and making sure you 
really understand it. The same is also 
true for understanding authentic 
material such as newspaper articles and 
radio programmes produced by and for 
native speakers, which still make up a 
majority of the English materials that a 
student is likely to come across. 
More sophisticated language is also 
vital for exams like Cambridge English 
Advanced and the higher grades in 
IELTS. Using more complex language is 
a good way of making up the marks 
that students will inevitably lose by 
making errors. Acquiring a set of 
impressively advanced-sounding phrases 
is a lot easier than it is to stop making 
these errors, even when the language 
that the students habitually use is 
relatively simple. Studying more 
advanced language is also a lot more 
motivating than trying to eliminate all 
mistakes with more basic words and 
phrases; and, in fact, a philosophy of 
always moving upwards and onwards is 
the best way of retaining motivation to 
learn English. 
As freer communication in the 
classroom will usually involve the 
opposite skill of simplifying language to 
match the person who is listening, if you 
want your students to concentrate on 
boosting the level of language that they 
use, you’ll probably need some more 
controlled speaking games. My article in 
Issue 94 of ETp provided some general 
techniques for getting students to be 
more ambitious and experimental with 
their language use in class, finishing with 
a card game in which the students try to 
use phrases with key words like sorry 
and afraid as they take part in a 
communicative activity such as a roleplay.
Alex Case has more 
games to encourage 
more ambitious use of 
functional language.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 19
alexcase@hotmail.com 
Alex Case teaches in 
Japan and blogs at 
http://tefltastic.
wordpress.com. You 
can find links to over 
400 articles, 1,500 
worksheets and 1,500 
blogposts on all things 
TEFL by him at http://
tefltastic.wordpress.
com/publications/.
Functional language: 
card game
The game that I described in Issue 94 
can also be played with cards that have 
descriptions of the things that you want 
the students to do during the 
communication, such as the names of 
functions, rather than the words and 
phrases they must use. For example, to 
practise turn-taking, you could use cards 
with one of these functions on each one:
 Interrupting
 Refusing interruption
 Taking the turn back / Getting back 
on track
 Offering others the chance to speak
 Keeping others speaking
 Signalling the end of your turn
 Turning down the chance to speak
 Ending your interruption
The full set would contain three or four 
cards with each function. As with the 
game with key words on the cards (see 
Issue 94), the students work in small 
groups and all the cards are dealt out. 
The students look at their own cards, 
but don’t show them to the other 
players. During a speaking activity that 
you assign, such as a roleplay 
teleconference, the students must 
successfully do the thing that is written 
on one of their cards, using a phrase 
that no one else has said during the 
game, in order to be able to discard that 
card. The person with the fewest cards 
left in their hand when the game finishes 
is the winner. The students can then 
work together to brainstorm further 
suitable phrases for each function (both 
those that they used during the game 
and others that they can think of). 
This game can also be used for many 
other kinds of language. For example, 
you could have cards saying ‘Opening 
greeting’, ‘Opening line’, ‘Friendly 
language’, ‘Explaining reasons’, ‘Closing 
line’ and ‘Closing greeting’ for emailing 
(roleplaying by saying what they would 
write in response to each other). 
Functional language: 
board game
I have recently found that this game 
works even better with a board to move 
round than it does with cards to discard. 
Each student talks about a topic written 
in the square that their counter lands on, 
perhaps in response to a question on the 
topic from someone else in their group. 
While they are speaking, they try to use 
phrases which haven’t been said so far 
and which fulfil the functions written in 
the middle of the board. The other 
students act as monitors, listening out for 
new phrases which fulfil those functions 
and putting a tick if they hear one, 
awarding one point for each when the 
person stops speaking. That person can 
then move that many squares forward on 
the board. The person who is furthest 
round the board when the teacher stops 
the game wins. The students can then 
brainstorm more good high-level phrases 
for those functions, including things they 
didn’t say in the game.
There is a version of this game, 
suitable for the Cambridge English: First 
speaking exam, on page 20. 
Meeting criteria: 
board game
As well as monitoring each other for 
appropriate and original language, as in 
the game above, students can listen out 
for how well their partners match other 
criteria for successful communication, 
such as:
 successfully doing the thing that they 
are asked to
 giving a good impression
 being polite
 being friendly
 starting well
 ending well
 using language that has been studied 
during the course
 avoiding silence (speaking fluently, 
filling silence, etc)
This can easily be turned into a board 
game similar to that above by having a 
game board with a series of challenges, 
one in each square. When a player lands 
on a square and performs a challenge 
(perhaps a roleplay), the other students 
in the group monitor and tick any of the 
criteria in the list above that they think 
have been achieved. That player can 
then move forward a number of squares, 
according to how many ticks they got. 
There is a version of this game to 
review common business skills and 
situations on page 21. As each situation 
is a roleplay, it is best if the students 
work in groups of at least three people, 
with the people who aren’t speaking 
working as the monitors, ticking the 
criteria and giving points.
Monitoring for more 
ambitious language
The idea of having a monitor in each 
group can also be used during the card 
games described in this and my last 
article. The simplest variation is to have 
one person, who is not taking an active 
part in the game, giving cards back to 
people if they try to discard them 
without successfully doing the thing 
written on them, or if they use phrases 
that other players have used before. A 
bigger change involves the monitor 
holding all the cards (rather than dealing 
them out to the other players), and giving 
cards to people as they successfully 
perform the function or use the words 
and phrases on them, checking that 
these haven’t already been used in the 
game. In this case, the person with most 
cards at the end of the game wins. 
Having monitors can also be very 
useful even when the activity doesn’t 
have a game element. For example, one 
person can sit out during speaking 
activities such as roleplays, monitoring 
for a list of criteria that they have been 
given, such as ‘smoothly starting and 
ending the conversation’, ‘speaking 
about half the time each’ or ‘politely 
interrupting’. After the activity has 
finished, the monitor gives feedback and 
suggestions on how the participants 
could improve next time those things 
that weren’t so strong. The participants 
can add their own ideas if they like. 
They can then try the same activity 
again. If you want to add more of a 
game element, the monitor can also 
declare a ‘winner’ of each exchange, 
based on the criteria that they have been 
given, with the prize, perhaps, being able 
to sit out the next round and take the 
monitor role. Pa
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20 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Functional language 
board game
(Suitable for students preparing 
for the Cambridge English: First exam)
would (really) like
work / job
who … with
What sort of …?
Where do you like …?
What do you like (most) about …?
How much time do you spend …?
transport / travel
brothers / sisters
Tell us about … recently.
holidays
interested in / hobbies
in the future / next
How would you describe …?
Has … changed over the years?
Do you spend a lot of time …?
Tell us about the last time you …
hometown
foreign languages
the area where you live
Do / Would you prefer …?
Would you say that …?
enjoy
eating out
party
favourite / like
exercise / fitness / health
Instructions 
Place your counters on START. Someone in your 
group will ask you a question about the topic or 
using the words in the square you are on. 
You move around the board by using phrases with 
the functions listed below while you answer. You 
get one point for each correct phrase that hasn’t 
been used by anyone before (no points for 
repeating phrases someone has already said). 
1 Checking what the question means
2 Commenting on the (possible) mismatch 
between the question and the answer
3 Commenting on the question
4 Dealing with difficult questions / 
Filling silence while thinking
5 Vague language / Saying you aren’t sure 
(eg can’t remember exactly)
6 Changing your mind / Correcting wrong 
information
7 Explaining things the questioner might not 
know / understand (eg things specific to 
your country)
8 Giving reasons
9 Using time expressions (past, present or 
future)
10 Making comparisons with others in your 
group / Mentioning things others have said
Your partners will award one tick for each new 
phrase you use. When you finish answering, you 
can move one square forward for every tick.
After you finish the game, brainstorm useful 
language for doing each of the things above. 
You will get one point for each correct expression 
which no one else thought of.
START sport
ambitions
art / media
at themoment
at the weekend / last weekend
Do you usually …?
technology / internet
close to
cinema / films / TV
Tell us something about …
concerts / music
cooking / food and drink
Do you have …?
Do you have a favourite …?
Do you find it easy to …?
friends
free time / leisure
Do you think you will …?
the place where you are living
home / at home
Is there anything …?
the most interesting thing
learn new things / study
parents
Does anyone you know …?
books / reading
Do you … every day?
your perfect …
get here today
How often …?
shopping
plans
take after
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 21
Meeting criteria 
board game
(Based on different kinds of business communication)
Instructions
Put one counter on the START square for each 
player (eg different coins). You move around the 
board by doing the things listed below while taking 
part in a roleplay, following the instructions in the 
square you are on.
You get one point for each of these things:
1 Successfully doing the thing on the square 
2 Being polite
3 Starting well/smoothly/in the proper way
4 Ending well/ smoothly/ in the proper way
5 Using language you studied during your 
course
6 Using language no one else has used during 
this game
7 Avoiding silence (speaking fluently, filling all 
silence, thinking aloud, not pausing too 
much, etc)
The person who lands on the square should do the 
thing written there, with someone else taking the 
other role (including saying what they would write in 
email replies and/or emails which should be replied 
to). Only the person on the square gets points, 
and then moves one square for each point that their 
partners give them.
The person who has gone furthest around the board 
when the teacher stops the game is the winner.
Refuse permission 
to do something 
face-to-face
Ask for permission 
to do something 
by email
Apologise 
for something 
face-to-face
Cancel 
something 
by email
Give bad news 
on the phone 
Give directions on 
how to get somewhere 
on the phone
Give instructions 
on how to do something 
face-to-face
Email more than 
one person 
Respond 
to a request 
on the phone
Make a request 
by email 
Make a request 
face-to-face 
Change an 
arrangement 
on the phone
Check the progress 
of something 
on the phone
Make 
an arrangement 
face-to-face
Quit 
your job 
face-to-face
Give information 
on the phone
Explain a new 
rule to everyone 
by email
Ask for 
information 
by email
START 
Meet someone for the 
first time face-to-face
Meet someone 
again face-to-face 
Make first contact 
with someone 
by phone
Make first contact 
with someone 
by email
Eat out 
with a 
foreign guest
Complain 
about something 
face-to-face
Respond 
to a complaint 
by telephone
Respond 
to a complaint 
by email
Invite someone 
to do something 
by email
Respond 
to an invitation 
by phone
Reject 
an invitation 
face-to-face
Ask for 
information 
face-to-face
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22 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Effective
class design
Effective
class design
T
he biggest concern of the young 
learner teachers I talk to in my 
training sessions and workshops 
is not normally a lack of 
activities but, rather, how to get the 
activities they do choose to work well. 
I mentioned the idea of micromechanics 
for teaching teens in ETp Issue 79. Here, 
I shall revisit it with regard to task design 
for young and very young learners, 
ranging from five to ten years. 
Micromechanics
Micromechanics is a branch of science 
and engineering. It involves studying the 
behaviour (the flexibility or breaking 
point) of a composite material by 
examining its component parts. For 
teaching, I use the idea as an analogy. 
Our composite material is whatever 
classroom activity is in progress, and its 
component parts are the individual 
behaviour of each child and whatever 
influences that behaviour: the teacher’s 
directions, staging and interventions as 
well as the learners’ understandings, 
mindsets, relationships, intentions and 
impulses. 
Real micromechanics researchers 
use electron microscopes to examine 
their materials. I recommend that we 
use the focus question: What is each 
child doing at each moment of the activity? 
the first place? Task design and structure 
is the means through which we fine-tune 
and balance these elements. 
An anecdote may help illustrate my 
understanding of task design:
Going down to our village square 
recently, I saw that a circuit of straw 
bales had been laid down for a coming 
festival. The bales were later to be 
covered in plastic and the circuit filled 
with sand for go-karting, but in this 
rudimentary and unmonitored phase 
they were still attracting attention. 
Chris Roland uses micromechanics to tighten up 
the nuts and bolts of activities.
Freeze-framing the moment like this 
helps us to figure out what is, was or 
will be going on at an individual level, 
and from there to a collective level.
Task design
Let us simplify YL activities into three 
basic elements: language content, order 
(plus control) and fun. These translate 
respectively into these teacher concerns: 
What will the students learn? How do I 
keep it going? Why will they want to do it in 
This straw bale circuit transformed previously open space 
into something much more interesting.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 23
While I drank my coffee, a little girl on a 
bicycle rode round the track again and 
again and again, and when she was too 
tired to keep pedalling, she got off and 
continued to push her bike round it.
Now if somebody had said to her 
‘Have a cycle. You’ve got the whole square. 
You can go where you want’, she never 
would have ridden till she was ready to 
drop. Inside the track, she had less space 
and fewer options, yet she enjoyed it 
more. The containment and guidance 
that the bales provided gave her 
pedalling a sense of depth or journey 
and made it more convincing. Structure 
at the same time restricts, but provides 
this sense of purpose and direction.
This is one way to think about task 
design: as constructing a clear route that 
marks out direction for our students. 
When they ask What do we have to do? it 
is a call for their teacher to use the very 
powerful tool of adult imagination and 
foresight to construct a course for them.
We find task design in several places. 
It is how we initially conceive of an 
activity. It is how we set things up in 
terms of staging, in terms of our 
instructions, the roles we assign (of 
teams, monitors, captains, helpers and 
turns) and the supporting frames of 
reference we provide as language on 
the board. It is also direction during an 
activity to both individuals and the 
whole class and, finally, it is our materials 
themselves, including how self-
explanatory and logical our paper-based 
exercises are and whether an exercise 
contains linguistic support or non-
linguistic clues to help the children solve 
the puzzle that the exercise has posed. 
Let me demonstrate various aspects 
of task design, using as an example two 
activities that have the potential to 
result in loss of control or of language 
focus. I have chosen more challenging 
activities, from a classroom management 
perspective, to highlight the importance 
of design in getting things to work. 
1 Sticky sentences
The first activity involves the use of 
sticky grabber toys, being used in the 
photo by a group of five and six year 
olds. The students use their sticky toys 
to grab two halves of a sentence. The 
sentences use everyday language, such 
as Who’s the//monitor today? or Can I 
borrow//some scissors, please? Thereis 
also colour-coded support, as the two 
parts of each sentence are on card of 
the same colour.
One option is to have one pair of 
students at a time grab designated 
sentence halves and then reconstruct 
them on the board using BluTac. 
Deciding which part of the sentence 
goes first encourages meaningful 
engagement with the language itself.
Bottlenecking
However, with only a couple of students 
up at the front at a time, we run into a 
classic tension which arises whenever 
activity on the part of the one or the 
few requires relative inactivity on the 
part of the many. We encounter this 
tension when the students have to sit 
quietly and listen to the teacher, for 
example. A similar imbalance occurs 
here when the demand for action felt 
by most of the class depends on the 
completion of the action by just one or 
two students. I call this ‘bottlenecking’. 
The Venus flytrap
Younger children struggle to sit as mere 
spectators, waiting their turn, while 
others do something really cool. Their 
impatience also increases pressure on 
the actors. Students start to come out 
of their chairs, advancing slowly, if 
unchecked, towards the locus of action 
until they surround the table, and the 
children whose turn it actually is get 
swallowed up, along with whatever it 
was they were doing; the task in 
progress is derailed by the little helping 
hands of their classmates.
To avoid the ‘Venus flytrap’ 
phenomenon just described, we might 
set the whole class up with workbook 
exercises as the main activity and have 
the grabber game as a secondary task 
going on at the same time. This does, 
however, entail teachers splitting their 
attention between requests for help with 
the exercises and overseeing the game.
Free for all
Another option is to have the whole 
class playing at once. Each child tries to 
grab one matching pair of cards. Whilst 
answering the issue of bottlenecking, 
the downside is reduced language 
engagement as each child collects only 
one sentence and can rely on the 
colour coding, thereby leapfrogging the 
linguistic content.
Again, we can compensate in various 
ways. We can have the sentences 
written on the board with a student’s 
name next to each, but not the colour, 
Performing this task 
together cuts out the 
pressure of waiting, but 
reduces the number of 
sentences each student 
engages with.
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24 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Effective
class design
chris.roland@gmail.com
Chris Roland is based at 
ELI in Seville, Spain, where 
he teaches and trains. 
He also tutors on Trinity 
Certificate and Diploma 
courses for Active 
Language, Cádiz, and 
OxfordTEFL, Barcelona. 
He is particularly 
interested in the area 
of task micromechanics, 
rules, the workings of 
fun and the way that 
teachers and students 
talk to each other. 
so they have to read and then find their 
sentence. We can also ask the children 
to collect their two cards and sit back 
down. Afterwards, each reads out their 
sentence in turn and we time them to 
see how long it takes them as a class. 
Another way to increase interaction 
with the English is to remove the colour 
coding and have everything on white 
card. The students identify their 
sentences on the board, and then have 
to locate the correct sentence halves 
on the table more carefully before 
launching their grabbers. These small 
considerations and tweaking of 
microsettings are the very stuff of 
increasingly effective task design. 
2 Octopus hurling
This second activity is one I have used 
extensively with seven and eight year 
olds. Inspired by anecdotes of early 
twentieth-century progressive educators 
in Catalonia, it involves interaction 
between language and symbols projected 
onto the board using PowerPoint and 
students with projectiles standing some 
way back. In response to a sentence at 
the top of each slide, such as She’s got 
fair hair or He’s got dark curly hair, the 
students throw a sticky octopus at the 
correct picture. 
The idea of throwing things in class 
may not sit well, intuitively, at first. The 
students certainly enjoy it, though, and 
in terms of demonstrating their 
understanding of sentences, it is a valid 
alternative to matching, ticking or putting 
up hands and answering questions. If 
they are going to be throwing, however, 
students do need clear guidance. 
To avoid bottlenecking pressure or 
Venus flytrap crowding, we return to 
our focus question: What is each child 
doing at each moment of the activity? The 
students belong to one of two teams 
(mirrored in the colour of the 
projectiles – here, orange and green 
sticky octopuses) and the answer to 
our focus question is that, most of the 
time, they will be observing how many 
of their teammate’s three throws hit the 
correct picture and recording that on 
their individual copy of the team’s score 
sheet. This means there is always some 
language to pay attention to and some 
reason for watching the action. 
With chairs arranged against the 
walls, the nearest student to the board 
on each side of the class stands up to 
throw, while the others move round by 
one seat, taking their score sheets with 
them. After throwing, each player joins 
students needing to distinguish between 
she, he and even it, characteristics of 
appearance, clothes, position or verbs. 
To increase processing, the throwers 
have to read out the sentence together 
first (they cannot throw until the 
teacher counts them in). What happens, 
though, if a student does not 
understand the sentence? To help here, 
we introduce an additional microsetting. 
As they prepare to throw, the players 
may turn to the next player on their 
team and ask Can you help me? That 
team member can then come out of 
their seat and explain, using L1 if 
necessary. Conversely, if their 
teammates are trying to lend unneeded 
support, we can arm the players with an 
emphatic I know! 
Introducing these scripts is 
consistent with the philosophy that our 
English classes are places where 
students interact in English, they don’t 
just have English as an object under 
study. 
With five different classes over the 
last two years, I have not yet had a 
student throw anything at a classmate, 
and I have run the activity for over 30 
minutes without it breaking down – 
with the students, just like the little girl 
on the bicycle, going round and round 
and round. 
As teachers, there are often things we 
might like to do but don’t dare. Thinking 
about where we can tighten up task 
design and structure on a nuts-and-
bolts level can make everyday activities 
more effective, and help take us to new 
places when it comes to getting more 
adventurous ones to work. 
Each pair of students gets three throws at the 
same slide, then the next pair gets a different 
sentence and images.
the back of their team’s seated queue. 
This rotation avoids a standing queue, 
which can become disorderly, and also 
means that even when it is not a child’s 
turn, there is still constant movement. 
The students soon realise that the slicker 
the rotation, the sooner and more often 
they get to have another throw. 
Another rule to regulate the action 
is that the teacher, not the students, 
re-collects the projectiles. Therefore, 
there is no possibility of a student holding 
onto their octopus and refusing to hand 
it over at the end of their throws. 
An activity like this can be used to 
practise a range of language, with the 
Effective
class design
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 25
Over 
 the 
 wall ...
Alan Maley 
goes back to nature.
T
he three books I discuss here are 
all about some aspect of the 
power of landscape to affect the 
way we are. Most of us live in 
towns nowadays, far from the natural 
world, and are assailed by such a barrage 
of visual andauditory stimuli that we have 
almost lost the capacity to look at 
anything really carefully – to notice it and 
observe it. If nothing else, these books 
may stir an interest in the world around 
us, and make us think about our place in 
it. They may also provide some ideas for 
incorporating our relationship with nature 
into our teaching.
of its past history: ‘The cultural humus of 
60 generations or more lies upon it. But 
most of England is 1,000 years old, and in 
a walk of a few miles one can touch every 
century in that long stretch of time.’
These things are there for us to see, if 
only we can learn to read the signs left by 
history on the landscape. In fact, the 
landscapes we see are a compound of 
geology, topography, soil-types, 
vegetation and the long history of human 
intervention. Hoskins takes us through 
this palimpsest, stripping it back, layer by 
layer, starting with the most ancient signs 
of habitation in the Iron Age and Bronze 
Age, still visible in stone walls, burial 
mounds, earthen forts, stone megaliths 
like Stonehenge, and Celtic field patterns. 
He moves on to the imprint left by the 
Romans, in the form of their roads, canals 
and dykes, like the Foss Dyke, and 
certain field patterns around former 
Roman villas. The Saxon occupation of 
Britain (450–1066) sees the development 
of the large open-field systems with their 
strip farming – still visible in some areas 
as patterns of ridge and furrow on the 
pastures – the settlement of villages 
following forest clearance and the earliest 
churches and bridges. The villages of the 
Scandinavian invasions are easily 
discernable from Saxon settlements by 
place names ending in -by, -wick and 
-thwaite. Following the Norman Conquest 
in 1066, the colonisation of the forests 
continued apace; marshland was 
reclaimed; watermills appeared on the 
rivers; new bridges, churches and 
cathedrals like Durham and Canterbury 
were built; the great monastic foundations 
controlled large tracts of the country, 
leaving their mark in the stone walls that 
march across the moors of the north of 
England; and towns like Norwich and 
Exeter began to thrive. The Black Death, 
which decimated the population, left in its 
wake hundreds of deserted villages, still 
traceable from the patterns they have left 
on the ground. Yet the 14th and 15th 
centuries were also a great period of 
castle building, and many churches and 
bridges date from this time. During the 
period from the Tudors to the Georgians, 
much of the remaining forest cover was 
cleared and many of the open fields 
started to be enclosed by the hedges 
which are now so much a part of the 
English landscape. Rich landowners 
began to build magnificent country 
houses, like Audley End in Essex, and 
these were often surrounded by parks 
and specially landscaped gardens. The 
final great transformation of the 
landscape was brought about by the 
The Making of the 
English Landscape
This book was first published in 1955 and 
was out of print for a time, so this 
handsome re-issue as part of a series of 
nature classics is most welcome. William 
George Hoskins was the father of modern 
landscape history. He makes us realise 
that what we see as we look at a 
landscape is composed of the many layers 
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26 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Gooley, T How to Connect with Nature 
(The School of Life series) Macmillan 2014
Hoskins, W G The Making of the English 
Landscape Little Toller Books 2013
Macfarlane, R The Old Ways: A Journey 
on Foot Hamish Hamilton 2012
yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
Alan Maley has worked in 
the area of ELT for over 
40 years in Yugoslavia, 
Ghana, Italy, France, 
China, India, the UK, 
Singapore and Thailand. 
Since 2003 he has been a 
freelance writer and 
consultant. He has 
published over 30 books 
and numerous articles, 
and was, until recently, 
Series Editor of the 
Oxford Resource Books 
for Teachers.
Over 
 the 
 wall ...
Parliamentary Enclosures of the 19th 
century, in which virtually all the open 
fields disappeared, to be replaced by 
smaller, hedged fields. The Industrial 
Revolution brought its own radical 
transformation to the landscape in the 
form of canals, turnpike roads and, above 
all, the railways. Millions of tons of earth 
were shifted to construct the tunnels, 
cuttings and viaducts, and coal mining, 
steel smelting, chemicals, pottery and 
glass disfigured the landscape with tips 
and the blight of spreading towns and 
their slums. 
So, next time you go to the countryside, 
in the UK or elsewhere, maybe you will 
see more than before. And there are some 
wonderful projects that you can do with 
students on local landscape history.
The Old Ways: A Journey 
on Foot
This is the third of Robert Macfarlane’s 
nature books. In it, he celebrates the 
complex relationship between the 
landscape and those who walk through it. 
He speaks of walking as ‘a reconnoitre 
inwards’ and ‘the subtle ways in which we 
are shaped by the landscapes through 
which we move’. In other words, we do 
not walk just to get somewhere, but to 
facilitate reflection, ‘walking as enabling 
sight and thought … paths as offering not 
only means of traversing space but also 
ways of feeling, being and knowing’. So 
this is a book both about the landscapes 
he encounters through his feet and also 
about a kind of metaphysical walking – an 
inward journey.
It is divided into four main parts: 
Tracking (England), Following (Scotland), 
Roaming (Abroad), Homing (England). The 
foreign walks are highly evocative of place: 
old pathways through the Left Bank in 
Palestine, the high forests of the Sierra de 
Guadarrama in Spain, the sacred mountain 
Minya Konka in the Himalayas. But the 
essence of the book is the journeys within 
Britain, with the detailed descriptions of 
walks in different kinds of landscape – 
chalk, granite, limestone, etc – all 
described in a lyrical style which brings 
them alive. For example:
‘In a canopy of long, thin beech wood, 
rooks yabbered and called, tossed up into 
the air and then settled back as if the 
wood itself were boiling.’ 
‘Rain-filled hoof marks and footprints 
flashed gold, coined by the sun.’
‘… a tractor ploughing a distant field to 
corduroy.’
‘… a big field mushroom lying upside 
down on its cap, its black gills like the 
charred pages of a book.’
One of the most hauntingly beautiful 
descriptions is of the Broomway, which 
crosses the mudflats at low tide in Essex, 
where sky and land and mist merge into a 
single silvery substance. This is writing at 
its best.
But the chapters also weave a 
discursive pattern of interaction between 
Macfarlane, the landscapes he traverses 
with their plant, animal and bird life 
brilliantly described, the many strong 
personalities he encounters on the way, 
the stories and the history associated with 
the landscapes, and the literary figures 
and travel writers who have also passed 
there. In particular, there is a thread of 
association with the poet Edward Thomas, 
who was killed in 1917 at the Battle of 
Arras and was one of the best English 
nature poets of the 20th century.
Macfarlane ends by walking alongside 
prehistoric footprints fossilised on the 
shoreline at Formby in Lancashire: ‘I stop 
by the last footprint, 5,000 years after 
setting out, my track ceasing where his 
does. I look back along the track-line to 
my south. The light tilts again and 
suddenly the water-filled footprints are 
mirrors reflecting the sky, the shuddering 
clouds and whoever looks into them.’
How to Connect with 
Nature
Tristran Gooley’s book is a practical guide 
for the layperson, to help them re-connect 
with the natural world. It is one of the 
titles in a new series of small, compact, 
practical handbooks produced by The 
School of Life. Gooley’s aim is to 
re-awaken awareness of the world around 
us: the way time is structured, the way we 
read the sky, the natureof water … . 
Chapter 2, The Senses, has a rich array of 
exercises for developing sensitivity to 
what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch. 
Many of these exercises could usefully be 
adapted for language teaching. He also 
deals with landscape types and their 
typical vegetation. There is a chapter on 
Hidden Calendars – all the natural signs 
available for reading the time of year. 
Again, much of this would also form good 
language teaching input, suitably 
adapted. In the penultimate chapter, he 
details the benefits from greater contact 
with nature and awareness of it. In 
particular, he mentions: ‘Time spent in 
nature has been shown to improve 
self-esteem and conflict-resolution ... one 
hour spent in nature can improve memory 
and attention span by 20 percent. Nature 
can calm us, it can help us focus and for 
many it works as an anti-depressant.’ 
So what are we all waiting for? 
Writing for ETp
Would you like to write for ETp? We are 
always interested in new writers and 
fresh ideas. For guidelines and advice, 
write to us or email:
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
It really worked 
for me!
Did you get inspired by something 
you read in ETp? Did you do 
something similiar with your students? 
Did it really work in practice?
Do share it with us ...
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Saturday 20 June 2015
Holiday Inn, Brighton
In conjunction withA one-day conference packed full 
of practical ideas to improve your 
teaching practice 
Delegates at ETp Live! in 2014 said…
“The speakers were inspirational and varied – 
couldn’t have asked for better.”
“I felt engaged and challenged.”
“interesting, thought provoking sessions”
ETp Live! brings the practical approach of English 
Teaching professional magazine to this one-day event, 
focusing on the practical aspects of English language 
teaching, with:
 : seminars
 : workshops
 : discussions
 : opportunities to network.
For more details and to see the programme, visit the 
website today. www.etprofessional.com/etp-live
How to book:
w: www.etprofessional.com/etp-live
t: 01273 434 943
e: info@etprofessional.com
Book now for just £49.00*
*+VAT
Register today 
for a special 
early bird offer 
– just £49.00*
Attending this counts towards your 
continuing professional development
is back
ETP 2015 Delegates 1–4c.indd 1 06/10/2014 17:17
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Saturday 20 June 2015
Holiday Inn, Brighton
In conjunction withA one-day conference packed full 
of practical ideas to improve your 
teaching practice 
Delegates at ETp Live! in 2014 said…
“The speakers were inspirational and varied – 
couldn’t have asked for better.”
“I felt engaged and challenged.”
“interesting, thought provoking sessions”
ETp Live! brings the practical approach of English 
Teaching professional magazine to this one-day event, 
focusing on the practical aspects of English language 
teaching, with:
 : seminars
 : workshops
 : discussions
 : opportunities to network.
For more details and to see the programme, visit the 
website today. www.etprofessional.com/etp-live
How to book:
w: www.etprofessional.com/etp-live
t: 01273 434 943
e: info@etprofessional.com
Book now for just £49.00*
*+VAT
Register today 
for a special 
early bird offer 
– just £49.00*
Attending this counts towards your 
continuing professional development
is back
ETP 2015 Delegates 1–4c.indd 1 06/10/2014 17:17
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 29
Technology for 
pronunciation
P R O N U N C I A T I O N
Technology for 
pronunciation
T
here is no escaping the 
presence of technology in ELT 
today. However, despite the 
scientific foundations of 
pronunciation, programs for computers 
and apps for mobile devices are 
currently a relatively small part of what 
is on offer for language teaching, with 
grammar and vocabulary dominating 
here, just as in the traditional classroom. 
Why this should be is hard to say, but it 
could be to do with the fact that 
learning pronunciation is very different 
from learning grammar or vocabulary.
Learning to pronounce
The critical thing about learning second 
language pronunciation is that it is more 
a process of skills acquisition than of 
cognitive knowledge – pronunciation is 
what you can do, not what you know. 
Because of this skills component, 
pronunciation teaching can learn a lot 
from the skills acquisition processes 
found in sports or in playing a musical 
instrument. At its simplest, skills 
acquisition can be seen as a three-stage 
process, with a cognitive stage being 
followed by associative and autonomous 
stages.
When I was first learning Spanish, 
for example, the simple /r/ was a source 
of great difficulty to me. In an attempt 
to help me, a friend explained that I had 
to imitate the American way of 
producing the t in water. In this first 
stage, the cognitive stage, I was receiving 
explicit instructions of how to produce 
the target feature, together with a model 
to aim at. Production in this first stage is 
conscious, deliberate, slow and requires 
the learner’s full attention. We’ve all 
witnessed this in class!
In the associative stage, learners 
slowly convert what they know into what 
they can do. At this intermediary stage, 
they need to be offered opportunities for 
abundant repetition of the target feature 
within a narrow context. Games and 
tongue twisters are two activity types 
that can provide this abundant 
repetition.
In the autonomous stage, the 
production of the target feature has to 
become more and more automated and 
rapid. With pronunciation, much more 
than with grammar and vocabulary, 
production has to come about without 
speakers having to think consciously 
about what’s happening inside their 
mouths. 
Choosing apps and 
programs
If skills are learnt by a three-stage 
acquisition process, to what extent does 
technology come to the learner’s aid? In 
order to answer this question, and to be 
able to decide for ourselves the real value 
of a new program or app, we need to 
think about a number of different issues.
 Suitability, choice and sequence 
Not all learners have the same 
pronunciation problems, especially 
when they don’t share the same first 
language. Programs and apps need to 
adapt to each learner – what is vital for 
a French speaker of English could be 
irrelevant to a Chinese speaker. Even 
when learners share a first language, 
the chance to choose what the learner 
personally considers is important 
(choice) and when the learner thinks 
it’s important (sequence) is essential 
for the motivation needed to maintain 
interest during drills, games and other 
repetitive pronunciation tasks. 
 Place and pace 
Good programs/apps need to pay 
attention to where the learning will 
happen (place – at school, in the 
classroom, at home, on the bus, etc) 
and at what speed (pace – different 
learners need to progress from one 
part of an activity to another at 
different speeds because of the 
muscle-training involved in skills 
acquisition).
 Explicit instructions 
Because learners will usually be 
working on their own, programs and 
apps will need to give an explicit 
introduction as to what is being 
practised and why, as well as clear 
guidance as to what is going to happen 
in the activity, and how to do it.
 Abundant repetition 
As we saw earlier, abundant repetition 
is essential in skills work, and one of 
the joys of machines is that, unlike 
teachers, they never lose their 
patience. Good programs and apps 
will, therefore, contain multiple 
opportunities for the repetition of a 
target feature in order to bring about 
automation. 
 Feedback and correction 
Feedback and correction are essential 
Robin Walker looks at the present and looks to the future.
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30 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISHTEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Technology for 
pronunciation
in order to overcome the use of 
existing first-language psychomotor 
habits for specific pronunciation 
features. This is a critical issue. In the 
absence of meaningful feedback, the 
first-language pronunciation habit will 
actually become reinforced, and with 
each failed attempt to produce the 
target feature correctly, the incorrect 
neuronal pathway will be further 
reinforced. This means that repeated 
‘off-target’ attempts of a merely ‘listen 
and repeat’ type not only do not 
generate improved pronunciation but, 
in fact, actually make it increasingly 
hard to modify the incorrect (first-
language-influenced) habit. 
 Assessment and progress 
Learning pronunciation on your own 
can be a cruel business, and if 
students don’t perceive that they are 
making progress, they can get very 
depressed. Clear indications of 
progress promote increased and better 
quality learning. In addition, tangible 
progress helps to justify the cost of 
taking on the learning, both in terms 
of any financial outlay, and in terms 
of time and effort.
So how do current programs and apps 
fare against these criteria? Given the 
impossibility of discussing a significant 
number of these, I am going to limit my 
comments to websites, programs and 
apps that I am familiar with and that are 
free. I have organised these around the 
three areas where I have turned to 
technology for help in my own teaching 
– tuition, listening and recording.
Technology and tuition
Technology is often championed as the 
solution for students learning English 
on their own. But is this true with 
pronunciation? It is impossible even to 
begin to review the countless free sites 
that claim to teach pronunciation, but 
here are two that give us some insight 
into what is currently available. 
BBC Learning English 
(www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/
learningenglish/grammar/pron/ )
The BBC Learning English website 
offers ‘tips on pronunciation’. This 
covers individual sounds, includes a 
brief section on connected speech, and 
has three radio programmes by a 
pronunciation expert. 
There is a short video for each of the 
sounds of English. In each, the speaker 
models the target sound, draws attention 
to the shape of her mouth, and then tells 
the viewer to listen and repeat. Sadly, 
the videos fail to solve the basic 
problems of computer/online tuition 
with respect to two important issues. 
The first is that for most of the 
sounds of English, focusing on the shape 
of the mouth gives learners little 
meaningful information. Try learning 
how to pronounce /dú/ as in judge from 
looking at a person’s face, and you’ll soon 
see what I mean. Secondly, as we saw 
earlier, the more we listen and repeat 
without being corrected, the harder it 
becomes ever to pronounce well. 
The BBC site is not alone here. In 
fact, none of the sites I have seen so far 
offer this critical corrective feedback. At 
best, they allow you to record yourself 
and compare what you have done with 
the model, but this is still a long way 
from what is needed by learners working 
on their own.
The Sounds of American English 
(www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/
about.html# )
This University of Iowa website focuses 
on the sounds of US English. It may not 
be the most attractive homepage on the 
internet, but the site provides learners 
with valuable information about what 
they are trying to do, especially with 
regard to the articulation of consonants. 
It does this through a very effective 
combination of sound bites, videos and 
animated illustrations. However, once 
again, there is no corrective feedback.
Technology for listening
There is a huge overlap between good 
pronunciation and good listening skills. 
Good pronunciation teaching involves 
exposing learners to a range of accents. 
These accents could be regional 
native-speaker accents, but in today’s 
globalised world, they are more likely to 
be non-native-speaker accents. A 
number of sites allow learners to get this 
much-needed exposure. 
The Speech Accent Archive 
(http://accent.gmu.edu)
You can use the Speech Accent Archive 
to get your students interested in different 
accents, and there are hundreds available 
on this valuable site. My learners really 
enjoy listening to speakers from their 
own first-language background to get 
started. After that, it’s a question of each 
learner’s most likely needs. The only 
thing that bothers me about this site is 
the artificial-sounding elicitation 
paragraph that all of the speakers use. 
When was the last time you had to buy 
‘six spoons of fresh snow peas’? 
Mouth diagram for /dú / from The Sounds of 
American English
Map of Asia from The Speech Accent Archive
The International Dialects of 
English Archive 
(www.dialectsarchive.com)
This site was created to provide actors 
with real-life models for learning 
different accents, so it lacks specific 
guidance or instructions for EFL 
students. But there are over 1,000 
recordings of native and non-native 
speakers of English reading a scripted 
paragraph and then talking freely about 
a topic of their choice. The transcript of 
the unscripted texts is available, allowing 
learners to match what they thought they 
heard against what was said, and then to 
focus on the pronunciation issues that 
often lie behind any differences.
Technology for 
pronunciation
/dú / play
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 31
Technology for recording
Making recordings is where I first began 
to look seriously at using technology to 
teach pronunciation. Even if I can’t 
listen to every student in class, I can 
listen to the recordings they make and 
give them a mark, as I suggested in ETp 
Issue 93.
Recorder Pro 
(www.davaconsulting.com/products/
recorder-pro/ )
Computer programs like Audacity or 
WavePad allow users not only to make 
recordings, but also to edit them. But for 
classroom use, it’s enough for students 
to use the recording facility on their 
mobile phones or, in the absence of this, 
to use an app like Recorder Pro.
The advantage of such apps is that 
they can be used anywhere (place), with 
the learners working at their own speed 
(pace), and with no limits as to how 
many times a student repeats a task 
(abundant repetition). They also 
encourage the learners to be critical of 
what they record. My own students, for 
example, admit to asking friends to listen 
to their different attempts at a target 
feature before choosing the one to send 
to me for marking. This process goes 
some way to providing that essential 
corrective feedback I insisted on earlier. 
Dragon Dictate 
(www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm)
For more immediate feedback, you can let 
your learners loose on speech recognition 
software. This can be computer-based, 
or as an app on a smartphone or tablet. 
One example is Dragon Dictate. 
As you speak, the app transcribes 
what you say. Users need to be online to 
get this particular app to work, so that 
doesn’t entirely satisfy ‘the place’ 
criterion. Nor are there any instructions, 
though the app is intuitive to use. 
Another limiting factor is that the speech 
recognition software behind the app has 
problems dealing with connected speech 
and different speakers’ accents, but it 
does provide immediate feedback, and 
many learners generally find this highly 
motivating, if a little frustrating at times. 
Modern technologies have the potential 
to bring a lot to pronunciation. They 
can allow learners to:
 work at their own speed in a time and 
place that suits them;
 practise as often (repetitively) as they 
want;
 access a huge range of accents to 
improve listening skills;
 make their own recordings and send 
Rogerson Revell, P ‘Can or should we 
teach pronunciation?’ Speak Out! 47 (20) 
2012
Robin Walker is a 
teacher, trainer and 
materials writer. He is 
editorof Speak Out! the 
newsletter of the IATEFL 
Pronunciation SIG, and is 
the author of Teaching 
the Pronunciation of 
English as a Lingua 
Franca, an OUP teacher’s 
handbook. His website is 
www.englishglobalcom.
wordpress.com.
robin@englishglobalcom.com
COMPETITION RESULTS
them to a teacher for marking and 
feedback.
Today’s technologies also allow teachers 
to give individualised feedback. This is 
especially meaningful if the teacher 
includes advice on how to correct 
problems. But for the moment, as 
stand-alone learning devices, especially 
in terms of self-directed tuition, current 
technologies do not do everything a 
trained teacher does. 
Pamela Rogerson Revell sums the 
situation up nicely when she suggests 
that ‘technology-based pronunciation 
materials complement rather than replace 
the teacher and need to be used and 
evaluated carefully’. But who knows 
what tomorrow will bring? 
Congratulations to all those readers 
who successfully completed our 
Prize Crossword 65. 
The winners, who will each receive 
a copy of either the Macmillan 
Collocations Dictionary or 
Macmillan Phrasal Verbs Plus are:
Dana Berga, Riga, Latvia
Sonia Bergmann, Graz, Austria
Xavier Besnard, Châtillon, France
Saima Bhatti, Slough, UK
Jenny Jenkins, Manchester, UK
Julia Peduzzi, Beckenham, UK
Alessandro Plusigh, Santa Maria La Longa, Italy
Roger Trett, Rachataewa, Thailand
Vanessa Wilson, Aosta, Italy
Constance Woolley, Glasgow, UK
 23 8 4 4 8 20 7 9 25 25 15 2 8 16
 N A R R A T I V E E Q U A L
 8 8 20 6 13 7 18 23 2
 A A T C P I X N U
 20 25 21 20 11 25 25 22 13 4 25 21 21
 T E S T Y E E M P R E S S
 7 6 8 13 8 24 16 25 25 22 20
 I C A P A B L E E M T
 10 5 8 13 7 4 26 4 8 13 25 4
 O K A P I R D R A P E R
 23 16 25 6 20 25 4 23 7 16 25
 N L E C T E R N I L E
 1 23 8 8 24 8 22 24 10 10
 N A A B A M B O O
 21 2 6 1 16 7 5 25 9 25 4 11 21
 S U C H L I K E V E R Y S
 13 4 25 25 7 10 23 25 10
 P R E E I O N E O
 25 11 25 12 25 8 4 6 7 20 8 26 25 16
 E Y E W E A R C I T A D E L
 6 8 8 8 16 25 26 16 7
 C A A A L E D L I
 2 13 22 8 4 5 25 20 19 25 12 25 16
 U P M A R K E T J E W E L
 16 13 16 8 26 14 25 8 10
 L P L A D Z E A O
 8 22 2 21 7 23 3 7 4 5 25 26 15
 A M U S I N G I R K E D Q
 20 17 25 16 23 7 25 2
 T F E L N I E U
 25 17 17 25 4 9 25 21 6 25 23 20 24 11
 E F F E R V E S C E N T B Y
 7 17 8 20 17 7 4 21 20 20 1 25 7 26 25 8
 I F A T F I R S T T H E I D E A
 7 21 23 10 20 8 24 21 2 4 26 20 1 25 4 25
 I S N O T A B S U R D , T H E R E
 7 21 23 10 1 10 13 25 17 10 4 7 20
 I S N O H O P E F O R I T .
Albert Einstein
 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
 H U G R K C I A V O Y W P
 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
 Z Q L F X J T S M N B E D
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1,000 creative tips, techniques, questions, thoughts 
and ideas on common teaching and classroom issues. 
an essential resource 
Bringing you
 ■ Tips to aid and inspire practice
 ■ Ideas on good preparation and planning
 ■ Ways to help with classroom management
 ■ Suggestions for lesson topics 
Comes complete with a CD-rom so you have worksheets you can print out and use 
straight away.
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Content includes:
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 ■ Speaking 
 ■ Listening
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 ■ Writing
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1,000 creative tips, techniques, questions, thoughts 
and ideas on common teaching and classroom issues. 
an essential resource 
Bringing you
 ■ Tips to aid and inspire practice
 ■ Ideas on good preparation and planning
 ■ Ways to help with classroom management
 ■ Suggestions for lesson topics 
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straight away.
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Content includes:
 ■ Introduction 
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 ■ In the classroom
 ■ Speaking 
 ■ Listening
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 ■ Writing
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34 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Do something 
different 
with your 
coursebook
R E S O U R C E S
Do something 
different 
with your 
coursebook 88
Rachael Roberts brings her series on adapting your coursebook to suit your classes 
to an end. In this final part, she does something different with writing tasks.
E
very coursebook has writing 
tasks, but often they’re tucked 
away at the back or put at the 
end of the unit. Coursebook 
writers are told: Teachers probably won’t 
use them in class. Why not? Why are 
writing tasks seen as dull, or something 
that is better given as homework? Isn’t it 
part of our job as teachers to teach our 
students to write more effectively in 
English? And how can we do that if they 
always do it at home, hand it in (not 
even that, sometimes) and then fail to 
look at the feedback we give?
How can we make the writing tasks 
in the coursebook more engaging, so 
that our students will enjoy doing them 
and see the very real value of writing in 
class time?
Interaction and 
authenticity
One of the problems with coursebook 
writing tasks can be that, unlike 
speaking tasks where the students 
interact with each other, it is often not 
very clear who the students are writing 
for or to. Outside the classroom, any 
writing our learners do will usually have 
a specific purpose and context. Inside 
the classroom, it is likely to be about 
developing and displaying skills and 
language. However, teachers can quite 
easily adapt writing activities to help 
their students see more clearly how the 
writing activity relates to the world 
outside the classroom.
Let’s look at some examples of 
typical coursebook writing tasks and 
how they could be adapted:
Informal and semi-formal emails
Obviously, the students could send real 
emails to you or to each other. 
Alternatively, you could set up a 
twinning project with another school. 
See www.etwinning.net/en/pub/index.htm, 
for example. This will obviously take 
more effort, but could be a fantastic 
resource throughout the year. Students 
could also write emails to themselves, 
using the site www.futureme.org. On this 
site, people write emails to themselves to 
be delivered on a specific date in the 
future. These can be made public or not, 
just as the individual chooses, so the 
students can read some other people’s 
emails there as well.
Narrative
The internet provides all sorts of 
opportunities for students to ‘publish’ 
their work and have it commented upon. 
This can be incredibly motivating, and 
encourages the learners to check their 
spelling, grammar and punctuation 
more carefully as their work will be 
public (though they don’t have to use 
their real names). See, for example, 
www.booksie.com.
Formal letters/emails
These are often expressed as letters/
emails of complaint. However, a similar 
genre, which might be more motivating, 
is writing on behalf of a victim of 
human rights abuse. Assuming this is 
appropriate in your context, it is a very 
authentic writing activity and could 
really make a difference in the world. 
See www.amnesty.org.uk/content.
asp?CategoryID=949 for sample letters 
and advice.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 35
radbod1234@aol.com
Rachael Roberts is an 
ELT teacher, teacher 
trainer and materials 
writer, and has published 
a number of coursebooks. 
She is particularly 
interested in ways of 
exploiting published 
material,The court will look forsome conduct by the defendant signifying that he assumesresponsibility. 3 [I] (usually used in questions or negative sen-tences) to be important or to matter: The fact that the
WORD FAMILY
significant adj.
significantly adv.
signify verb
significance noun
signification noun
insignificant adj.
insignificantly adv.
insignificance noun
S
OUP EAP Data Standards Ltd, Frome, Somerset – 5/8/2013 EAP A-Z.3d Page 749 of 914
749 signify
For students who need to 
learn the language for writing
academic English
whatever subject they 
are studying at 
university or college
1
NEW
Oxford
Academic iWriter
With
Find out more at 
www.oup.com/elt 
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 1
MAIN FEATURE
HEADS UP, HEADS DOWN, 4 
HEADS TOGETHER 
Lindsay Clandfield heads off in a new direction
FEATURES
IS IT MY TURN YET? 8 
Jenny Wilde says turn-taking is an important skill
STUDENT STORYTELLERS 10 
David Heathfield tells a tall tale for his students to retell
C IS FOR CREATIVITY 14 
Alan Maley, Hitomi Masuhara and 
Chaz Pugliese add the final creative contributions 
to this extended article
KEEP MOVING ON! 2 18 
Alex Case offers activities for more advanced language
OVER THE WALL 25 
Alan Maley celebrates the past in the natural scenery 
of the present
TECHNOLOGY FOR PRONUNCIATION 29 
Robin Walker examines the options
DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT WITH 34 
YOUR COURSEBOOK 8 
Rachael Roberts adapts writing tasks
SUGGESTIONS FROM THE STAFFROOM 5 36 
Sasha Wajnryb compiles tested tips on dictogloss
PLAY IT AGAIN! 40 
Magda Tebbutt and Tim Strike recommend some 
winning language games
SAY CHEESE! 42 
Ken Milgate shows how photos can be exploited 
SWIMMING, NOT SINKING 50 
Tim Thompson revitalises his classroom with 
real-world projects 
ASK ME ANOTHER! 54 
Kayvon Havaei-Ahary questions why questions 
are too often neglected
TEACHING YOUNG LEARNERS
EFFECTIVE CLASS DESIGN 22 
Chris Roland applies micromechanics to activities 
with children
TEACHER DEVELOPMENT
VALUE YOUR VOICE 56 
Ming E Wong voices her opinion on vocal health
TECHNOLOGY
FLIP, FOLLOW AND FEEDBACK 57 
Laura Nanna describes a successful 
three-stage project
FIVE THINGS YOU ALWAYS WANTED 61 
TO KNOW ABOUT: E-SAFETY 
Nicky Hockly looks at staying safe online
WEBWATCHER 63 
Russell Stannard surveys Google Forms
REGULAR FEATURES
IT WORKS IN PRACTICE 38
REVIEWS 44
SCRAPBOOK 46
COMPETITIONS 31, 37, 64
ContentsContents
Includes materials designed to photocopy 
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2 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Editorial
When I returned to the UK from six years in 
Japan, a friend of my parents looked at my 
photos of lavishly decorated temples, colourful 
festivals, steaming volcanoes and lush tropical landscapes 
and sighed. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing new under the 
sun!’ I’ve never really understood why she said this – or 
what exotic parts of the UK were familiar to her but 
unknown to me. However, her comment came to mind 
when I was editing the articles for this issue of ETp. Despite 
the staggering amount of new technology that is being 
developed on a daily basis to help language teachers and 
their students, it is clear that some of the basics still hold 
true, and much that is new is building on the foundations 
of what has been around for a very long time.
Magda Tebbutt and Tim Strike remind us of a number of 
fun language learning games. Some of these will already 
be known to many readers but, as Madga and Tim point 
out, it does no harm to be reminded of old favourites from 
time to time.
Sasha Wajnryb bases his article on the dictogloss 
technique, popularised by his own mother in the late 
1980s. And in celebration of this, we have a photocopiable 
dictogloss activity in the Scrapbook, which combines the 
technique with an intriguing brainteaser.
Editorial
David Heathfield’s article centres on what must be the 
oldest teaching technique of all – storytelling – and it 
comes with a charming old folktale for you to tell to your 
students and then encourage them to retell it.
Alan Maley looks at books about landscape, many of 
which link the past to the present by drawing the reader’s 
attention to those features of the landscape that give us a 
glimpse of past lives and the historical events that took 
place there.
Finally, in our main feature, Lindsay Clandfield offers some 
new labels for the old practice of labelling lesson plans. 
He gets to the heart of what the students are actually 
doing at each phase of the lesson – so perhaps ‘plus ça 
change’ isn’t quite ‘la même chose’, after all.
Helena Gomm
Editor
helena.gomm@pavpub.com
Rayford House, School Road, Hove BN3 5HX, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1273 434943 Email: admin@pavpub.com
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Editor: Helena Gomm 
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Publisher: Fiona Richmond
Published by: Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd, 
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© 2014, Pavilion Publishing and Media Ltd 
ISSN 1362-5276
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Pages 20–21 and 46–48 include materials which are designed to photocopy. All other rights are reserved and no part of this publication may be 
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
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4 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Heads up, 
heads down, 
heads together
M A I N F E A T U R E
Heads up, 
heads down, 
heads together
I
n English language teaching, we 
love labelling lesson plans. I 
remember my first assignment to 
prepare a lesson plan in my 
pre-service teacher training. The lesson 
plan document was a table, full of 
different columns. I had to divide my 
lesson into stages, and outline what I 
was doing at each of those stages. 
But that alone would have been too 
straightforward. 
I remember there being several other 
columns that I had to assign aand has a blog, 
www.elt-resourceful.com, 
with more practical ideas 
and downloadable 
material.
Campbell, C and Kryszewska, H 
Learner-based Teaching OUP 1992
Johnson, D W and Johnson, R T Learning 
Together and Alone Pearson 1998
Storch, N ‘Collaborative writing: product, 
process and students’ reflections’ Journal 
of Second Language Writing 14 2005
Interaction and 
collaboration 
Teachers often choose not to use 
coursebook writing tasks in class because 
the students tend to work alone on them 
and in silence. However, this certainly 
doesn’t have to be the case. Writing 
collaboratively can be just as beneficial as 
collaborative speaking work. Obviously, 
there are extra benefits if the discussion 
of the writing process is carried out in 
English because the students will have to 
try to express their ideas to each other – 
clarifying, rephrasing, and so on – which 
will help to develop both their language 
and their ideas. However, even if this 
discussion is in L1, working with others 
who know a little more will encourage 
the students to work at a slightly higher 
level than they would on their own. In 
addition, Neomy Storch found that texts 
produced by pairs were better ‘in terms 
of task fulfilment, grammatical accuracy 
and complexity’. And finally, as David 
and Roger Johnson point out, 
collaborative writing has been shown to 
lower anxiety and boost confidence.
There are several ways to encourage 
cooperation:
 Jigsaw writing. In jigsaw reading, each 
student in a group has a different part 
of a text, reads it and shares what they 
have read with the others. In jigsaw 
writing, each student writes a different 
part of a text. This can work very well 
with a cartoon strip or photo story. 
Once they have written their individual 
sections, the group needs to put the 
texts together, which will require 
discussion and editing to make sure 
that the story flows and makes sense.
 Circle writing. In this classic 
technique, the students sit in a circle 
and write the first line of a story 
before passing the paper on clockwise 
for their neighbour to write the next 
line (with six students, there would be 
six stories going around at once). 
Once the stories are finished, the 
students can choose a story to work 
on in smaller groups of two or three, 
to improve and refine the writing.
 What do you want to know? Students 
can also work collaboratively to plan 
a piece of writing, which is then 
written individually. An example given 
by Colin Campbell and Hanna 
Kryszewska asks the students to choose 
a topic they know quite a lot about, 
such as a hobby or their job. They write 
this at the top of the piece of paper, 
which is passed around in the same way 
as in circle writing, and their classmates 
add questions they have about the 
topic. Each student then writes a short 
article about their topic, answering all 
the questions. This provides an 
authentic audience for their work, as 
the other students read the articles to 
find out the answers to their questions.
Using different senses
Another way to lift writing activities off 
the page and make them more engaging 
is to add some sensory input. Pictures 
and video are quite easy to source online 
(see eltpics.com for a great selection of 
free-to-use pictures collected by teachers 
for teachers) and can really pick up the 
level of motivation. For example, if the 
students are asked to write a film review, 
you could show some film trailers to 
inspire them or, at a higher level, play 
them a video review of the film (try 
Mark Kermode’s reviews on YouTube).
If they are being asked to write a 
description of a person, you could show 
them some pictures of a friend or a 
member of your family and ask them to 
write not just a physical description, but 
about who they think the person is, how 
you met them or what their personality 
is like.
Sound can also be motivating. If the 
students are asked to write a narrative, 
you could try playing them some short 
pieces of music and asking them to 
image it is the soundtrack to a film. 
Where is the film taking place, what is 
happening, who is involved? This can 
then be the basis for their story. You 
could use sound effects in a similar way. 
See www.thesoundbooksite.com for 
sound effects and teaching ideas.
Students also often respond well to 
things that they can actually touch and 
feel. For a writing task where they need 
to describe an object, try bringing in 
some actual objects for them to describe. 
You may be surprised how much more 
detail they produce. Or use a bag of 
random objects. The students pick out 
one each, then, working in a group, they 
have to write a story together which 
involves all of their objects.
Giving different feedback
Because writing is so often done out of 
class, feedback is usually given by the 
teacher in a written form and is often 
pretty much ignored. Changing where the 
writing is done, who gives feedback and in 
what form it is given can make feedback 
much more central to the writing process, 
and thus much more useful. 
If time allows, oral feedback and/or 
discussion can be extremely valuable. 
This could be done with individuals 
while the other students work on 
another piece of writing. Alternatively, 
you could use an online tool, such as 
Jing (www.techsmith.com/jing.html), 
which captures what is on your computer 
screen as well as what you are saying. In 
this way, you can record yourself giving 
spoken feedback while highlighting the 
parts of the text you are referring to.
Instead of correcting the whole text, 
which can be very time-consuming and 
too much for the student to take in, you 
could decide to focus on one specific 
area, such as paragraphing, linking, 
vocabulary, etc. Or you could rewrite 
part of the text for them so that they can 
compare the two versions.
And, of course, students can always 
give each other feedback – though be 
aware that they will tend to focus on 
grammar and spelling mistakes rather 
than the bigger picture, unless you help 
them learn to do otherwise.
However you choose to do it, devote 
some time in class to feedback – to 
underline its importance and to make 
the students feel that what they write is 
important.
Try some of these ideas and see if you 
can’t make your coursebook writing 
activities more engaging, and thus 
actually help your learners to develop 
their writing. 
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36 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
S U G G E S T I O N S F R O M T H E S TA F F R O O M
Sasha Wajnryb offers some classroom-tested tips to invigorate your lessons.
5
Dictogloss
The staffroom can be the source of 
a wealth of knowledge for all 
teachers. Both new and veteran 
teachers can take advantage of the years 
of experience and the varied teaching 
styles that other teachers can offer. 
This series mimics a friendly 
staffroom environment where teachers 
share and access useful tips on how 
best to meet the needs of their students. 
The tips in this issue of ETp concern 
dictogloss. The tips have been proposed 
by experienced teachers at a busy ESL 
college in Sydney, Australia. 
Dictogloss is a well-known language 
learning activity in which groups of 
students reconstruct short texts. It is an 
integrated skills technique, which 
encourages the students to work 
collaboratively to negotiate meaning, and 
enables them to utilise a great deal of their 
English language learning experience, 
rather than focusing on one isolated skill.
It is often attributed to Dr Ruth 
Wajnryb, who popularised the technique 
in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 
Dictogloss is not dictation! The students 
don’t have sufficient exposure to the 
original text to reproduce it exactly. The 
focus is, instead, on producing a text that 
has a similar meaning to the original. The 
students often modify the grammar and 
lexis of the original as they paraphrase its 
meaning.
Dictoglossempowers students to 
teach and learn from each other, and it 
can be used to teach new language or 
revise material in an interesting way. It’s a 
worthy addition to your teaching kitbag! It 
typically consists of the following stages:
Preparation
1 Choose or design a short text of 4–6 
sentences. 
2 Introduce your students to the topic 
and pre-teach essential vocabulary. 
3 Instruct the students to write the 
numbers 1–6 (depending on the number 
of sentences) on a blank page with some 
space between them. Tell them that they 
will soon hear a text and will be asked to 
write down the important words. 
Emphasise that they won’t have enough 
time to write down all the words, so they 
should focus on the keywords only.
Dictation
4 Read the text twice. Although the 
speed of delivery can vary, depending on 
level, try to read it at a natural pace. On 
the first listening, ask the students simply 
to listen for gist. On the second listening, 
get them to note down the keywords next 
to the relevant numbers on their paper.
Reconstruction
5 Allow the students to collaborate in small 
groups, sharing their words and trying to 
construct sentences that have the same 
meaning. The goal is for them to create 
their own text with the same meaning, not 
to reproduce the original text word for word. 
During this stage, try to monitor only.
Analysis and correction
6 Review the students’ sentences and 
give feedback.
Ten tips for using dictogloss 
1 Step back and let your students 
discuss and collaborate. It can be 
tempting to hover and give assistance. 
However, this often impedes student 
confidence and willingness to contribute. 
Instead, let your students use their 
collective knowledge to build the text. 
2 As the students collaborate, note the 
types of errors most commonly found 
across all the groups. Then give small-
group feedback and help each group to 
correct their own individual errors. After 
doing this, the remaining mistakes will be 
those which all the groups have made. 
This ensures that your whole-class 
feedback will be relevant to everyone. 
3 Create your own texts. There are a 
variety of commercially-available books 
that provide introductory discussion 
material, a dictogloss text and information 
on how to explain likely student errors. 
These materials are often useful for 
teachers who are new to the activity. 
Once you have some confidence, though, 
you may find that customising your own 
texts according to the interests and needs 
of your learners is more valuable. 
‘Strange but true’ or bizarre news stories 
often make fun material.
4 Dictogloss is an activity that you can 
use regularly. Some teachers of intensive 
courses do it each week. It can be used 
to introduce a new topic, or to revise 
previously-studied grammar or lexis. 
5 Remind the students that their task is to 
construct a similar text, not to memorise 
and copy the original. The dictogloss 
procedure, including limited opportunities 
to hear the original text and a natural 
speech rate, is designed to minimise the 
students’ ability to memorise the text. 
6 Short texts are better than long ones. 
The focus is on the reformulation. 
Students will have jotted down the bare 
bones of the text. Using all their 
combined years of studying English, they 
need to build on those notes to create 
their own, similar, text. 
7 Giving feedback to the whole class at 
the same time may be demoralising for 
some students, particularly if they don’t 
know each other well. So you may wish 
to provide feedback to individual groups. 
8 Creating word clouds that display some 
of the key lexis in the text as part of the 
pre-task warm-up may assist low-level 
learners or those unfamiliar with dictogloss.
9 After the students have completed 
their texts and received feedback, asking 
them to improve their texts may be 
beneficial. Highlighting particular parts of 
speech is often helpful, eg asking the 
students to add an adverb whenever they 
have used a verb, or an adjective before 
each noun. Alternatively, you can ask 
them to exchange texts with another 
group and edit the other group’s work. 
10 An interesting variation is a silent 
dictogloss, where the students are given 
a photo as a stimulus for each sentence 
and need to create a coherent text. 
Sasha Wajnryb teaches 
adult international 
students in a large 
college in Australia. He 
has worked in ELT for 
15 years as a teacher, 
academic manager and 
consultant. 
If you want to share an idea in the ETp 
community staffroom, feel free to email it to 
sasha.wajnryb1@tafensw.edu.au.
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Short story competition
In the Scrapbook in Issue 91 we announced a short 
story competition, based on the idea of ‘Hint 
Fiction’. This espouses the short story tradition, but 
limits the stories to a maximum of 25 words, with 
the few carefully-chosen words hinting at a longer 
and more complex chain of events. Entrants had to 
submit an interesting story written in fewer than 25 
words. Here are some of the entries we received.
Alien football
I was walking along 
the street when an alien 
caught me to play a 
football match. I scored 
two goals. It was great fun!
Ezequiel Grossi
The lady in black
She appears every night. 
A scary appearance while 
she walks. I’m scared. 
I wake up. Maybe she 
was a dream ...
María Rosario Elías
Brazuca
She felt bloated and 
battered, beaten by 
twenty-two men for ninety 
minutes. Feels sad ... 
never knew she was the 
star of the world cup. 
Gastón Federico Elías
The scary shadow
I go to a zoo. The animals 
are not in the cages. There 
aren’t people. I’m scared. 
I see a shadow.
Agustín Jarzyna
And the winner is ...
Gastón Federico Elías with his 
story Brazuca. We will send Gastón a copy 
of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 
25 Words or Fewer by Robert Swartwood.
The miracle
The first star twinkled 
at dusk. The air fairies 
brought a gentle 
breeze. The dying 
woman saw God and 
was reborn to eternity.
Ivana Pérez Campos
A bird
I am at school with 
my best friends. 
I find a tiny bird. 
It is looking at me; 
it opens its wings 
and flies away.
Sara Krieger Varela
www.macmillanglobal.com
New stand-alone 
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• offers students a business-related flavour 
• new material is in addition to the existing eWorkbook 
• builds on and recycles the language in a business context
• can be used either in conjunction with the Global coursebook or as a stand-alone piece
10 new videos use the unique Global formula to present the language in a business context. These can also be downloaded to a mobile device making it ideal for busy students to study on-the-go.
The ‘Work Globally’ activities are a business-related extension of the ‘Function Globally’ exercises and have a real focus on the day-to-day practical language students will need in the workplace.
Macmillan-Global-eWorkbook-ETPmay2013_2.indd 1
4/5/13 12:27 PM
Could our English 
language professionals 
benefit from your 
product or service?
Advertise in and get 
your message across.
English Teaching professional is the best way to get your 
message out to our broad and dynamic international readership. 
For more information contact:
Carole Blanchett, Mainline Media. 
Tel: +44 (0)1536 747333
Email: carole.blanchett@mainlinemedia.co.uk
Assessing English language proficiency since 1938 
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Quality audited by theAssociation of Language Testers in Europe
awarded to GESE, ISE and SfL qualifications
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language proficiency for use in the real world 
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English Teaching Professional March 2013 (186 x 123).indd 1
26/03/2013 17:22:55
www.macmillandictionary.com
Macmillan Dictionary Online: it’s everything 
print dictionaries wish they were but never 
could be ... not in their wildest dreams. 
It’s your English!
 All online, all free, all yours...
Games
Videos
Language blog 
Open Dictionary 
Clear definitions 
Audio pronunciations
Red word and star frequency system
Language Tips
 
Gadget
Apps
Facebook pages
Twitter 
feeds
Search box gadget
The British Council’s EnglishAgenda website 
keeps you up to date with our work in ELT in 
the UK and around the world. The site includes:
•	 UK	seminars and videos	by	leading	names	in	ELT
•	professional development	webinars,	advice	and	materials
•	 free	research papers	and	publications	to	download
•	 the	Directory	of	UK ELT Research
•	 information	about	British	Council	research funding
•	 details	of	ELT projects	around	the	world
•	 advice	about	life	in	the	UK	for	international	students	and	
information	on	the UK English language teaching offer.www.britishcouncil.org/englishagenda
UK home for English language teaching and research
© Mat Wright
© British Council 2013 / C653
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38 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Personal ‘Trivial Pursuit’
Though it uses a traditional ‘Trivial Pursuit’ 
board, this game is given a student-generated 
twist …
Obtain enough ‘Trivial Pursuit’ boards so that 
you have enough for one between four students. 
Cut up pieces of card for the students to fill with 
suitable questions, and make a dozen cards 
yourself as an example. (You will need to create 
some categories. Rather than ‘Science and 
nature’, for example, you might have a topic 
your students have covered, or something more 
general like ‘Grammar’ or ‘Vocabulary’.)
Photocopy your cards so that each group will 
have a set. 
1 Find out if your learners have played 
‘Trivial Pursuit’ before. If not, do a brief 
model, using one of your cards. 
2 Explain that the game is ready to go, except 
that you forgot to make enough cards – so 
the students will need to make some, too. 
3 Hand out one of your cards for each group to 
study. Elicit the categories on the card and 
reiterate that each category matches a colour. 
4 In groups, the students make some question 
cards of their own. At this point, they can 
look through notebooks and coursebooks, etc 
for inspiration (and review!).
5 Once finished, each group should swap cards 
with another group. Hand out the rest of your 
cards, too. 
6 The students play the game and review what 
they have learnt during the course.
Student-generated quiz
Fill the board! … and now reconstruct it!
More tested lessons, 
suggestions, tips and 
techniques which have 
all worked for ETp 
readers. Try them out 
for yourself – and 
then send us your own 
contribution. Don’t 
forget to include your 
postal address. Rupert, Pema, Erica, Lizzie, Jenny, Holly, 
Suzanne, Tom and Jonny
All the contributors to It Works in Practice in this 
issue of ETp are teachers at International House 
Palermo in Sicily. We would very much like to thank 
Lizzie Pinard for coordinating another spread of 
great activities from them. 
They will receive a selection of books for their 
staffroom, published by Macmillan. Macmillan have 
kindly agreed to be sponsors of It Works in Practice 
for this year.
1 Put the learners 
in pairs.
2 Give each pair one of 
the topics studied 
during the course and 
set a time limit for 
them to go through 
their notes and make 
questions related to 
that topic.
3 Regroup the learners 
so that each group 
includes a learner from 
each topic set. They 
should take turns to 
ask their fellow group 
members the questions 
they made with their 
previous partner. 
1 Fill the board with loads of vocabulary, 
pronunciation, language, etc during 
the course of a lesson. Try to erase as 
little as possible. 
2 At the end of the lesson, take a 
photo of the board. If the learners 
have smartphones, they can take 
photos, too.
3 At the beginning of the next lesson, 
get the learners to reconstruct what 
was on the board. 
Variation
You could help the learners 
by letting them see your 
photo, but covering up large 
parts of it. At the end, show 
the photo and compare it 
with the reconstruction or 
let them look at their own 
photos. What did the 
learners forget? Feed that 
into the next review activity!
Variation
Put the learners in small teams and get them 
to go back through their notes and make quiz 
questions. Tell them that the questions can 
be worth between 10 and 50 points, in 
multiples of 10, and they must allocate a 
number of points to each question. 
The teams take turns to pose a question to 
the others. The first team to answer correctly 
wins the points allocated to that question. 
If a team answers incorrectly, the question-
setting team wins the point allocation. 
Play until all the questions have been asked 
or time runs out. The winners are the team 
with the most points at the end of the game.
(Tip: If there are a few specific things you 
particularly want your learners to review, 
throw in a few ‘teacher bonus questions’, 
worth 60 points!)
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 39
Tornado
1 Draw a grid on the board (or why not 
prepare it in advance and project it?).
2 Draw the same grid on a piece of paper 
that only you can look at. Allocate each 
square a function: a question (?), 
a bonus (B – 50 points), a forfeit 
(change points with the other team), 
a natural disaster (eg a picture of a 
tornado – lose all points). 
3 Prepare some questions for the 
question squares in the grid.
4 Put the learners in two teams. The 
teams take turns to pick a square. Build 
up some suspense, then write/draw in 
the board grid what you have got in 
your paper grid for the chosen square. 
5 The learners answer the question, or 
win bonus points, or change their 
points with another team, or lose all 
their points, according to what square 
they have chosen.
6 Play until all the squares have been 
used. The team with the most points is 
the winner.
Vocabulary review race
The aim of this activity is to encourage the students to review any vocabulary 
that has arisen during the course. 
Pelmanism plus
1 Prepare a set of Pelmanism cards. There 
should be enough duplicate sets for as 
many pairs or groups as you can make in 
your class. In each pair, there could be a 
language point and an example, or a word 
and corresponding prefix/suffix, or two 
halves of a sentence – any combinations 
that make the learners think about the 
language they have studied.
2 Put the learners in pairs or small groups. 
They take it in turns to turn over two 
cards and decide if they match or not. If 
they do match, the learner who played 
them gets to keep them. 
3 The winner is the player with the most 
pairs of cards at the end of the game.
4 Once they have played with your set, 
get each pair to make a set of their own 
cards. They should then exchange sets 
with another pair and play with the other 
pair’s set of cards.
Mighty mingle 
The aim of this activity is to get the students looking back over the course 
and thinking about everything they’ve been studying. 
1 Put the students in two lines, so that each 
student is facing another student.
2 Give them one minute (using a big 
count-down timer is effective, if you have 
a projector) to talk about everything they 
can remember learning during the course.
3 After the minute is up, the students must 
change partnersand repeat the activity. 
4 Repeat this until each student has had 
a minute with all the students in the 
opposite line. 
(The idea is that different students will 
remember different things, and after each 
discussion, they will add to their list of things 
learnt during the course. Task repetition will 
enable them to exchange information more 
efficiently so, as the activity progresses, more 
information will be exchanged each time.)
Optional follow-up
Put the students in small 
groups and get them to pool 
all the information they’ve 
collected in the course of the 
activity. Give each group a 
poster-sized piece of paper on 
which they should represent 
the pooled information 
visually. Once they have 
finished, stick the posters up 
on the wall and have the 
students walk round in their 
groups and look at the other 
groups’ posters. You could 
give them some questions to 
answer (eg Has this group 
remembered anything that you 
didn’t remember?) as they 
walk round.
Do you have an idea which you would like to contribute to our It Works 
in Practice section? It might be anything from an activity which you 
use in class to a teaching technique that has worked for you. Send us 
your contribution, by post or by email, to helena.gomm@pavpub.com.
All the contributors to It Works in Practice get a prize! We especially 
welcome joint entries from teachers working at the same institution. 
Why not get together with your colleagues to provide a whole It Works 
in Practice section of your ideas? We will publish a photo of you all.
1 Write a word or chunk of language 
that has featured in your lessons 
over the duration of the course on 
a small piece of paper. Fold it in 
half, number it and stick it to the 
wall. Repeat until the wall is 
covered in pieces of paper.
2 Put the students in pairs.
3 The students in each pair should 
take turns to run up to one of the 
pieces of paper, unfold it and look 
at the word/chunk, run back to 
their partner and get their partner 
to guess it (using mime or 
description, but not using any of 
the words written on the paper).
4 Once the word/chunk has been 
guessed, the pair make a note of 
the number. (They don’t have to go 
through the words in numerical 
order, the numbers are purely to 
keep track of what’s been done and 
what hasn’t.) 
 The winning pair is the quickest 
pair to get through all the pieces 
of paper on the wall.
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40 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Play it 
 again!
Play it 
 again!
V O C A B U L A R Y
T
eachers need to help their 
students build up an extensive 
range of vocabulary in order to 
make them competent users of 
English. For this reason, considerable 
emphasis is usually placed on vocabulary 
practice and development at all stages 
and levels.
It is often forgotten how important 
repetition is for establishing an extensive 
and viable word bank. Students 
consistently hear or read new words in 
class – and coursebooks provide 
controlled practice of new vocabulary 
through reading texts, activities and 
games – but it is often hard for learners 
to retain new words unless they are used 
repeatedly in context in a variety of 
situations.
One of the best ways to reinforce 
new vocabulary is through engaging 
games that make learning fun. These 
games serve as ideal fillers, warmers or 
closers that can help brighten up even 
the dullest class.
Here is a shortlist of our 12 favourite 
vocabulary games, guaranteed to appeal 
to any type of student. Most teachers 
will probably know and use at least 
some of these games – but we all need a 
little bit of a refresher course every now 
and then.
We recommend two simple but 
essential rules when setting up any game:
 Make sure you have given clear 
instructions and modelled the game, 
to ensure the students clearly 
understand how to play.
 Make the game competitive.
1 Sound associations
The students take turns to call out 
words, each one starting with the final 
sound (not letter) of the previous word. 
For example:
S1: enough
S2: fish
S3: shop
etc
Proper nouns are not allowed. To make 
it more difficult or more targeted, you 
can specify the category the words must 
come from, eg leisure activities, food 
items, etc.
You can, of course, also play this 
game with the final letter of the previous 
word. For example: 
enough house elephant 
etc
2 Hangman
This game can be used with the target 
vocabulary from a particular 
coursebook unit to reinforce memory, 
the number of letters and spelling. 
Choose one of the target words and 
represent the number of letters by 
dashes on the board. The students take 
turns to call out letters. If a student calls 
out a correct letter, put this letter in the 
word. If a student chooses an incorrect 
letter, start drawing a hangman on the 
board. These pictures vary in 
complexity, but the one shown here 
takes nine strokes to draw. The students, 
therefore, have nine chances to guess the 
correct letters and find the word. If you 
finish the drawing before the students 
guess the word, you win. If they guess it 
first, they win.
H O _ S E
Magda Tebbutt and Tim Strike remind us of 
some of their favourite language learning games.
3 Memory game
This game can be used with all kinds of 
words or sentences. You will need to 
prepare a set of flashcards in matching 
pairs, with a word, picture, clause or 
sentence on each one. These cards are 
placed face down on the table and the 
students have to take turns to choose 
two cards and turn them over. If they 
find a matching pair, they keep them. If 
not, they replace them face down. The 
winner is the student who finds the most 
matching pairs. You could design the 
cards so that the matching pairs are 
word + picture, synonyms, antonyms, 
collocations, gapped sentences + missing 
words – anything you want to practise.
4 Pictionary
This is a very popular game. Put the 
students in groups and ask a member of 
each group to come to the front. 
Whisper a word to them, which they 
then have to draw for their group. They 
can’t say anything and they can’t write 
any words or letters. The first group to 
guess the word within a set time period 
wins a point. The next member of each 
group then comes to the front, and you 
whisper the next word to them.
B I A T W R X L M
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5 Try to remember
Prepare flashcards with 12 words or 
pictures representing words on them. 
Give them to the students and tell them 
they have two minutes to remember as 
many words as possible. Take the cards 
away and get the students to write down 
as many words as they can remember.
6 How many words can 
you find?
Give the students a grid with nine 
letters, and ask them to make as many 
words as they can from these letters. A 
letter may only be used twice if it occurs 
twice in the grid. All their words must be 
three letters or more. The person who 
gets the most words wins. For advanced 
classes, you can award points for the 
number of letters in their words. Words 
they could find in the example grid 
shown here include: beautiful, bat, beat, 
bate, table, fable, fault, flute, file, fail, 
able, eat.
meaning of the word, giving the best 
definition they can think of. The other 
students work in groups and compete to 
be the first group to guess the word.
For higher-level students, you can 
include on the flashcards a set of words 
that the students are not allowed to use 
in their definitions. For example, if the 
target word is key, the words they can’t 
use might be open, close, lock and door.
9 Scattergories
Choose about ten or 12 different 
categories (eg sports, hobbies, fruits and 
vegetables, nationalities, irregular verbs) 
and tell the students to put them in a 
vertical list down the page.Then give 
them a letter of the alphabet and ask 
them to think of one word starting with 
that letter for each category. You can set 
a time limit. The students get one point 
for each correct word and two points if 
it is a word that no one else in the class 
has got.
10 Sentence game
Make sets of flashcards with a series of 
different words on them. For example:
11 Word mapping
As an introduction to a lesson, put a 
word map on the board and get the 
students to write as many words as they 
can think of that are associated with the 
lesson topic. For example:
Magda Tebbutt is the Academic Manager at 
the MIT Language Centre, Melbourne, 
Australia, and Tim Strike has held various 
academic positions at the same institute. They 
both have over 15 years’ experience teaching 
ESL and tutoring tertiary-level students. 
7 Bingo 
This is a game which is often played 
using homophones (words that have the 
same sound but different spelling, eg 
their, there and they’re). Each student 
has a different grid containing a number 
of words. As you read out a sentence, 
the students judge from the context 
which is the correct word and cross it 
out in their grid. When they have 
crossed out an entire row, they shout 
Bingo! Bingo is also great with all kinds 
of numbers. You can use large numbers, 
times, money and those which students 
often have difficulties distinguishing 
between, such as twelve and twenty or 
seventeen and seventy, etc.
8 Definition game
Prepare a series of flashcards, with one 
word on each. A designated student 
picks a card and has to describe the 
Put the students in groups and give them 
each a set of cards. They have to use 
these words (and no others) to make as 
many sentences as possible within a set 
time limit.
 B I T
 E A U
 F U L
mtebbutt@mit.edu.au
tstrike@academic.mit.edu.au
12 Yes/No game
The students take turns to come to the 
front of the class to receive a card with a 
word on it. The other students have to 
ask questions about the meaning of the 
word on the card. The questions can 
only be yes/no questions. For example: 
Are you alive? Are you an animal? Do you 
live in Asia? Are you grey?
This game can be reversed by putting 
the word on a sticky note on the student’s 
forehead. The student with the word then 
asks the others yes/no questions to try to 
find out what the word is. 
The games suggested above are proven 
winners in the classroom and we highly 
recommend that you give them a go! 
the
played
and
a
near
river
friend
his
boy
game
over
likes
had
went
girl
picnic
GO ____________
 ____________
 ____________
PLAY ___________
 ___________
 ___________
DO ___________
 ___________
 ___________
SPORT
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42 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Say 
cheese!
Say 
cheese!
R E S O U R C E S
A 
favourite speaking activity of 
mine is to present pairs of 
advanced-level students with 
photographs taken from 
newspapers and magazines. Such 
photographs are often accompanied by 
explanatory text, but my aim is to 
promote the students’ deductive skills, 
so I only give them the images, which 
they are then asked to contextualise. 
Rather than simply asking them to 
describe what they see, I encourage them 
to imagine the circumstances leading up 
to the picture, any likely dialogue and 
any possible consequences.
A plenary session in preparation 
with suitable teacher prompts often 
helps to get the ball rolling before the 
students are given free rein to exploit 
their powers of imagination. Each 
picture soon comes alive and gives rise 
not only to descriptive language but also 
practice in modals of deduction and 
speculation. The students might supply 
a suitable dialogue, if appropriate, or 
comment on the significance of the shot 
in abstract or evaluative terms, 
explaining its ethical, environmental, 
emotional or even philosophical import, 
to name but a few possibilities.
The students’ own photographs can 
also be used as sources of visual material 
for language development. Each student 
is asked to bring a photo to class. In 
pairs, they talk about their photograph 
Ken Milgate brings 
pictures – and lessons – 
to life.
Every picture tells a story, 
so we are told.
to a partner and then respond to any 
questions or comments. In this activity, 
there is knowledge on the one hand and 
enquiry on the other, both channels 
demanding unrehearsed language.
The two photographs accompanying 
this article could generate a range of 
vocabulary items – both photos involve 
sisters of very different kinds – and 
could initiate any number of peripheral 
exercises.
Photo 1
Handing out copies of the first photo, I 
would start by inviting my students to say 
what they see in the picture, at the same 
time commenting on their observations 
and conjecturing on any issues. The 
significance of the word sister would 
hopefully encourage the students to 
mention family, religion and medical 
connections; the style of clothing should 
elicit clues with respect to time; the pose 
should suggest a publicity shot; the logo 
should be identifiable with a transport 
link; the sum of the investigation would, 
hopefully, prompt the students to want 
answers to these questions: 
 Who was Sister Dora?
 What did she do to deserve to have a 
railway locomotive named in her 
honour?
I would then get the students to search 
the internet for the information needed 
to complete a worksheet with the 
following questions:
 When was Sister Dora born?
 What was her full name?
 Where did she first work as a nurse?
 What happened in 1875 and how did 
this affect Sister Dora?
 What is the connection between Sister 
Dora and railways?
 Where did she die?
 What was the cause of her death?
In discussing the logo, I would ask the 
students to sketch any logos they know 
before I distributed a handout depicting 
international logos for them to identify.
Photo 2
The second photo is of two German 
sisters, Lorena and Kristina. I would 
first ask my students to:
 describe the clothes the girls are 
wearing;
 speculate on the relationship between 
them;
 speculate on the nature of the occasion.
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Photo 1
Sister Dora (born Dorothy 
Wyndlow Pattison in 1832) was 
a nun who devoted her life to 
nursing the sick in Walsall, UK. 
During a smallpox outbreak in 
1875, she treated over 12,000 
patients. For the last two years 
of her life, she worked at a 
hospital overlooking the South 
Staffordshire Railway. She 
developed a strong friendship 
with the railway workers, who 
were often injured in industrial 
Photo 2
Lorena, the younger child in the photo, 
is carrying a Schultüte, a paper cone 
which parents and grandparents give 
to children on their first day of school. 
The cone is filled with toys, chocolate, 
sweets and school supplies – intended 
to make the child’s first experience of 
school more enjoyable. This custom is 
common in Germany, Austria and the 
Czech Republic.
marken@milgatefamily.co.uk
Ken Milgate has over 
40 years’ experience of 
teaching ESOL in further 
education. He is a 
reflective practitioner 
with research interests 
in innovative teaching 
strategies, and he used 
to be Chief Examiner and 
Distance Learning Tutor 
for Eurolink, preparing 
prospective ESOL 
teachers worldwide.
If the students were unable to identify 
or guess the significance of the day 
(Lorena’s first day at school), I would 
tell them. We would then discuss 
customs in other countries associated 
with this rite of passage.
All photographs have stories to tell and 
messages to impart. The long-term 
benefit of these activities should be that 
the students view the photographs they 
encounter as sources of vocabulary 
extension and linguistic exploitation.
With so many photographs nowavailable online, these exercises can be 
repeated and extended without involving 
you or the students in any expense, and 
this will also promote the development of 
IT skills for an educational purpose. In 
no time at all, the students will increase 
their awareness of the world about them 
and extend their active vocabulary and 
powers of deduction. 
accidents. They raised money 
to buy her a horse and cart 
so that she could visit 
housebound patients more 
easily. Sister Dora died of 
breast cancer in 1878, and 
18 railwaymen in full uniform 
carried her coffin to the 
cemetery. This photo shows 
someone dressed as Sister 
Dora for a railway festival, 
standing next to the engine 
which was named after her.
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Reviews
English for Academic Purposes
by Edward de Chazal
OUP 2014
978-0-19-442371-7
A substantial addition to the Oxford 
Handbooks for Language Teachers series, 
this book is intended for EAP practitioners 
globally, which is a welcome reminder 
that the field extends well beyond UK 
university contexts. It provides a survey of 
the literature, including six of the more 
well-known works covering the 
development of EAP as a distinct area of 
ELT. These are divided into the more 
theoretically and the more practically 
focused. The book claims in its 
Introduction to offer a ‘comprehensive, up 
to date and coherent account of the field 
... an accessible description of EAP 
practice ... grounded in current theories 
and developments in the field’, and it 
does, indeed, fulfil this brief. 
The book is clearly organised into 
theory and practice sections, moving from 
‘The Field of EAP’ to chapters on each of 
the four skills, and arriving at the final three 
chapters which take a more practical 
approach, covering materials, assessment 
and technologies. Especially welcome is 
Chapter 12 on technologies, which was 
written by Aisha Walker. At the end of 
each chapter, there are useful references 
for further reading. The scope is broad 
and this has necessitated an overview 
approach. It also reflects the author’s views 
of the field, as he states in the Introduction. 
If the aim is to provoke further healthy 
debate, this has been achieved.
In terms of the rapid development of 
the field, especially regarding its widening 
diversity and use of technologies, an 
up-to-date account is useful. In addition, 
the author does not shy away from the 
key issues, some of them attracting 
controversy, such as the English for 
General Academic Purposes or English 
for Specific Academic Purposes debate 
(a general approach or a subject-specific 
approach for teaching academic skills 
and language). The extent to which 
organisations like BALEAP, a global 
association for practitioners of EAP, cover 
the teaching of EAP outside the UK is a 
second key issue. Both these topics are 
covered in Chapter 2. The status of the 
EAP teacher is a third important issue that 
de Chazal addresses; he offers 
constructive comments regarding the 
reach, scope and influence of the EAP 
practitioner. BALEAP features 
prominently; its EAP teacher competency 
framework underpins the discussion of 
teaching practices and the professional 
and personal development that is so 
desirable. 
The book covers the whole field of 
EAP, from foundation courses, through 
pre-sessional programmes to in-sessional 
support. It was pleasing to see secondary 
EAP, a relatively little-known area, 
mentioned. In the discussion of issues 
such as the ‘specific versus general’ 
approach to EAP teaching and materials, 
however, de Chazal appears to be firmly 
rooted in the pre-sessional general EAP 
course in a higher-education setting. 
The level of explanation is extremely 
clear, and the pedagogic style in which 
de Chazal writes makes it particularly 
valuable for early-career second-language 
MA TESOL students and for those 
responsible for leading EAP initiatives in 
their institution, as a tool to aid teacher 
education. This includes non-language 
teachers and administrators. For those 
making the transition from EFL or ESP to 
EAP, one of the practically-oriented EAP 
books may be more attractive, initially, 
especially where shortage of time is a 
factor. De Chazal’s book would, however, 
effectively support a teacher’s post- 
pre-sessional reflection.
Clare Anderson
Cambridge, UK
Subscribers can get a 12.5% discount 
on this book. Go to the ETp website and 
quote ETPQR0314 at the checkout.
Translation and Own-language 
Activities
by Philip Kerr
CUP 2014
978-1-107-64578-3
Two things about the title of this timely 
book are worth pointing out. Firstly, 
following Guy Cook (Translation in 
Language Teaching, OUP 2010) the 
author uses the term own language in 
preference to mother tongue, native 
language or L1. Secondly, own language 
(OL) use is often equated with translation, 
but the title makes it clear that OL use 
does not necessarily entail translation.
In Chapter 1, ‘Introduction’, beginning 
with the observation that the ‘use of the 
learner’s own language in language 
teaching is a contentious issue’, Kerr 
reviews the history of the use and 
non-use of OL in language teaching. He 
convincingly counters the arguments, 
prejudices and misunderstandings which 
have led to the widespread rejection of 
OL as a useful contributor to the learning 
process, and adduces a number of 
reasons why OL use should be at least 
tolerated, and sometimes encouraged. 
This introductory chapter repays careful 
reading, and is especially recommended 
for anyone who is still sceptical about the 
value of translation and OL in language 
teaching and learning.
Chapter 2, ‘Techniques’, describes 
general ways in which OL can be used in 
the course of teaching: in the service of 
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Reviews
classroom management, preparation for 
speaking activities, as a remedy for fatigue 
and lack of concentration, and so on.
Chapter 3, ‘Attitudes’, includes 
activities to elicit the learners’ attitudes to 
OL use and to negotiate class rules for 
when, why and how much OL may be 
used during lessons.
Chapter 4, ‘Tools’, has activities for 
learners to share, experiment with and 
evaluate the proliferating range of 
bilingual and bilingualised dictionaries, 
translation tools and other resources 
available in print and online.
Chapter 5, ‘Reverse translation’, 
presents eight variations on the time-
honoured procedure of translating into 
OL and then back into the target 
language, or vice-versa.
The 17 activities in Chapter 6, 
‘Language skills’, show how translation 
and OL can be used to support work on 
the four skills, and the 14 activities in 
Chapter 7, ‘Language focus’, suggest 
ways of integrating translation and OL in 
work on lexis and grammar.
The activities are annotated according 
to which of three broad types of classes 
they can be used with:
Type A: The teacher can only use English; 
the learners have no shared language.
Type B: The teacher can only use English; 
the learners have a shared language.
Type C: The learners have a shared 
language, which the teacher can also use.
The Appendix contains outlines of 
two teacher-training seminars on the 
topic of the book, one for pre-service 
teachers and one for in-service teachers.
In a book such as this, it is clearly 
impossible to provide other-language 
samples which are relevant to every 
possible reader. Nevertheless, the OL 
lexical samples and texts are almost all 
from Romance languages (especially 
French) and German; this is a rather narrow 
selection of languages, and it would have 
been useful to cast the net wider.
No doubt, some teachers will 
recognise some of the activities as things 
they already do, perhaps without thinking 
about it. Others will welcome thebroad 
range of options presented for making 
principled and effective use of translation 
and OL. Others still may be shocked by 
some of the suggested activities, but 
hopefully, even they will be persuaded, 
by the descriptions of the activities 
themselves and by the words of wisdom 
in the ‘Introduction’ and the introductory 
sections of the chapters, to dip their toes 
in the water and begin to exploit the 
resources of their learners’ languages.
Jonathan Marks
Łeba, Poland
Subscribers can get a 12.5% discount 
on this book. Go to the ETp website and 
quote ETPQR0314 at the checkout.
Seeing Beyond Dementia
by Rita Salomon
Radcliffe 2014
978-1-84619-892-2
This is a handbook for carers with English 
as a second language who work with 
dementia patients in an English-speaking 
care system. It is written from the 
perspective of the UK, where many carers 
are not native speakers of English. 
Communication with dementia patients is 
not easy at the best of times, and is made 
even more difficult if carer and patient 
don’t share the same language. This book 
attempts to address this issue by 
presenting the current thinking on person- 
centred dementia care and, at the same 
time, offering help with the vocabulary that 
carers will need, together with examples of 
sentences that are appropriate to use with 
patients in a variety of situations. The focus 
is on good day-to-day communication skills 
and promoting positive interaction 
between patients and carers.
Unfortunately, many people for whom 
this book would be a useful resource may 
not get past the rather depressing sepia 
cover. Also, the fact that the book is 
intended for carers with English as a 
second language is hidden in the subtitle, 
which is not very eye-catching.
Having a parent in a care home 
myself, I found this book to be extremely 
useful because it is full of information on 
dementia, explains very clearly and 
sensitively the problems and issues that 
arise with this condition and offers good 
advice about how to deal with them. There 
is an admirable focus on helping preserve 
the dignity of the patients, emphasising 
their strengths rather than their 
weaknesses and accepting and honouring 
their reality, even when it is not your own. 
There is no doubt that the author knows 
her stuff when it comes to dementia care, 
and it is really good that she includes the 
voices of dementia sufferers themselves, 
who are able to articulate what their 
experience is like, what they find helpful 
and how they like to be treated.
That said, I was a little less convinced 
by the approach to English language 
teaching, which is one of the aims of the 
book. I feel that what is needed is a little 
more than lists of relevant vocabulary to 
translate and some, admittedly extremely 
useful, sentences that could be used. 
Having witnessed first-hand the 
communication difficulties carers from 
other countries can experience, I would 
say that some kind of listening component, 
involving examples of conversations with 
patients and giving opportunities for 
pronunciation practice, would be 
absolutely crucial in a book of this kind.
This book goes a long way towards 
helping carers in the dementia field, and I 
wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. I feel, 
however, that there is another book 
waiting to be written, equally well-
grounded from the social care 
perspective, but also informed by ELT 
methodology and practice.
Deirdre Watson
Hull, UK
Subscribers can get a 12.5% discount 
on this book. Go to the ETp website 
and quote ETPQR0314 at the checkout.
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Playing on words
Riddles can be in straightforward question and 
answer form:
Q What’s black and white and red all over?
A A newspaper. (‘red’ = ‘read’)
Q What can go up a chimney down, but can’t 
come down a chimney up?
A An umbrella.
Q 1st of January (New Year’s Day) is exactly one 
week after 25th December (Christmas Day). So, 
how can it be that in 2016, Christmas falls on a 
Sunday, with New Year’s Day being on a Friday?
A If you are talking about a single calendar year, 
1st January comes FIRST, and so 25th December 
of the same year is never on the same day of the 
week. 2016 is also a leap year, having 29 days in 
February, adding a second day to the shift.
Q I cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
 Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
 I lie behind stars and under hills,
 And empty holes I fill.
 What am I?
A The dark.
Making assumptions
Riddles help to show how much we make assumptions in what 
we read or hear. These three show this particularly well:
Q 100 feet in the air, but its back is on the ground. What is it?
A A dead centipede.
Q You are my brother, but I am not your brother. Who am I?
A Your sister.
Q There have been cases of twins being born of different days 
due to the deliveries taking place either side of midnight – 
have you heard of the brother and sister who were born on 
exactly the same day but were not twins? Why not?
A They were joined by a further sibling, and so were triplets.
Playing 
tricks
Q What is the centre of 
gravity?
A V. (graVity)
Q There is a watermelon that weighs 100 kilos and is 99% water. After a few hours in the hot sun, the water 
content is down to 98%. How many kilos of 
water have been 
lost to evaporation?
A 50! At the start, 1% (=1 kg) ISN’T water. At the end, it’s still 1kg, but is now 2% of the whole; this means that this horrendously-sized vegetable has now come down to the almost manageable 50 kg.
Iced tea 
brainTEAser
On page 48 you will find 
an activity based on a 
brainteaser, which you 
might like to use with 
your students.
I 
have spoken before about my pride in, and 
admiration for, the glorious language of 
English. I also take some pride in some 
elements of the English sense of humour; I say 
‘some’ as although good slapstick can be very 
funny indeed, I am in greater thrall to the clever 
use of the language and general wordplay.
The deft use of puns is a great delight, and 
there is often much humour in other wordplay, 
such as riddles and brainteasers.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 47
Detective riddles
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle gives his famous detective 
Sherlock Holmes a wonderful line: ‘When you have 
eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however 
improbable, must be the truth.’ This is a very useful 
concept to have in mind when tackling some of the 
more abstruse riddles:
Q A man was driving a black car. His lights were off. 
There was no moon. A cat was in the middle of the 
road. How did he know to stop?
A No lights, no moon – it was a bright sunny day!
Q A man lives on the tenth floor of his building. 
Whenever he wants to go out, he takes the lift down to 
the ground floor. When he returns, he takes the lift to 
the seventh floor and walks up the stairs to the tenth. 
He hates walking up stairs, so why does he do this?
A He is very short, and he can’t reach the lift buttons 
above the one for the seventh floor. In a variation of this 
riddle, he takes the lift to the tenth floor on rainy days 
(because he uses his umbrella to press the button).
Q Anthony and Cleopatra are found dead on the floor of 
a villa in Egypt. Nearby is a large broken bowl. There 
is no mark on either of their bodies and they were not 
poisoned – how did they die?
A They were goldfish – their bowl got knocked off the 
table and shattered.
Q As I was going to St Ives, 
 I met a man with seven wives. 
 Each wife had seven sacks. 
 Each sack had seven cats. 
 Each cat had seven kits. 
 Kits, cats, sacks and wives, 
 How many were there going to St Ives?
A Just one – the man and his entourage are assumed to 
be coming the other way, ie from St Ives.
Q One evening a man started to run. Thenhe turned left. 
Soon after, he turned left again. Then he started 
running home. When he got home, there were two 
masked men waiting for him. Who were they?
A The pitcher and the umpire – he was playing baseball.
Poetic riddles
I remember very fondly the style of riddle that I always 
think of as being traditional. These are in the form of 
poems, which reveal a letter of the answer at a time. 
The clues ran something like: 
My first (letter of the answer) is in TOOTH, but never 
in TOT. 
TOT has all the letters of TOOTH with the exception 
of H, so this is the first letter of the answer. That is a 
particularly obvious one, and they are rarely as simple. 
Here’s an example:
My first is in SHED but never in WORKSHOP.
My second is in DON’T! but never in STOP!
My third is in WINE but not in GLASS.
The fourth is in TOP-UP? but nowhere in PASS.
The fifth is in OPERA, initially seen.
And my last is in RIDDLE, or fishy beam.
Answer: EDITOR
How it works out:
My first is in SHED but never in WORKSHOP.
My second is in DON’T! but never in STOP!
My third is in WINE but not in GLASS.
The fourth is in TOP-UP? but nowhere in PASS.
The fifth is in OPERA, initially seen. (‘initially’ referring to 
the initial letter of opera)
And my last is in RIDDLE, or fishy beam. (the fish is a 
BREAM, or beam + R)
Here are three more:
1 My first is in FIRE but not in GRATE.
 My second is in EARLY but not in LATE.
 My third is in MUSIC and also in TUNE.
 My fourth is in DISTINCT but not in SOON.
 My last is in FROST and also in SLEET.
 When ripe, I am juicy and tasty and sweet.
 What am I?
2 My first is in LAMP but not in LIGHT.
 My second is in MAY but not in MIGHT.
 My third is in DART and also in BOARD.
 My fourth is in STRING but not in CORD.
 My last is in SEE but not in GLANCE.
 I am a city renowned for romance.
 Where am I?
3 My first is in ACT but not in PLAY.
 My second is in APRIL but not in MAY.
 My third is in NOBLE and also in LORD.
 My fourth is in CARD but not in BOARD.
 My last is in STACK but not in HAY.
 You look at me every single day.
 What am I?
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48 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com • Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green
The history 
of riddles
And while we are on the subject of poetry, riddles 
occur extensively in Old English verse, whose 
principal exponent was Aldhelm, who lived in the 
seventh century, and was himself inspired by the 
fourth- or fifth-century Latin poet Symphosius. 
In the Anglo-Saxon world, wit had its original 
non-humorous meaning of brainpower, or ability to 
reason. This wit was taught with a form of oral 
tradition called the riddle. 
Old Norse mythology often refers to wisdom-
contests, frequently as a passport to the release of 
one of the contestants as an alternative to some 
unpleasant fate at the hands of the opponent.
The Greeks were also fond of riddles. An example of 
an early Greek riddle (or ‘charade’) goes like this:
My first, tho’ water, cures no thirst,
My next alone has soul,
And when he lives upon my first,
He then is called my whole.
The answer to this charade is ‘sea-man’. 
Here is another distinguished example, 
written much later by no less than Jane Austen:
When my first is a task to a young girl of spirit,
And my second confines her to finish the piece,
How hard is her fate! but how great is her merit
If by taking my whole she effects her release!
The answer is ‘hem-lock’ (a poison).
Death by iced tea
This activity could be used with students at all levels, 
though you may need to pre-teach some vocabulary 
(eg iced tea, survived, poisoned ) to lower-level students.
1 Dictate the following brainteaser to the class. You could 
do this as a dictogloss (see Sasha Wajynryb’s article on 
page 36) so long as you make sure that everyone ends up 
with a text that contains the correct information and all 
the relevant details.
International 
riddles
Our wordplay isn’t confined to English alone – in the UK, our close neighbours are the French, and we have ‘borrowed’ many words from them to enrich our vocabulary: chic, cul de sac, laissez-faire, etc, and we are not above using the punning effect of similar pronunciation on words in the two languages:
Q There were two teams of three cats each in a rowing competition, one French team and one English. Which team won?
A The English, as ‘un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq’. (un, deux, trois cats sank)
Two sisters went out to a restaurant to 
have dinner. They both ordered iced 
tea. One of the sisters was very thirsty 
and drank very fast. She drank five 
glasses of iced tea in the time it took 
the other to drink one glass. The sister 
who drank one glass died, while the 
other survived. All the drinks were 
poisoned. Why did the sister who had 
more iced tea survive?
2 Check the students’ texts. Then put them into pairs or 
small groups and get them to discuss the story and come 
up with possible answers to the question at the end.
3 Get the pairs or groups to share their solutions with the 
class. They could vote on the best suggestion.
4 Confirm the answer if anyone has worked it out. 
(The poison was in the centre of the ice cubes. The ice 
in the glasses of the sister who drank quickly never had 
time to melt, so she didn’t drink any poison.) If no one has 
worked it out, either reveal the answer to the class or give 
them some clues in the form of questions. Begin with the 
first question and add the others, one by one as 
necessary, until they get the answer.
 a) What exactly was in the glasses of iced tea?
 b) What was different about the way the sisters drank the 
iced tea?
 c) When the sisters had drunk the iced tea, what was 
different about their glasses?
 d) What part of the drink was poisoned?
5 Encourage the students to discuss in groups, and then 
share with the class, any riddles or brainteasers that are 
popular in their country. Help them to translate them into 
English.
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50 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Swimming, 
not sinking
I N T H E C L A S S R O O M
Swimming, 
not sinking
T
he final exam for my ‘English 
Communication’ course 
consisted of two questions: 
What did you learn in my class 
this semester? and What grade do you 
feel you have earned? The students who 
tookthis course were mostly first-
semester freshmen at the Korea 
Advanced Institute of Science and 
Technology, Korea’s top science and 
engineering university. The majority of 
their undergraduate classes will be 
conducted in English, and the aim of 
this course was to prepare them to 
survive in this challenging environment.
Many of the answers given by the 
students to the first exam question were 
prefaced by descriptions of their shock 
when they heard there was no textbook 
for the course. They expected the course 
to be a continuation of either their 
grammar-focused English classes from 
high school or the basic conversation 
drilling that was common at the private 
institutes they attended. They did not 
expect the focus of the course to be solo 
and group projects that were to be 
completed exclusively in English. 
First-semester freshmen begin the 
majority of their courses wide-eyed and 
unsure, and English classes are no 
exception. The students are often reserved 
and afraid of making mistakes. One 
student confessed during his final exam 
that he didn’t have any confidence in 
English after high school. This was 
because the school placed all the 
emphasis on grammatical accuracy, and 
he was constantly being told that he was 
wrong. However, communicating 
successfully with group members on 
projects throughout the semester had 
taught him the opposite. He now looks at 
situations where he needs to communicate 
in English as opportunities instead of 
threats. What type of course could have 
changed his attitude in only one semester?
The course
The way I teach my sections of the 
English Communication course at 
KAIST has changed dramatically over 
the last six years and I have evolved as an 
educator. I was given a coursebook in my 
first year here and told to finish it by the 
end of the semester. After a few years, the 
book was changed, but I only found a few 
pages of it really useful for my students so 
I stopped using it. When they complained 
that it had been a waste of money buying 
the book, I took this to heart and used 
one of my summer breaks to overhaul 
my entire approach to the course.
When I graduated from university, I 
had two main skills: reading books and 
taking tests. This did not serve me well 
in my first round of job interviews. I was 
disappointed that I had not graduated 
with more skills: it was skills that 
employers were after, and I was lacking. 
This was where I started when I began 
to design my new course. I asked myself 
what skills my students needed in order 
to succeed in a university environment 
in English and beyond. A professional 
attitude is something employers desire, 
and I expected my students to attend 
and participate in class with that in 
mind. I decided that attendance and 
Tim Thompson 
focuses on real-world 
communication skills.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 51
participation were, therefore, worth 20 
percent of the total grade.
I wanted to build the course around 
three Ps: practicality, portfolios and 
perpetual. Practicality was important 
because the students would be studying 
and interacting through English in their 
courses for the next three and a half 
years at KAIST. Portfolios allow students 
to feel pride in their accomplishments at 
the end of the semester; they can look 
back on the things they have created, and 
remember what they did to complete 
them successfully; they can also become 
aware of the pitfalls that can cause a 
project to end in an unsatisfactory way. 
Perpetual refers to the idea that media 
projects can be posted online in order to 
create institutional memory and serve as 
an example for the next group of 
students taking the course. Many of the 
projects were based on some aspect of 
the university, such as the best places to 
eat or how to get a part-time job as a 
tutor. Some groups created videos 
explaining how to successfully complete 
projects they had undertaken earlier in 
the course. 
thinking about the importance of 
choosing an appropriate topic whenever 
they had to speak to a group of people. 
They had to consider whether their 
chosen topic was something that their 
group members would already know 
about or care to learn about. By noting 
the responses of their group members, 
the students became more aware of the 
importance of topic selection.
The second goal was organising the 
content, and this was the primary focus 
on the first day of small-group discussion 
practice. Organising the content could 
mean choosing to tell a story using time 
as the organisational framework, listing 
key facts from the article, or simply 
describing how the article made them 
feel. The next class focused on time 
management, with a goal of three 
minutes per speaker. The third class 
focused on delivery aspects, such as eye 
contact and speaking speed. On the final 
day of group discussion practice, the 
students stood up when it was their turn 
to provide the background information 
for the discussion. Interestingly, the 
discussion leaders noted that it was more 
stressful speaking to their peers when 
they were no longer at the same eye level.
Solo presentations
The students may not have been explicitly 
aware of this, but they had been slowly 
building towards speaking in front of a 
larger group. They were now ready to 
make short presentations in front of the 
class. Each student made two ungraded 
presentations over the next two weeks. 
The first three-minute presentation was 
informative and the second was 
persuasive. They always chose their own 
topics, and feedback was given based on 
three criteria: preparation, delivery and 
content. The students were expected to be 
prepared to deliver their content to their 
audience inside a given time limit (three 
minutes +/- 15 seconds). The second 
presentation was filmed, and the students 
had access to the videos in order to see 
for themselves what they were doing well 
and what they needed to improve. Solo 
presentations in the style of their choice 
(informative or persuasive) and on the 
topic of their choice were then used as a 
graded midterm exam. Topics from 
previous presentations could not be 
repeated. Scoring was out of 15 points, 
with five points each allotted to 
preparation, delivery and content. I 
didn’t use a checklist rubric because I 
find that I spend more time looking at 
the rubric than at the speaker. I graded 
holistically and made notes.
Group presentations
Group presentations were also planned 
and given before the midterm period. 
The students were expected to make two 
group presentations. The first one 
received feedback and suggestions for 
improvement and the second one was 
graded. The content had to be updated 
from the first presentation to the second, 
but the main topic had to be the same. 
Teamwork was graded, in addition to 
preparation, delivery and content. All 
group members shared the same score 
Portfolios allow 
students to feel pride in 
their accomplishments; 
they can look back 
on the things they 
have created, and 
remember what they 
did to complete 
them successfully
The goal of the 
group presentations 
was to create a 
synergistic effect, 
with each person’s 
presentation developing 
the common theme 
further
Media projects 
can be posted online 
in order to serve as 
an example for the 
next group of students 
taking the course
Group discussions
The first skill we concentrated on in the 
course was small-group discussion, and 
it covered the first two weeks of the 
semester. Each student was expected to 
bring in an article which was written in 
English and was about a topic they were 
interested in. They would then present 
key points from this article to two or three 
other students, and focus on speaking 
about the article, not reading from it. 
The presenter would then lead a short 
discussion about the article’s content. The 
first goalfor this activity was justifying 
why the topic would be interesting for 
the other group members. This got them 
and were, therefore, responsible for each 
other’s production. Teamwork included 
having another team member forward 
the PowerPoint slides while the presenter 
was speaking. and transition to the next 
speaker if the group members spoke one 
at a time. Groups were also given the 
freedom to make their presentation into 
a roleplay, panel or debate if they 
wished. In these cases, teamwork meant 
sharing the floor. The goal of the group 
presentations was to create a synergistic 
effect, with each person’s presentation 
developing the common theme further, 
rather than simply having three or four 
consecutive speakers on the same topic. 
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52 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Swimming, 
not sinking
thompson@kaist.ac.kr
Tim Thompson has been 
teaching in South Korea 
for 14 years and is 
currently a visiting 
professor at the Korea 
Advanced Institute of 
Science and Technology. 
He specialises in 
teaching presentation 
and interview skills.
Group presentations were graded out of 
20 points, allocated in the same way as 
the solo presentations, but with five 
additional points for teamwork.
After the midterm period, I showed 
the students their attendance/
participation scores as well as their solo 
and group presentation scores. They 
could see if they were meeting the 
course’s expectations up to this point or 
if they needed to step things up. This 
made a big difference when I asked them 
what grade they thought they had 
earned at the end of the semester.
A podcast project
After the midterm break, we started on 
two major group projects: making 
podcasts and making videos. Both 
projects lasted three weeks and were worth 
15 points each. I wanted the students to 
look at these projects as something they 
could show a company or graduate school 
as an example of a skill they possessed, 
not merely as an assignment that would 
receive a grade and then be thrown away. 
The results could be shared on the internet 
and could be used to represent the 
students’ abilities and experiences.
The podcast (basically a recorded 
radio show) project required the students 
to work with a partner or in a group of 
three. Pairs were expected to design and 
create two four- or five-minute podcast 
episodes, and groups of three had to 
create two seven- or eight-minute episodes. 
The podcasts were to be designed with a 
target audience in mind and with a main 
theme that could be carried out over a 
hypothetical ten-episode season. Groups 
were required to submit a marketing 
plan outline with their second episode, 
which described their target audience 
and suggested three ways to reach them. 
The audio-only aspect of podcasts 
required the students to focus on their 
spoken delivery. They were allowed to 
read their scripts, but needed to try to 
sound natural while doing so. They were 
encouraged to manage their time so that 
they could come to me during 
preparation classes to check the 
grammar in their scripts and run ideas 
by me before and after recording. 
Groups who were able to do this almost 
always received the maximum score.
The students were not explicitly 
taught which technology to use or how 
to use it for the final two projects. I told 
them that they could come to me if they 
needed help and suggested a few 
software programs (Audacity and 
Windows Movie Maker), but they were 
expected to learn on their own. During 
the final interview, many students 
commented that learning how to use the 
software themselves was very motivating 
and they were more confident about 
learning things independently now.
While it is far from perfect, and 
constantly in a state of flux, I am happy 
that my English Communication course 
gives the students the opportunity to 
acquire skills and experiences. Critics 
could, rightly, point out that the 
students are missing an opportunity to 
improve their grammar, since mistakes 
are rarely pointed out. However, Korea’s 
emphasis on grammar in the public 
school system has provided these 
students with every opportunity to learn 
the basics, and I feel it is now time to 
sink or swim. Reading a book about 
swimming probably won’t save you if 
you fall in the ocean; you have to get in 
the water and learn. By focusing on 
practical, timely communication and the 
skills associated with it, my students 
learn how to improve their chances of 
success, both in their first and second 
language, once the course is complete. 
They learn organisational skills that can 
be used for their writing course in the 
next semester. They learn a lot of new 
content from their classmates’ discussion 
topics, presentations and media projects. 
They also learn by getting their hands 
dirty and making mistakes. 
When the students were able to 
reflect on this before their 15-point final 
exam, most saw what all the hard work 
was for and how a coursebook wasn’t 
going to get the job done. They had to 
do things for themselves, just as they will 
have to in the real world. 
Reading a book 
about swimming 
probably won’t save 
you if you fall in the 
ocean; you have to get 
in the water and learn
A video project
The final projects involved making 
videos. Part one consisted of three 
30-second commercials. The first was to 
advertise something worth visiting in the 
city we live in. The second was a public 
service announcement about making 
something in the city better. The third 
featured something at our university that 
the public might not know about. Bonus 
points were available if the teams got 
actual feedback from someone connected 
to the topics they chose. For example, if 
the topic for the advertising video was a 
restaurant, feedback from the restaurant’s 
owner or manager would garner points. 
The second project was a two-minute-
long video, and it was meant for the next 
year’s freshmen. The goal was to re-teach 
one of the projects from the course. Tips 
were to be given on how to complete the 
project efficiently and successfully.
Swimming, 
not sinking
In previous years, I did not use a lot 
of class time for preparation: it was 
always set for homework. However, by 
letting the students brainstorm and work 
on their scripts in class (observing an 
‘English only in the classroom’ rule) I 
watched them gain confidence by using 
their English for practical purposes over 
the entire 50 minutes of a lesson. The 
students learnt that grammar can affect 
understanding and needs attention, but 
that some grammar mistakes can be 
ignored, as they are by native speakers. 
Giving them time to work in class and 
ensuring that they did so in English was a 
win–win situation. The students gained 
confidence and motivation by discovering 
they could complete tasks and accomplish 
their goals in English. They worked 
harder when they needed to know how to 
communicate their feelings about a given 
topic in order to complete their current 
project. Students in this class were not 
studying English for a hypothetical 
situation in the future: they needed to 
know how to say something now, and that 
increased their motivation to find it out.
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MET_IATEFL_2014_4c A4.indd 1 03/06/2014label to 
for each stage of the lesson. For novice 
teachers, preparing a lesson plan almost 
always takes longer than the lesson itself! 
Labels
Here are some of the different ways that 
language teachers have labelled elements 
of a lesson plan:
 Time 
How long will each stage take?
 Interaction patterns 
Who is talking to whom? This is often 
listed as T–S (teacher to students), 
S–S (student to student), S–T (student 
to teacher).
 Aim 
What is the objective for each stage?
 Outcome 
What do you expect the students will 
have accomplished or learnt at the end 
of that stage? This is often phrased as: 
‘by the end of this stage, the learners 
will have …’.
 Material 
What teaching material will the 
students be using at each stage (eg what 
worksheet or what coursebook page)?
More labels
In addition to the above labels, we can 
label different stages of the lesson 
according to pedagogical principles of 
how a lesson should be organised. 
Here are some of the ways this has 
been done in language teaching. Some 
may be very familiar to you all, others 
may be new:
 PPP (Present, Practise, Produce) 
 Perhaps one of the most famous 
acronyms in lesson labelling, these 
labels refer to the main stages of a 
class. Although it has been much 
maligned, it is still a standard lesson 
procedure and very easy to explain to 
novice teachers. The problem with 
PPP is that it is too prescriptive for 
many teachers (you have to label the 
stages in that order).
 TTT (Test, Teach, Test) 
 This is another well-known way of 
organising a lesson into three stages. 
The first stage involves activities that 
attempt to find out what the students 
Lindsay Clandfield 
proposes a practical new 
perspective for planning 
lessons.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 5
We need to remind 
ourselves that, while the 
projector and computer 
are very useful tools, 
they are only part of 
what goes on in the 
language classroom
already know about a language point. 
This is followed by explicit teaching to 
fill in any gaps in the students’ 
knowledge, and then a final testing 
stage determines whether the students 
can now put this language to use.
 ESA (Engage, Study, Activate) 
 Coined by Jeremy Harmer in The 
Practice of English Language Teaching 
as an alternative to PPP, these are also 
labels for lesson stages. These stages 
can be moved around, as long as the 
first stage is Engage; individual stages 
can be repeated as well (so you can 
have EAS, ESA, ESEA). 
 ARC (Authentic, Restricted, 
Clarification) 
 This method of labelling is more about 
the kind of language being produced 
in the classroom, be it restricted, 
unrestricted and authentic, or the 
teacher clarifying and explaining 
language. Originally coined by Jim 
Scrivener, the ARC model stages are 
similar to ESA in that they can also be 
moved around and repeated (so you 
can have ARC, CRA, ACRA, etc). 
 OHE (Observe, Hypothesise, 
Experiment)
 This form of labelling a lesson’s stages 
comes from Michael Lewis’s lexical 
approach. Here, the emphasis is 
placed on getting the students actively 
taking part in each stage of the 
process, and appears to favour a more 
inductive approach to language (ie the 
students figure things out on their 
own to some extent).
Many teachers will tell you that, after 
their initial training, and barring 
exceptions like an observed lesson, they 
don’t produce anything like such detailed 
lesson plans. One could, therefore, ask: 
Is it useful?
I believe the answer is yes. Going 
through the process of labelling a lesson 
plan as we are learning to teach – or 
doing it every once in a while as we are 
teaching – makes us reflect on what we 
are doing and the different elements that 
we consciously think of which go into a 
lesson.
A new label
Over the past 20 years, I would venture 
to say that there has been relatively little 
change in what elements go into lesson 
plans from the ones I have outlined 
above. 
There has, however, been a slight 
change in the physical layout of many 
classrooms around the world, and the 
way that teachers are using it: that is, the 
presence of a computer, a projector and 
an internet connection.
Screens and projectors have actually 
been around for a long time. Televisions 
and overhead projectors were being used 
in schools from the 1960s onwards. But 
their use was often limited, either 
because there were not enough of them 
to go round (Does anyone else 
remember ‘signing out’ an overhead 
projector or TV for a class? I do!) or 
there was a lack of accessible materials 
to use with them. 
getting too wrapped up in the ‘bells and 
whistles’ of projecting interesting things, 
and then running out of time for the rest 
of my lesson.
We need to remind ourselves that, 
while the projector and computer are 
very useful tools, they are only part of 
what goes on in the language classroom.
A new perspective
I would like to propose another way of 
thinking about the stages of a lesson, and 
labelling them, taking the reality of the 
projector in the classroom into account. 
I call it Heads up, Heads down, 
Heads together. 
 Heads up is for presentation-type 
work (often with a projector).
 Heads down is for quiet individual 
student work.
 Heads together is for communicative 
tasks or groupwork, including 
whole-class discussions.
Each part of a lesson can be identified 
with one of these labels, and a good 
language lesson should have all three 
elements. 
Let’s look at them in turn.
Heads up
These stages of the lesson are primarily 
for teacher-led, lockstep work. This 
usually means using a projector or 
whiteboard. The kinds of activities that 
can be used in a heads up stage are:
 Lead-in activities using images or 
video on the topic of the lesson to 
engage and motivate the students.
 Language explanation work 
(grammar and vocabulary teaching) 
or clarification of complicated tasks.
 Live listening activities (for example, 
a lecture on a topic, accompanied by 
a slideshow).
 Feedback on answers to exercises.
 Student presentations, especially if 
they are at the front of the class and 
showing/sharing something they have 
created.
Modern projectors (or beamers) that 
connect to a computer are now 
becoming increasingly ubiquitous. The 
fact that these computers can connect to 
the internet means that teachers have a 
huge wealth of material to draw on to 
supplement their classes. In addition, 
interactive whiteboards provide various 
other ways of sharing and displaying 
information. 
The result has been an increase in 
what could be labelled ‘heads up’ work. 
This is seen by many proponents of 
education technology as a good thing. 
Interactive whiteboards, for example, are 
hailed for making classrooms what 
Pete Sharma and Barney Barrett call 
‘a “heads up” learning environment 
instead of each student being bent over 
their book’.
However, I believe that the presence 
of this technology has made it tempting 
to teach in a far more ‘heads up’ manner 
than perhaps we should.
PowerPoint presentations to explain 
language points, videos and slideshows 
to engage students with the lesson 
content are all great, but they can 
sometimes take away much needed time 
for other important things. 
Personally, I have found myself 
Heads up, therefore, is any part of the 
lesson where the students’ attention is 
focused on the screen or on a particular 
individual (usually the teacher, but it 
could also be another student).
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6 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Heads up, 
heads down, 
heads together
lclandfield@yahoo.ca
Lindsay Clandfield is 
an award-winning writer, 
teacher, teacher trainer 
and international 
speaker in the field 
of English language 
teaching. He has written 
coursebooks and 
methodology09:14
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54 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Ask me another!
I N T H E C L A S S R O O M
Ask me another!
A student’s ability to answer a 
question (oral or written) 
correctly shows a teacher that it 
is safe to assume that:
a) the student understands the meaning 
of the question;
b) the student understands the form of 
the question.
Of course, the extent of this 
understanding will vary.
However, I believe a correct answer to 
a question inadvertently triggers another 
assumption from the teacher: that the 
student is also capable of producing the 
same type of question themselves.
My experience as both a language 
teacher and learner suggests that students’ 
ability to understand and answer 
questions is often more advanced than 
their ability to produce them. The reason 
for this may not be that the one skill is 
more difficult than the other, but because 
in many language classes the practice of 
producing questions is neglected in favour 
of the practice of answering questions. 
This neglect can potentially stunt a 
student’s development, as it deprives them 
of the confidence and ability to participate 
in class discussions and activities. 
There are a number of theories that 
account for the general difficulties 
students have in forming questions. 
Manfred Pienemann and Malcolm 
Johnston claim that question-building 
follows a set of natural developmental 
stages, and that only over time can 
students overcome their errors. Others 
claim that L1 transference (when 
students transfer grammatical syntax 
from their own native language to the L2) 
and cultural factors (eg in some countries 
a teacher-centred format is preferred, 
and students are not encouraged to 
participate or question) also affect the 
process. Although there is evidence to 
suggest that these are contributing 
factors to the problem, it is also evident 
that if question forms and meanings are 
not practised more frequently in the 
classroom, students will continue to 
make errors and lack the confidence to 
develop their English skills. The purpose 
of this article is to provide teachers with 
four question-practising activities that 
have benefited me and my students in the 
past, and will hopefully benefit others.
These activities can be used in 
conjunction with new grammar points, 
as a review or as warmers. They are 
predominantly aimed at pre-
intermediate to advanced students, but 
could be tailored for lower levels.
1 The question is …?
For this activity (based on the popular 
US TV show Jeopardy) you need a 
collection of pictures of different nouns 
(or the objects themselves), which can 
either be random or connected to a 
particular topic. The activity can be done 
with the whole class, in groups, in pairs 
or one-to-one. The aim is for the students 
to formulate questions, to which the 
noun shown in the picture is the answer. 
For example, if the noun is France, one 
possible question would be Where can 
you see the Eiffel Tower? The benefit of 
this activity is that there is no one correct 
question, but a number of possible 
questions. The only rule is that the 
question cannot contain the noun itself. 
2 Twenty questions
In this activity, the teacher, or a student, 
chooses a noun (not something very 
obscure). If it is a student who selects the 
noun, they could be given a list prepared 
by the teacher from which to choose. 
They don’t tell the class what it is. The 
other students try to guess the noun by 
asking up to 20 yes/no questions. 
The game is over once a student 
guesses the noun. The game can be 
repeated as many times as the teacher 
wants. The activity can be done with the 
whole class, in groups, in pairs or 
one-to-one.
3 Survey
The students work in pairs or groups and 
ask each other questions. Each student 
should be given a list of questions (the 
number depends on the time available) 
to ask their partner or their group. The 
questions can be about specific topics (eg 
hobbies), based on different question 
types (eg yes/no questions, tag questions) 
or could involve a variety of topics and 
question types. The students record their 
partner’s or group members’ answers on 
a survey form. Depending on the level 
of the students, they can be encouraged 
to devise some original questions, in 
addition to those given to them. 
4 Interview
In this activity, the students read the 
script of an interview dialogue involving 
two people. However, they only get the 
interviewee’s answers, so they have to 
construct questions that correspond to 
these answers. For example:
Q: ___________________________________?
A: My hobbies are watching TV, listening 
to music; and jogging.
 (A correct question would be What are 
your hobbies?)
Q: ___________________________________?
A: I go jogging three times a week.
 (A correct question would be How 
often do you go jogging?)
The interview can be set in any context 
and can contain as many answers as the 
teacher wants. I usually use this activity 
for individual practice, but it has also 
been effective in pairwork. Although 
this is a writing activity, once the 
dialogue has been completed it can be 
used for a roleplay. 
For lower-level students, the activity 
could be adapted into a word-ordering 
exercise. with the questions provided, but 
in jumbled order. The students’ task is to 
put the words into the correct order. 
Kayvon Havaei-Ahary shows that for every answer, 
there’s a question.
kayvonhavaeiahary@gmail.com
Kayvon Havaei-Ahary has 
been teaching English for 
three years in a Japanese 
senior high school. He is 
also currently studying 
for a Master’s in TESOL 
at Nottingham University, 
UK, via distance learning. 
He is particularly 
interested in developing 
creative ways in which 
language can be taught 
in the EFL classroom.
Pienemann, M and Johnston, M ‘An 
acquisition-based procedure for second 
language assessment (ESL)’ Australian 
Review of Applied Linguistics 9 (1) 1986
Pienemann, M and Johnston, M ‘Factors 
influencing the development of language 
proficiency’ In Nunan, D (Ed) Applying 
Second Language Acquisition Research 
Adelaide National Curriculum Resource 
Centre 1987Pa
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56 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Value your voiceValue your voice
T E A C H E R D E V E L O P M E N T
The voice is the tool a teacher uses 
most. It is always there, there is 
no need to pack it and, like 
everything that we use on a daily basis, 
we tend not to value it until something 
goes wrong. But the voice is more fragile 
than we think. In extreme cases, we can 
lose it, and this will affect our livelihood. 
Not every teacher can expect to be a 
Joyce Walters: the London teacher who 
was awarded £150,000 from the local 
council in compensation for ignoring 
her pleas over her voice problems. 
While we can control how, and how 
often, we use our voice, it is also highly 
subject to external conditions, such as 
those at our workplace. But let us start 
with the voice itself.
The voice
The breath is thefoundation of your 
voice. You need to take in enough breath 
to enable you to speak loudly and for 
long enough. This does not mean 
huffing and puffing. Instead, before you 
start speaking, you should take in 
enough air so that you can feel your 
diaphragm pulling down, then bring 
that air up into the chest while centring 
and aligning your back. This sounds like 
a lot of effort, but bad posture can be 
seriously debilitating in the long term. It 
might be worthwhile seeking the help of 
a voice coach to get it right. You need to 
stick at it, as bad habits are often 
stronger than the desire for change. 
Yoga and pilates are also useful for 
promoting good posture.
Your voice needs amplification or 
resonance to be heard. It resonates 
through your chest, the nasal and 
pharyngeal passages in the back of your 
throat and your mouth. Think of the 
whole body – not just the mouth – as a 
resonating chamber. As you hum or 
make vowel sounds, you can check 
where your voice is resonating and hear 
the changes you can make. It is possible 
to produce both a low and rich timbre 
and a more nasal tone, though one will 
feel more natural than the other.
Ming E Wong believes we should care for our most important tool.
Using your voice
Don’t forget to have a warm-up. The 
voice actually comes from a pair of vocal 
folds which vibrate only when we speak. 
So warm up these folds before you speak 
by humming. The /m/ and /n/ sounds 
will give them a gentle workout. You can 
also simulate a siren – the low and high 
sounds will stretch your vocal folds 
gently and help your voice to become 
more expressive. This is vital when you 
are reading to children or giving a lecture. 
Nothing kills an audience quicker than a 
boring, monotonous voice.
Avoid assaults on the voice. 
Sometimes we need to remove phlegm 
from our throats, but many people clear 
their throat or cough out of nervous 
habit. Throat-clearing is an irritant on 
the vocal folds and coughing is 
tantamount to punching them. In most 
cases, it only serves to exacerbate the 
situation. It is much better to avoid 
foods that induce phlegm, such as 
oranges, sweets and dairy products. 
Drink water or suck sugar-free pastilles 
to remove itchiness or a ticklish feeling. 
Both shouting and whispering impose 
unnecessary pressure on the voice – 
prolonged shouting can even lead to 
nodules on the vocal cords. And, of 
course, smoking is a terrible assault on 
the vocal folds.
Vocal health is part of physical 
well-being, so the usual pre-requisites 
for health apply – get enough sleep, eat 
sensibly, drink plenty of water, exercise 
and relax at regular intervals. Menopause 
and age can also affect the voice, but 
they do not necessarily impair it.
The teaching environment
Just as actors and singers are spurred on 
by their surroundings, so teachers need a 
good teaching environment in order to 
do their best. 
Check your classroom – are there 
competing sounds from lights, radiators, 
air-conditioners and overhead 
projectors? Can the windows and doors 
be closed properly? Is the room clean 
and dust-free? You should always drink 
enough water to hydrate your voice, but 
you can also help it (and add ambience 
to your surroundings) by putting plants 
or a small aquarium in your classroom 
so that it is not a parched, dried-out 
space. Obviously, this works best if you 
teach in the same classroom all the time. 
But even if you are an external trainer, 
talking to your supervisor or client 
about your workspace should show that 
you are a professional, interested in 
doing your job well. 
If you require a microphone, request 
a wireless one. Fixed microphones 
restrict your movement. They also make 
it easy for your voice to trail off when 
you move or for you to shock your 
audience when you suddenly raise your 
voice. Fixed microphones also produce 
clumsy feedback noises. A wireless 
microphone allows you to move 
naturally and speak less self-consciously.
Protecting your voice
Don’t forget to incorporate ‘voice naps’ – 
yes, stop talking! Appoint class assistants 
to read texts aloud, and encourage your 
students to peer-evaluate. Use hand-
signals, bells or whistles to indicate the 
start and end of activities. Watch a movie 
or documentary in class. At the end of 
the workday, rest your voice.
Avoid unnecessary speaking by 
preparing your materials carefully. 
Handouts should have tasks that are 
self-evident. Make your instructions 
clear and succinct so that you don’t have 
to repeat them. 
Plan your lessons. While this doesn’t 
mean that you have to follow a lesson 
plan slavishly, you should be clear what 
you want to do at each stage. Students 
like their teachers to be clear and 
confident. While rambling or thinking 
out loud is natural and unavoidable, 
such ‘unplanned’ talk can be unclear 
and distracting – and it’s yet more work 
for your voice! 
Ming Wong is originally 
from Singapore, but is 
currently based in 
Frankfurt, Germany, 
where she teaches at 
universities, community 
colleges and companies. 
She is also a freelance 
writer and intercultural 
trainer, specialising in 
Southeast Asian culture.
mingee@t-online.de
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 57
T E C H N O L O G Y
Flip, follow 
 and feedback
Flip, follow 
 and feedback
W
hen I came across the idea 
of the flipped classroom 
(giving the students 
language and content input 
to study at home and using the lesson time 
for the sort of practice exercises usually 
done for homework), I immediately 
became interested in it because I liked 
the concept of handing over the learning 
process to the learners themselves. 
Moreover, I thought that this new 
approach for delivering content in English 
could spark up my students’ motivation 
and provide them with a challenge. 
When I started devising the project 
described here, I realised that flipping 
the classroom was just one step, maybe a 
disorienting one, towards my learning 
outcomes. I felt the need, therefore, to 
develop the concept further in order to 
tailor it to my students’ needs. This is 
how I came up with the idea of a 
three-phase approach involving three Fs: 
flip, follow and feedback.
What does the project 
involve?
My ‘Flip, follow and feedback’ project 
was designed for my pre-intermediate 
Italian EFL learners, and centred on 
using a model video, which I produced 
myself, about Lucca, their hometown. 
The students were then set the task of 
creating their own videos.
The project could be done in 
different learning contexts and for 
different purposes, ranging from a CLIL 
history lesson to studying the 
vocabulary of architecture on an ESP 
course. It would also be useful for 
developing integrated skills. Both the 
project itself, and the video employed as 
its central resource, are examples which 
could be adapted to suit the needs of 
any type of learner.
The project draws inspiration from 
the flipped classroom model, but it goes 
forward and adds further developments. 
I initially decided just to try to flip my 
class by giving the students a video 
about the history of Lucca to watch at 
home, but then I realised that this could 
be the springboard for activating a 
deeper learning circle. The project is, 
therefore, carefully structured in different 
steps in which the flipped moment is just 
a part. These are described below, and 
there is more information in the lesson 
plan on page 59.
Flip ...
First, the learners are given the video to 
watch outside the classroom, whenever 
and wherever they want. They are also 
given worksheets (see page 60) to 
complete and to reflect upon before the 
lesson. They then come to class to share 
information, check their comprehension 
and ask questions. During this phase, 
they build up their knowledge 
cooperatively and inductively, using 
English as the medium to interact both 
with the content (the history of Lucca)and with the teacher and their classmates. 
Above all, they have to pool their 
resources to cope with a different 
approach to learning, and they have to 
use a wide range of learning strategies – 
not just those specific to language 
learning, but also strategies for learning 
in general. For example, after viewing 
the video and filling in the worksheet 
designed to check comprehension, they 
have to reflect on how they tackled the 
Laura Nanna’s flip 
is anything but a flop.
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58 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Flip, follow 
 and feedback
nannalaura@virgilio.it
Laura Nanna teaches 
English to teenagers 
and adults in Italy. She 
has published articles 
on English language 
methodology and CLIL. 
Her interests focus on 
new approaches to 
teaching English, 
especially using creativity. 
She was nominated for 
The Macmillan Education 
Award for New Talent 
in Writing at the ELTONs 
in 2014.
activity, which makes them aware of the 
processes at play. In other words, inverting 
the order of the teacher’s explanation in 
class and the homework by providing 
the video for self-study before the lesson, 
helps encourage learner autonomy, not 
only linguistically, but also holistically.
Follow ...
In the ‘follow’ phase, the learners have to 
follow the model video provided by the 
teacher and produce their own videos on 
the sights of Lucca. They do research on 
the internet, study, work together and 
prepare to be filmed in the town. The 
teacher provides them with an outline 
for their video narration, and they can 
watch and re-watch the original video to 
familiarise themselves with both the 
verbal and non-verbal communication 
necessary to structure their performance. 
The video in this phase becomes an 
invaluable resource, providing prompts, 
ideas and models of behaviour and 
attitudes. Providing models to help the 
students structure their work is a 
traditional technique. The novelty here 
is that the learners can use the model 
video at their own pace, having it at their 
disposal whenever and as many times as 
they want. During the preparation of 
the video commentary and during the 
filming, the teacher takes notes of the 
learners’ feelings, impressions and 
comments about the task.
Feedback.
The last phase of the project is ‘feedback’. 
In actual fact, feedback accompanies 
every single stage of the project and isn’t 
left until the end. However, a specific 
moment has to be identified when data 
from the learners is collected, shared and 
compared. Here, the learners’ reflection 
and metacognitive strategies play a 
pivotal role in enhancing the learning 
process and promoting learner autonomy. 
The use of action-research tools, such as 
the learner reflection questionnaire and 
the teacher’s step-by-step field notes, helps 
bridge the gaps throughout the project: 
they support the building of knowledge 
and skills development, and offer a useful 
guide for any learners who are disoriented 
by this new approach.
Why flip, follow and 
feedback?
The idea of giving the video for 
homework, instead of having the 
students watch it in class or giving a 
traditional presentation myself, 
underpinned a constructivist approach 
to learning which enabled the students 
to work actively and independently from 
the beginning. What really made the 
difference was the fact that I was 
presenting Lucca in the video myself – it 
was not a clip downloaded from 
YouTube. Having the teacher as the 
presenter in the video acted as a filter, 
enabling the content to be delivered 
appropriately in terms of information 
load and linguistic complexity. In other 
words, it was a presentation tailor-made 
for the target audience. The learners 
were able to watch the video at home or 
on their mobile phones and had it with 
them all the time as a benchmark to 
support their work on the task. In 
addition, each learner’s needs were 
catered for, and students with special 
needs could profit from ‘pausing and 
rewinding the teacher’.
After the students had watched the 
video for homework, I could devote the 
following lesson to discussion, 
interaction and cooperative learning, 
using that precious time efficiently to 
listen to my students and to assist them 
in their personal discovery of knowledge 
instead of simply presenting content.
Afterwards, I realised that the video 
was a real ‘treasure trove’ of possibilities, 
and I saw ways in which it could be 
exploited in many different learning 
situations. By using this video, I tried to 
activate the learners’ observation skills 
and make them aware that speaking a 
foreign language is more than just 
uttering words: it also involves their 
behaviour, feelings and actions. This was 
the most enjoyable and student-centred 
phase of the project as it involved 
guiding the students to create their own 
narratives, according to their own 
individual personalities and styles. 
Last but not least, the ongoing 
feedback was crucial for the effectiveness 
of the project. The awareness-raising tools 
I employed were fundamental to reducing 
the learners’ anxiety and encouraging 
them to reflect on their learning. The 
on-the-spot field notes I took and the 
sharing of opinions significantly glued 
the different phases together and 
signposted the flow of the project. 
The real novelty of this project is not 
in the use of a common video or 
technology as a resource for teaching 
and learning, with all the benefits it 
brings, but how it can be used to 
integrate, to reverse, to personalise and 
to create learning and teaching products. 
Here, there is no ‘teacher versus video’ 
collision at play, but both the teacher 
and the learners blend with the 
technology in creating new learning 
spaces. This is made possible, first and 
foremost, by teachers who are not 
overpowered by technology but, instead, 
are able to act as guides, facilitators and 
models in directing the students towards 
the learning path. In addition, 
continuous feedback helps train the 
learners to make use of technology in 
order to reach their goals, rather than 
being driven by it. 
As regards the practical aspects of 
making the original video, I found this 
great fun and it took about two hours 
using a video camera and the assistance 
of two kind colleagues, who then 
downloaded it onto the computer and 
edited it. It was worth making, 
especially in terms of reproducibility of 
the lesson and as a permanent recording 
of it which can be used for many 
different purposes. The latter aspect is 
particularly interesting for me: the video 
can pave the way to new learning 
projects and can suggest further 
activities.
This project was a positive and 
rewarding experience for both me and 
my learners. The novelty factor of 
flipping the classroom was motivating, 
and the task encouraged the learners to 
be creative as language learners and 
performers. 
The project can be adapted to any 
learning situation or content – so why 
not try it yourself ? 
Flip, follow 
 and feedback
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 59
Lesson plan: Flip, follow and feedback
Learner level: B1 (CEF) 
Time: It is difficult to be precise about the time needed for this 
project as some activities were carried out in an asynchronous 
way, typical of the flipped classroom. It took about ten hours, 
inside and outside the classroom, to create the teacher’s and 
the 25 students’ videos and to work on the topic in class. 
However, the learning time, which is the key factor in this 
project, is personal for each student.
Materials/resources: Video camera, computer with internet 
access, worksheets
Extra activities/variations
 Learners could subtitle or dub the teacher’s video or their 
classmates’ videos.
 A Moodle e-learning platform may be created, where 
teacher and learners interactand produce activities 
based on the videos.
 Learners may conduct video interviews with each other, 
and talk about their experience of being filmed.
 Learners can create trailers for their videos.
 Learners can create video presentations on any topic and in 
any place, to be given to the teacher to watch at home. 
(Can we call this ‘double flipping’?)
Video-making on the history 
of Lucca 
Setting the task/warming up 
 
 
 
 
 
After viewing the video 
 
 
 
 
Research (monuments) 
 
 
Trip to create students’ videos 
 
Feedback session
The teacher goes to the town centre to create a video about it. She gives a 
presentation, which includes information about the most important monuments 
and historical highlights.
The teacher gives the video to the learners, to be watched outside the classroom 
(on a DVD or usb pendrive or uploaded on the school website).
The teacher conducts a brainstorming activity about the learners’ town to activate prior 
knowledge (Worksheet 1). 
The teacher gives out Worksheet 2 to be completed during the viewing so as to 
develop viewing strategies and to direct the students’ attention towards specific 
elements. The teacher explains that the video can be watched and stopped as many 
times as they need.
The students are given one week to watch the video and complete the worksheet. 
They are also given a questionnaire on how they tackled the viewing task (Worksheet 3). 
The teacher acts as a facilitator and interacts with the students who have completed 
their worksheets in a discussion. The students, in small groups, compare their 
worksheets, ask each other questions and share their impressions and ideas about the 
video. After that, the teacher leads a whole-class session in which all the contributions 
are structured and assembled together on the board. In other words, the teacher helps 
the students combine and build up their knowledge.
The students are asked to research a monument or a place in Lucca in order to 
prepare a presentation on it to be delivered and filmed during an outing to the town 
(Worksheet 4).
The teacher provides the students with an outline (Worksheet 5) to help them prepare 
their presentations, including useful language. 
The students visit the town and they deliver their presentations in front of a video 
camera at the relevant locations. The teacher accompanies them, jotting down 
observations and impressions in her field notes.
After the trip, the students reflect on the activity, share their opinions and give 
feedback. The teacher collates the gathered data (questionnaire, observations, etc) 
to facilitate reflection (Worksheets 3 and 6).
STEPS DESCRIPTION
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60 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Worksheet 3 (Learner reflection questionnaire)
Answer this questionnaire.
Where did you watch the video? 
 at home at school on my mobile
How many times did you watch it? 
 1 2 3 more
Did you use the pause and rewind buttons? 
 no yes – What for? _____________________________
Was the video easy or difficult to understand? 
Why? _______________________________________________
What did you find helpful/easy to understand? 
 the images of places 
 the teacher’s explanation 
 the repetitions of words 
 the fact that I know Lucca 
 watching the video when I wanted 
 watching the video many times 
Comments _________________________________________
Did you like watching the video with your teacher 
presenting Lucca?
 yes no
Worksheet 4
Research your chosen subject.
My monument/building/place is ____________________________________
Find information about the following points:
 Location 
(Where is it?)
 History 
(What period does it belong to? owners, architects, materials, etc)
 Characteristics
Worksheet 5
Prepare your commentary on the part of the video 
you will present. Follow the plan below, and write 
your commentary in three paragraphs.
Introduction (1 minute)
Useful language
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen … welcome to …
Let me introduce myself.
I’m going to present … 
And I’m here to give you some information about …
Body (3–4 minutes)
Prepare a summary of the information you found; 
decide on the most important things.
(Draw an outline or a mind map to help you.)
Useful language
It is in … 
It was built in … by …
The owners were …
Its shape is …
It is made of bricks. 
It was used for protecting the town …
As you can see, …
Conclusion (1 minute)
Finish off your speech.
Useful language
This is all about …
Let’s move on to …
Worksheet 1
Draw the perimeter of the walls of Lucca. Write 
down (inside the walls) any place, word or historical 
event that comes to your mind related to your town.
Worksheet 2
1 Watch the video as many times as you need. Pause and rewind 
whenever you want to. Then complete the following table about 
the history of Lucca:
2 Choose a moment in the video that you liked or you didn’t like 
or that you didn’t understand properly. Describe it (images and 
words) and give reasons for your choice. Use the prompts below:
 There is …
 The teacher is presenting …
 I can see …
 I didn’t understand …
3 Watch the video again and find the English equivalent for the 
following words:
 Porta: _________________ Case-Torri: _________________
 Mura: _________________ Mercanti: _________________
 Pianta: _________________ Medioevo: _________________
 Circondare: _________________ Tessile: _________________
 Regno: _________________ Pellegrinaggio: _________________
 Piazza: _________________ Fosso: _________________
 Seta: _________________ 
Period KeywordsCharacteristics Places
Worksheet 6 (Teacher’s field notes)
Phase 
Setting 
the task 
and giving 
out the 
video
Learners 
presenting 
in front of 
a video 
camera
Examples of 
teacher’s notes
Students are a bit 
disoriented by the 
task of watching the 
video at home.
Students are 
engaged and 
very uptight.
Examples of learners’ 
comments
‘Did you really create 
the video?’
‘I’m curious to see you.’
‘It’s fun.’
‘Can I interrupt myself 
during my presentation?’
‘Today we can’t be 
tongue-tied!’
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 61
Nicky Hockly is 
Director of Pedagogy of 
The Consultants-E, an 
online teacher training and 
development consultancy. 
Her most recent books are 
Digital Literacies (Routledge), 
an e-book: Webinars: A 
Cookbook for Educators 
(the-round.com), and Going 
Mobile (Delta Publishing), a 
book on mobile learning. 
She maintains a blog at 
www.emoderationskills.com.
nicky.hockly@theconsultants-e.com
T E C H N O L O G Y
Five things you always wanted 
to know about e-safety 
(but were too afraid to ask)
1 What exactly does ‘e-safety’ 
mean, and why should I care?
We all know that the internet, like real life, 
contains both good and bad. Although 
we don’t want to overplay the dangers 
posed by cyber-criminals, viruses and 
malware, internet scams and worse, we 
can’t deny they exist. E-safety – 
essentially, knowing how to be safe online 
– is something that concerns us all. It 
especially concerns those of us who are 
in charge of children, whether parents or 
teachers of young learners (we’ll define 
‘young learners’ as those under the age 
of 18). If you are a teacher of young 
learners, then understanding e-safety 
should be a key part of your professional 
know-how. 
2 What sort of e-safety issues 
can affect my young learners?
The key question. Arguably, one of the 
most common threats affecting children 
online is cyber-bullying – that is, bullying via 
electronic means such as text messages 
or social media. Other often-cited threats 
include online ‘stranger danger’ 
(befriending people you don’t know online, 
who may not be who they seem to be), 
‘sexting’ (sending messages, images or 
videos with sexual content– something 
that affects teenagers rather than younger 
children), and ‘grooming’ (adults who prey 
on youngsters, and pressure or blackmail 
them for sexual favours). This is a very 
scary-sounding list. Although these 
dangers do all exist, we need to be careful 
about over-reacting. We should keep in 
mind that only a very small percentage of 
online users ever suffer these abuses. So, 
rather than simply terrifying everyone, we 
need to take a proactive stance and help 
children a) to understand and identify 
aberrant online behaviour and b) to develop 
strategies to deal with issues if they 
should ever arise. We also need to show 
our students specific things they can do 
to keep safe online from the outset. 
Prevention is better than cure.
3 So how can I help my young 
learners stay safe online?
Start by focusing on the concrete things 
that children can do to avoid bad situations 
arising in the first place. This involves them 
understanding that they need to limit the 
information about themselves they share 
online, for example in social networking 
profiles. They also need to be careful about 
who they befriend online. And in order to 
challenge the culture of internet bullying, 
we need to teach our young learners to 
be respectful and polite themselves when 
they are dealing with others online – the 
rule of thumb here is to ask ‘Would I 
shout this comment out loud in a 
crowded room?’ Because on a social 
networking site, this is effectively what 
they are doing. And we need to teach 
them that if any bad situations do arise, 
they should go to an adult for help.
4 Should I spend time in class 
talking about this with my 
young learners?
Definitely. The issue of e-safety – and how 
to stay safe online – is an excellent topic 
for a language class (or two). Here are 
some activities you can do:
 Activity 1: Posters (suitable for all 
ages) Have the students brainstorm safe 
practices online and create posters in 
small groups. You could use the poster at 
http://goo.gl/1GRRdr as an example and 
to help them with ideas. 
 Activity 2: Cyber-bullying (suitable for 
teenagers) Have a short discussion about 
cyber-bullying – what it is, and whether 
your learners have heard of (or 
experienced) any examples of it. Show 
them the short award-winning film about 
cyber-bullying at http://goo.gl/fCkNn1, 
and discuss it afterwards.
 Activity 3: Social networks (suitable 
for teenagers) Ask your learners what 
social networks they belong to, what the 
pros and cons are, and what positive or 
negative experiences they have had with 
social networks. Hand out the ‘social 
network discussion cards’ available at 
http://goo.gl/xHMnDD (scroll down for 
them). Ask the learners to work in small 
groups to discuss each situation and to 
come up with a solution.
Of course, the discussion of issues 
surrounding internet use and e-safety 
does not need to be restricted to the 
classroom or to young learners. It’s also 
worth thinking about organising a parents’ 
evening at your school, so as to ensure 
the parents are also equipped to help 
their children stay safe online.
5 Where can I find more 
resources about e-safety?
Because e-safety is such an important 
area, there are plenty of online resources 
for children, teachers and parents. Here 
are two websites I especially recommend:
 NSPCC (National Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Children): 
http://www.nspcc.org.uk/
 CEOP (Child Exploitation and Online 
Protection Centre, part of the UK National 
Crime Agency): http://ceop.police.uk/
Both these sites have advice, tips, 
checklists and video resources about how 
to keep children safe.
Even if your young learners don’t go 
online during your classes, they may have 
access to technology at home – if not 
now, then probably at some point in the 
future. Teaching them to understand the 
importance of e-safety is something that 
will help them both now and in the future.
In this series, Nicky Hockly 
explains aspects of technology which 
some people may be embarrassed to 
confess that they don’t really 
understand. In this article, she explores 
how to keep young learners safe online 
– often referred to as ‘e-safety’.
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Coming soon…
Fully searchable archive via the website
Bringing you the best of Modern English Teacher from the past 5 years
Make sure you hear about it first – subscribe to Modern English Teacher
www.modernenglishteacher.com
MET Website Archive 1.0 ad for ETp.indd 1 06/10/2014 12:39
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 63
Web Russell Stannard 
has a goggle at Google Forms.Webwatcher
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell:
russellstannard@btinternet.com
Help videos on using Google Forms can be found at:
www.teachertrainingvideos.com/googleforms/index.html 
(for the basics)
www.teachertrainingvideos.com/googleforms2/index.html 
(for more advanced features)
The Google suite of tools is pretty useful and I have been 
introducing it more and more into my training. One reason I 
particularly like it is that teachers and students only need 
one log-in, and then have a whole range of tools at their disposal. 
In previous issues, I have covered Blogger, Google Docs and 
Google Sites. Of course, by signing up to Google, you also get 
Google + and a Gmail account. One additional tool, and one that 
is very useful for teachers, students and researchers, is Google 
Forms. This allows you to create questionnaires and surveys very 
easily. It then collates and organises all the information into 
charts and graphs for quick analysis. It is very user-friendly and, 
what’s more, it is free.
How the tool works
You first need a Google account and then you go to your Google 
Drive. There, just click on ‘Create’ and choose ‘Form’. The first 
thing you will be expected to do is to give your form a name and 
choose the layout you want to use. Now you are ready to go. The 
tool is very intuitive. You simply choose from a drop-down menu. 
You are offered a whole range of question types to choose from, 
including multiple-choice, radio buttons, text, a complete 
paragraph, scales, etc. Select the type you want and then write 
in your questions. With some question types, you will need to 
provide the answers as well.
Once you have experimented with the basics, you can begin 
to do quite sophisticated things. For example, you can provide 
‘branch questions’, depending on the answers the students give. 
Let’s imagine your first question is whether a student has ever 
lived in England. If they say ‘Yes’, then they go to question 2, 
which might ask which city they lived in; but if they say ‘No’, they 
automatically jump to question 3. You could develop a whole 
series of branch questions and create a type of maze game that 
the students could work through in groups.
The advanced features, which allow the data to be checked, 
are also very useful, especially if you are trying to gather email 
addresses or numerical information. So, for example, you can 
make sure an @ has been used when the users are filling in their 
email addresses.
More than just a questionnaire
It is also possible to add video and images, so you could embed 
a video that the students have to watch and then answer 
questions on. This is really useful, as teachers are often worried 
that they suggest learning content for the students to watch at 
home, but they never know if they have actually watched it. You 
could include a form where the students insert their names and 
then complete the answers to your questions after watching the 
video. All the information is automatically collated for you, so this 
can be a very useful time-saving device, too.
To add video, you need to click on the ‘Add item’ button. 
Choose ‘Video’ and then either paste in the URL of the video you 
want to use, or search for a video within the system and selectit. 
Adding images is done in more or less the same way, and you 
can upload images from your own computer.
Another useful feature for teachers is the ‘Section header’, 
one of the items that you can include in the form. It allows you to 
paste in text for the students to read and answer questions on. 
You need to play around with all the options, but you will see that 
it is a pretty flexible tool and can do lots of useful things.
Sharing the information
Once you have created your questionnaire or survey, simply click 
on the ‘Send form’ button. You are then given various options for 
sharing the questionnaire. You can embed it in a blog or on a 
website; you can copy the link to the questionnaire and then 
email it to your students; or you can use a whole range of social 
media buttons to help you distribute it. Google Forms will be 
connected to the address book in your Gmail account, too, so 
you can quickly find email addresses by simply writing in the 
names of people from your Gmail address book. 
Saving the information
Your questionnaire will be automatically saved in your Google 
Drive. You can access it at any time and make changes. You can 
also view the results from the questionnaire very easily by 
selecting ‘Responses’ and then choosing ‘Summary of responses’ 
from the drop-down menu. You will notice that everything is 
organised into graphs and summaries. I really find this useful.
How the tool can be used
I have used this tool for questionnaires at the start of a course 
and at the end. I have also got the students to create their own 
questionnaires and share them. I especially like doing this because 
the students practise and process English and learn about using 
Google Forms at the same time. It is a good idea to get them to 
work in pairs to create their questionnaire, gather information and 
then write a report based on the data. They need to think about 
the layout, the appropriate types of questions for the information 
they are trying to gather and then, of course, once they have got 
the data, they need to interpret it and use it to write their reports. 
Google Forms is a simple tool that takes very little time to learn to 
use. And once you have got the hang of it, it can open up a huge 
range of options. To give you a taster, I have created a very short 
questionnaire in Google Forms. If you have just two minutes, you 
can try it out at http://tinyurl.com/nswyq4o.
Russell Stannard is the founder of 
www.teachertrainingvideos.com, 
which won a British Council 
ELTons award for technology. He 
is a freelance teacher and writer 
and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
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64 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
 9 24 6 11 22 23 25 9 22 5 8 22 24 2
 
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 2 7 2 22 24 25 1 7 9 13 19 25 24 9
 T
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 D
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 2 22 10 19 2 24 18 9 1 2
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ETp presents the sixty-eighth in our series of prize 
crosswords. Once you have done it successfully, let 
your students have a go. Send your entry (completed 
crossword grid and quotation), not forgetting to 
include your full name, postal address, email address 
and telephone number, to Prize crossword 68, English 
Teaching professional, Pavilion Publishing and Media 
Ltd, Rayford House, School Road, Hove, BN3 5HX, 
UK. Ten correct entries will be drawn from a hat on 
10 February 2015 and the winners can choose one of 
these titles: Macmillan Collocations Dictionary or 
Macmillan Phrasal Verbs 
Plus. Please indicate your 
choice on your entry.
VERY FREQUENT WORDS
*** Physical damage done to a 
person or a part of their body
*** Used for emphasising that 
something is not imaginary
*** The food that a person or 
animal usually eats
*** Used as part of an infinitive
*** A word used for showing 
that something belongs to a 
particular person or thing 
*** To put your hand on 
someone or something
*** The conditions in the 
atmosphere relating to 
temperature, precipitation, etc
*** A word used for referring 
to yourself 
*** A word used for referring 
to all the people in a group
*** A word used for 
introducing a situation that 
may happen, especially when 
talking about its results
*** A written statement 
showing how much money 
you owe someone for goods 
or services
*** The past tense of eat
FREQUENT WORDS
** An urgent or emotional 
request for something
** Very keen to do something 
** A feeling of great happiness
** A computer that is designed 
to be used by one person at 
home or in an office
** A long thin object, usually 
made of wood, used for 
writing or drawing
** An important test of your 
knowledge
** Causing or involving great 
sadness, because someone 
suffers or dies
** The sound people make 
when they are thinking about 
what to say next
Prize crossword 68 FAIRLY FREQUENT WORDS
* A competition in which you 
answer questions
* A group of soldiers whose 
leader is called a colonel
* To touch someone gently 
several times with a flat hand
* A long journey, especially 
by boat or into space
* A small tool used for 
shaving
* A brown powder used for 
making chocolate-flavoured 
foods and drinks
LESS FREQUENT WORDS
– A plant with small white 
flowers, used for making tea
– Carried in the air
– To make it more difficult for 
someone to do something 
(formal)
– To copy someone’s voice 
or behaviour, especially to 
make people laugh
– A short series of notes in 
jazz or popular music that 
is repeated often
– Thank you (informal)
– A female spirit in ancient 
Greek stories who lives in 
rivers, mountains or forests
– The tube that carries food 
away from your stomach
– A set of kettledrums
– A large piece of cloth you 
hang on a wall for decoration
– A piece of land covered 
with grass
– Someone who knows a lot 
about a particular subject
– To change the way that 
something is presented or 
sold in order to make it seem 
more attractive or interesting
– To send someone back to 
the country where a crime 
was committed for a trial
– A minor argument
To solve the puzzle, find which letter each number represents. 
You can keep a record in the boxes above. The definitions of 
the words in the puzzle are given, but not in the right order. 
When you have finished, you will be able to read the quotation.
Jean-Paul Sartre
– Quiet, gentle and easily 
persuaded by other people 
to do what they want
– Someone who tries to end 
a disagreement
– Great skill in using your 
hands or your mind
– The process of becoming 
old
– Extremely important and 
affecting how something 
develops
– Continuing forever or for 
a very long time
– Not wearing clothes
– Put directly into a vein 
(abbr)
– A document giving details 
of goods or services that 
someone has bought and 
must pay for
– The part of your mind that 
is unconscious and has 
hidden wants and needs
– Arranged in rows, with 
each row slightly higher than 
the row in front
– A group of performers, 
especially one that travels to 
different places to perform
– Lacking energy and not 
wanting to do anything
– A word used for expressing 
a feeling of sudden pain
– A medical condition in 
which you have difficulty 
sleeping
– A large South American 
animal with a long neck and 
a thick coat
– A piece of recorded music 
that a new singer or group 
sends to a recording 
company (informal)
– Something you poura 
liquid or mixture through to 
remove the solid or largest 
pieces
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detection  bandwidth No more than 10% of the signalstrength is lost in the connection to the amplifier input.sig·nal2 /ˈsɪɡnəl/ verb (-ll-, US -l-) 1 [T] to be a sign thatsth exists or is likely to happen  INDICATE (2): ~ sth Theproposal for a new, looser union of sovereign states sig-nalled the end of the old USSR.  ~ that… The crisis sig-nalled that some important changes were taking place inEnglish political culture. 2 [T] to show sth such as a feel-ing or opinion through your actions or attitude: ~ sth Hisgovernment signalled a willingness to abandon the UK'snational veto.  ~ that… The company raised its pricessignificantly, signalling that it did not want a prolongedcostly price war. 3 [I, T] to make a movement or sound togive sb a message, an instruction or a warning: The othership signalled back.  ~ to sb He was waving his arm,signalling to his wife.  ~ (to) sb to do sth The emperorsignalled his chamberlain to show in another delegation. ~ sth The charge was signalled by trumpets.  ~ that… Asthe driver could not see the road behind him, it was theduty of the conductor to signal that the road was clear.sig·na·ture /ˈsɪɡnətʃə(r)/ noun 1 [C] your name as youusually write it, for example at the end of a letter: Twoweeks later, the newspaper delivered a petition to thePrime Minister containing 1.5 million signatures.  sb's ~The artist's signature appears on the picture. 2 [U] the actof signing sth: Under the terms of the Treaty, this agree-ment should have been concluded within 18 months ofsignature.  for ~ (by sb/sth) The Convention is open forsignature by countries which are not members of the Coun-cil of Europe.  ~ of sth Stalin achieved the signature of theJapanese-Soviet Neutrality Pact in April 1941. 3 [C] a par-ticular quality that makes sth different from other similarthings and makes it easy to recognize: sb's ~ Over a groupof films, a director must exhibit certain recurrent charac-teristics of style, which serve as his signature.  ~ (of sth)The vast assemblages of different molecules making up aliving organism can give a form of molecular signature ofthat life for the fossil record.  + noun Vollin also recallsLugosi's signature role, Count Dracula.
sig·nifi·cance  /sɪɡˈnɪfɪkəns/ noun [U,C] 1 theimportance of sth, especially when this has an effect onwhat happens in the future: ~ (of sth) (for sb/sth) Thesignificance of these findings has yet to be fully determined. This legislation has particular significance for olderworkers.  In the Berlin of the early 20th century, this formof architecture had acquired a special significance.  of…~ Two developments in the 1990s were of major signifi-cance.  INSIGNIFICANCE 2 ~ (of sth) the meaning ofsth: There are several scenes in the novel in which Nickponders the significance of a word.  Like so many scien-tific terms, it has taken on a more precise significance. 3(also staˌtistical sigˈnificance) (statistics) the extent to whicha result is different from what would be expected fromRANDOM variation or errors: However, no tests were madefor statistical significance, and no comparison with otherschools was included.  reach ~ Among 18–64 year-oldrespondents, however, this discrepancy did not reachsignificance.
d ADJECTIVE + SIGNIFICANCE great  major  considerable particular  special  real  relative  full  increasing increased The important contributions to astronomy byKuiper were also of great significance for the geologicalsciences.  practical  functional  symbolic  political social  historical  cultural  economic  moral  religious legal  biological  clinical This finding has practicalsignificance, in that empathy can be learned and appliedin real-life situations.
d VERB + SIGNIFICANCE have  understand  explain  discussIt must be established that the car owner understood thesignificance of a notice warning that parked cars would beclamped.  assume  acquire  attach  recognize, see,acknowledge  appreciate  consider, examine  assess,evaluate  determine  emphasize, highlight  test demonstrate, show, indicate  lose  give It is a disease
that will assume increasing significance as the populationages.
sig·nifi·cant  /sɪɡˈnɪfɪkənt/adj. 1 large or important enough tohave an effect or to be noticed:These voters could have a significanteffect on the outcome of the election. Although population ageing is aglobal phenomenon, there are sig-nificant regional differences.  ~ forsb/sth The contributions of Islamiccivilization proved to be as signifi-cant for the West.  it is ~ that… Itwas significant that its nearest rival only had a 5.5 per centshare of the market.  INSIGNIFICANT  thesaurus note atIMPORTANT 2 having a particular meaning: The lighting ofa candle may be symbolically significant if it denotes thebringing of light, that is, enlightenment.  it is ~ that… It isparticularly significant that Branagh selected Belfast forthe play's United Kingdom debut. 3 (statistics) having stat-istical significance  see also SIGNIFICANCE (3): After 3 years,results for breast cancer were no longer statistically signifi-cant.  Munafo et al. (2003) found significant associationsbetween personality and polymorphisms in three genes. INSIGNIFICANT
d SIGNIFICANT + NOUN number  amount  part  proportion way  effect, impact, influence  difference  change variation  increase  decrease, reduction improvement  role  factor  contribution  risk problem Shopping centres bring significant increases intraffic.  This graph highlights the significantimprovements in human development throughout muchof the world.  association, relationship, correlation interaction  predictor The percentage of managers andprofessionals in a neighbourhood is a significant predictorof educational outcomes for children (Crane, 2008).d ADVERB + SIGNIFICANT highly, extremely  particularly potentially Their choice of the word ‘degrade’ is highlysignificant.  especially  increasingly  equally politically  socially  historically  culturally economically  morally Three technological changes areespecially significant.  strongly  consistently statistically It turns out, however, that this relationship isstrongly significant (Figure 3.2).
sig·nifi·cant·ly  /sɪɡˈnɪfɪkəntli/ adv. 1 in a waythat is large or important enough to have an effect onsth or to be noticed: At that time, the sea level was signifi-cantly higher than it is today.  The party systems in Eng-land, Scotland and Wales differ significantly.  A smallchange that lowers the temperature below the meltingpoint significantly reduces water production. 2 in a waythat has a particular meaning: Significantly, however, theLaw Commission recommended that the offence should beregarded as a relatively minor one. 3 (statistics) in a waythat has statistical significance  see also SIGNIFICANCE (3):The sum of the two coefficients is positive, but it is notstatistically significantly different from zero.  The breedingpair density was significantly correlated with the numberof fledglings.
sig·nify  /ˈsɪɡnɪfaɪ/ verb (sig·ni·fies, sig·ni·fy·ing, sig-ni·fied, sig·ni·fied) (formal) 1 [T] to be a sign of sth MEAN1 (1): ~ sth Some saw Obama's election as signi-fying the end of racism in America.  ~ that… Consult-ation signifies that the other person or group is important.2 [T] to show or state sth such as a feeling or intention: ~sth The most widespread of gestures signifying an agree-ment is the handshake.  ~ that… The court will look forsome conduct by the defendant signifying that he assumesresponsibility. 3 [I] (usually used in questions or negative sen-tences) to be important or to matter: The fact that the
WORD FAMILY
significant adj.
significantly adv.
signify verb
significance noun
signification noun
insignificant adj.
insignificantly adv.
insignificance noun
S
OUP EAP Data Standards Ltd, Frome, Somerset – 5/8/2013 EAP A-Z.3d Page749 of 914
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3 simple ways to order:3 simple ways to order:
TEFL Books Revised.indd 3 11/06/2014 16:55
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tdbooks. You 
can find out more about 
him at his website www.
lindsayclandfield.com.
Sharma P and Barrett, B ‘Blended 
Learning: using technology in and beyond 
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blended-learning/updates/Update%20
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Heads down
These stages of the lesson are the quiet 
moments. They involve focused 
individual work. The students are either 
using their coursebooks, or are writing 
something. The kinds of activities that 
can be used in a heads down stage are:
 Completing written language 
exercises.
 Individual writing exercises.
 Silent intensive reading in class, for 
example a coursebook text.
 Silent extensive reading time in class.
 Individual web searching or web-
related work.
 Listening to the class audio and doing 
exercises individually.
 Doing an individual part of a group 
project.
 Taking written tests or exams in class.
 Other information-gap type activities.
 Project work.
 It reminds us that there are moments 
for quiet, focused work. 
 It does not neglect the pairwork/
groupwork feature that is so 
important in the modern 
communicative lesson. 
 Finally, it provides a simple and 
memorable way of looking at our 
class and lesson organisation. 
Why not give it a try?
Suggested answer key for the 
lesson plan on page 7
 1 Heads up 
 2 Heads up 
 3 Heads together
 4 Heads down
 5 Heads down, then heads up 
(for the teacher checking back) 
 6 Heads up 
(although if this grammar point 
started off with the students 
having to figure out a rule together 
in groups, it could be heads 
together then heads up)
 7 Heads down, then heads up 
(although if the students did the 
exercises in pairs, it might be 
heads together then heads up) 
 8 Heads together 
 9 Heads together 
(although if the instructions for this 
were complicated, it might be 
heads up, then heads together)
 10 Heads up
Heads together is any part of the 
lesson where the students are 
explicitly working together. In modern 
communicative classrooms, this will 
usually involve some kind of speaking. 
Heads together sections of a lesson 
are the noisiest parts!
Heads down is any part of the lesson 
where the students are working 
individually. They will usually be focused 
on something in their coursebook, a 
personal computer or tablet or a piece 
of paper.
Heads together
These stages of the lesson are the 
communicative ones. They involve the 
students working together, with the 
teacher as a facilitator or moderator. 
The students are speaking together, or 
are working in pairs or groups on a task 
of some kind. The kinds of activities 
that can be used in a heads together 
stage are:
 Speaking tasks in pairs or small 
groups.
 Mingle speaking activities.
 Collaborative work on language 
exercises.
 Jigsaw readings.
 Roleplays.
A practical perspective
Of course, the potential danger of any 
label is that all labels have a tendency to 
oversimplify things. In reality, there are 
moments during a lesson where it might 
be hard to say if it’s heads up, heads 
down or heads together. The three labels 
may very well overlap:
 If students are all quietly reading the 
same text, but on the whiteboard 
rather than in their books or tablets, is 
this heads up or heads down? (I would 
argue it is ‘heads down’ work, even 
though everyone is looking up at the 
screen.)
 If two students are working together 
on the same exercise, but not speaking 
to each other, is this heads together or 
heads down? 
I’m sure you could find other examples 
of grey areas, but I believe that, for 
many parts of a lesson, a teacher can 
easily visualise which of the three 
perspectives is going on. However, any 
new approach to lesson planning should 
be informed by a desire to be effective 
and practical. 
In the cases where there is an 
overlap, this therefore should not 
necessarily be a problem – these labels 
are not designed to limit, but rather to 
inform and orient us.
Take a look at the sample lesson 
plan on page 7 to see what I mean.
In short, I would argue that this new 
perspective is useful for helping us 
reflect on the way we organise our 
classes, especially with the presence of a 
projector and screen:
 It takes into account the fact that our 
‘heads up’ work has become a lot 
more interesting and visual than 
before. 
Heads up, 
heads down, 
heads together
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 7
Lesson plan
Here is a sample lesson plan, with various labels. Can you 
complete the final column? Remember that there may be 
more than one possibility, and for some stages you could 
have two labels (eg Heads up, heads down). See the key 
on page 6 for suggested answers.
Teacher shows clips from 
various trailers for last 
summer’s blockbuster 
films.
Teacher uses pictures and 
model sentences to elicit 
meaning of key words 
about films.
Students ask and answer 
questions that include 
key words from Stage 2.
Students read a text 
about the key marketing 
decisions made behind 
movie releases.
Students answer 
questions about various 
details in the text; 
teacher checks back.
Teacher gives a short 
presentation of a 
grammar point, using 
examples from the text.
Students do a series of 
short written exercises 
to practise the grammar 
point; teacher checks 
back.
Students do a semi- 
restricted speaking 
activity.
Students do a longer 
speaking task: a 
questionnaire about 
movie-watching habits.
Teacher gives feedback 
on activity, reviews lesson 
aims, assigns homework.
To engage students’ 
interest in the topic 
 
To pre-teach potentially 
difficult vocabulary 
from text 
To activate new 
vocabulary and involve 
students in the topic
Reading for general 
understanding 
 
Reading for 
specific details and 
comprehension of 
key points
To understand and/or 
review key language 
point 
To consolidate 
understanding of 
language point 
 
To consolidate 
understanding of 
language point
To provide fluency 
practice relating to 
the topic 
To wrap up the lesson
Compilation of clips 
from movie trailers 
website 
Sample sentences, 
images 
 
Questions for 
discussion 
Reading text, 
gist questions 
 
Reading text, 
comprehension 
questions 
PowerPoint 
presentation, 
example sentences 
Written exercises 
 
 
 
Speaking exercise 
 
Speaking exercise 
 
 
Homework
3 min 
 
 
5 min 
 
 
5 min 
 
7 min 
 
 
10 min 
 
 
5 min 
 
 
7 min 
 
 
 
5 min 
 
10 min 
 
 
5 min
1 
 
 
2 
 
 
3 
 
4 
 
 
5 
 
 
6 
 
 
7 
 
 
 
8 
 
9 
 
 
10
Stage Description Aim Heads …TimeMaterial
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8 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Is it my 
 turn yet?
S P E A K I N G
Is it my 
 turn yet?
W
hat is ‘fluency’? I have 
heard this question 
discussed in teachers’ 
rooms in London, 
Shanghai, Amsterdam and Prague. In all 
these locations, ‘fluency’, ‘communication’ 
and ‘conversation’ classes are consistently 
popular with students, so there is 
evidently a demand for them and a 
perceived need to develop spoken fluency. 
It is important, therefore, to pin down 
what it means and how we can help our 
students achieve it.
Speaking is often used as a means to 
practise grammar or lexis and is rarely 
taught in coursebooks as a skill for its 
own sake. Discussing an alternative 
model for teaching speaking with my 
colleagues elicited a range of comments 
on what a fluency class should include, 
such as ‘providing students with the 
opportunity to speak’, ‘giving correction 
and feedback’ and ‘pronunciation’. 
When I suggested that there was also a 
need to focus on speaking sub-skills 
such as turn-taking, a few of my 
colleagues brushed this aside, saying 
that the art of turn-taking isthe same in 
all languages, so it isn’t really necessary 
to teach it. 
However, an Italian student 
prompted me to look into the matter 
further when he complained that he had 
plenty to say – and in Italian he had no 
problems – but in English the 
conversation always moved on before he 
had a chance to contribute. In short, he 
failed to take up his turn. Evidently, 
then, a confident and outgoing person 
Problems 
Culture
I tend to reject the assertion that 
turn-taking is a skill which is the same in 
all languages and cultures. I believe that 
many of the problems students have 
with turn-taking can be traced to 
cultural differences which create a lack 
of confidence or a lack of awareness of 
the social norms connected with the 
cooperative principle described above.
Japanese students, for example, often 
have difficulty interrupting other 
speakers or showing disagreement, as 
this is frowned upon in their L1. It is 
also culturally acceptable for Japanese 
speakers to leave a period of silence 
before taking up a turn. When 
participating in discussions with people 
from Western cultures, this may result in 
them losing their turn.
Similarly, students may lack 
awareness of what constitutes an 
inappropriately long turn and may 
overly dominate the conversation. This 
can be due to stress, anxiety and the 
feeling that they must speak in order to 
be successful. It can also result from a 
lack of cultural awareness – they may be 
dominating the conversation in a way 
that is perfectly acceptable in their L1. 
In English, we use non-verbal signals 
to help show our turn-taking intentions. 
Thornbury identifies ‘a sharp intake of 
breath and the raising of the shoulders’ 
as a signal of the wish to take a turn, 
while head nods from listeners 
encourage the speaker to continue. Body 
Jenny Wilde insists on the importance of turn-taking for developing spoken fluency.
perfectly capable of taking up their turns 
in L1 can’t necessarily do so in English. 
What does turn-taking 
involve?
The process of participating fully in 
discussions is very complex, involving 
juggling the skills of listening to others, 
judging how others feel, contributing 
opinions and agreeing/disagreeing in real 
time. According to Scott Thornbury, a 
series of linguistic and cultural norms 
govern spoken interaction, including the 
fact that speakers should take turns to hold 
the floor, long silences should be avoided 
(this is culturally specific) and speakers 
must listen when others are speaking. 
Rob Nolasco and Lois Arthur describe 
the ‘cooperative principle’, which enables 
native speakers to engage in a discussion 
appropriately, saying neither too much nor 
too little. According to this principle, 
turn-taking involves certain skills:
 recognising the appropriate moment 
to get a turn;
 signalling the fact that you want to 
speak;
 holding the floor while you have your 
turn;
 recognising when other speakers are 
signalling their wish to speak;
 yielding the turn.
Students need to be able to do these 
things in order to join an ongoing 
discussion, and they need to do them 
without undue hesitation.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 9
Originally from the UK, 
Jenny Wilde is the 
Corporate Courses 
Coordinator at the 
British Council in Prague, 
Czech Republic. She has 
previously taught in the 
UK, China and the 
Netherlands. Her main 
teaching interests are 
exam preparation and 
effective business 
communication 
techniques.
jenny.wilde@gmail.com
language is inherently culturally specific, 
and our students may neither recognise 
the use of such gestures, nor be able to 
use them appropriately themselves.
Language
Linguistic resources also come into play. 
For example, the under-use of discourse 
markers such as well or right to indicate 
a shift in topic could result in a speaker 
being prematurely interrupted and 
losing their turn. Stress and intonation 
are also important tools for topic 
management: a falling tone on words 
like OK or So often shows that the 
speaker is about to change the topic.
Students may also speak with a 
narrow intonation range which does not 
engage the listeners or hold their 
attention, thus exposing the speaker to 
the likelihood that people will talk over 
them, forcing them to give up their turn. 
This is particularly true of students 
whose L1 does not have as wide an 
intonation range as English, such as 
speakers of Slavic languages or Dutch 
speakers. In addition, students may not 
have been exposed to a sufficient range 
of ‘adjacency pairs’, where the first turn 
determines the second – eg A: May I 
come in here? B: Sure, go ahead – 
meaning that they do not signal or 
respond to agreement, disagreement or 
interruption appropriately. 
Solutions 
It’s evident that if we are to help our 
students to participate successfully in 
discussions, we need to raise their 
awareness of culturally specific norms 
and ensure they have sufficient language 
resources, including lexis, phonology 
and discourse. We also need to help 
them recognise that English speakers 
may use non-verbal signals which are 
different from the ones they use in their 
own cultures, and that these are key to 
indicating intentions during discussions. 
I have used the following methods to 
help develop my students’ awareness of 
the features of turn-taking:
Watch without sound
Watching a recorded discussion without 
sound and having the students guess the 
content helps to raise their awareness of 
paralinguistic features such as body 
language and gesture. It enables the 
students to recognise the extent to which 
these signal the feelings, attitudes and 
turn-taking intentions of the speakers. 
While watching, the students could 
complete a questionnaire, answering 
questions relating to certain speakers’ 
behaviour. For example:
 How does Sue stop the others from 
interrupting?
 Do you think Joe is interested in or 
bored by the discussion?
We can ask the students how they know 
this, in order to highlight the use of 
certain signals. They can then watch with 
the sound on to check if they are right.
Provide an aural model
The same recorded discussion could 
then be used to raise awareness of the 
linguistic features of turn-taking. For 
example, you can give the students a 
transcript of the discussion with key 
lexical phrases used for inviting people 
to speak and allowing someone to 
interrupt, etc blacked out. They have to 
listen for these phrases, which are then 
modelled and drilled.
The students can be asked to 
categorise the phrases according to their 
function and then brainstorm other 
phrases that may fulfil the same role. 
Concept questions can be used to raise 
awareness of intonation features. For 
example: Do we use a wide or narrow 
intonation range when allowing someone 
to interrupt?
The students can then go on to 
practise this language in their own 
discussions.
Increase self-awareness
The students’ own discussions can be 
recorded – most phones have the 
capacity to make video or audio 
recordings. These can provide a fun and 
interesting tool for helping students 
analyse their own interactions and judge 
their success. Questions could be set as 
the students play their recordings back, 
for example:
Did you speak: too much / 
 too little / 
 just right?
Were your contributions: relevant / 
 off topic?
Did you respond to others: well / OK / 
 not at all?
Was your body language: appropriate / 
 inappropriate? 
The aim is to develop the students’ 
sub-skills for participation in future 
discussions and help them realise the 
things they are doing well and those 
they could improve. 
Use a ‘talking stick’
When my students either hold their 
turns too long or have a tendency to stay 
quiet in group discussions, I often use a 
‘talking stick’, which is passed around 
the group members. Only the holder of 
the stick can talkat any one time, and 
all group members have to hold the stick 
at least once. This forces more dominant 
students to relinquish their turns and 
less confident students to take them up. 
I find the anticipation of receiving the 
stick helps the students to focus on the 
discussion and also encourages them to 
use body language and facial signals 
when they want the stick. I also usually 
encourage the use of adjacency pairs 
during the passing of the stick – eg 
Marek, sorry to interrupt, but can I add 
something? Of course. The stick can then 
be taken away, with the students 
encouraged to continue the discussion 
with the same emphasis on shared roles.
I believe that participating in discussions 
is incredibly challenging for students 
because it involves a multitude of skills 
and processes. The sub-skill of turn-
taking is crucial to the success or failure 
of this participation. It is a skill which 
doesn’t necessarily transfer across 
languages and cultures, but is one that 
needs to be encouraged and developed. 
Activities that both raise awareness of 
these skills and provide opportunities 
for practice and feedback need to be 
incorporated into our lessons if we want 
to help our students communicate and 
discuss effectively. 
Nolasco, R and Arthur, L Conversation 
OUP 1987
Thornbury, S How to Teach Speaking 
Pearson 2005
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10 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Student 
storytellers
I N T H E C L A S S R O O M
Student 
storytellers
I
f you regularly tell stories in class, 
your students will soon want to 
become English language 
storytellers, too. You can invite 
them to bring in short folk tales to tell. 
However, it is a good idea to help them 
develop their fluency and confidence 
first by getting them to retell a story that 
you have told them. 
Providing them with a simple 
framework, some effective strategies and 
a short folk tale to retell is an important 
step on the way to helping them become 
autonomous student storytellers.
 
Students want to hear stories 
and sometimes want to tell 
them … there is no better way 
of developing fluency than 
storying. 
Andrew Wright 
When students are first invited to retell 
stories, they naturally tend to imitate the 
way you have told them. They will try to 
use the same structures, vocabulary and 
voice patterns. However, retelling the 
story in another person’s words is 
limiting. Every one of us has our own 
individual storytelling voice. When we 
tell a story, we are not reciting a script, 
so it is useful to establish the fact that 
clear communication is more important 
in storytelling than accuracy. Every time 
a student retells the same story, it will 
increasingly become his or her own.
When they are retelling a story, 
students already know what they want to 
say, so they can focus their attention on 
how to get the listeners to understand and 
enjoy the story; but language learners are 
unlikely to be fluent storytellers in English 
straight away. They may struggle to 
communicate, and hesitate when striving 
to get the story across. However, in their 
desire to convey the story, students often 
manage to make up for limited 
vocabulary by expressing emotion, using 
mime, gesture, facial expression and, 
importantly, their imagination.
The soul never thinks without 
an image. 
Aristotle
Mental imagery is given free rein when 
we create a safe and comfortable 
atmosphere in which students can listen 
to stories openly and retell them freely.
When different students in the same 
class retell the same story, each student’s 
experience of that story will be different. 
This is in part because of mental 
imagery: how the students see the story.
What my students have said about 
retelling a story I have told them is 
revealing: 
 Some students describe what they see 
in their imagination as being like a 
series of still images; others say it is 
like a film. 
 Some see vivid colours, while others 
see it in black and white. 
 Some see true-to-life scenes and 
others see fantastic animation.
 Some students talk about 
remembering the rhythms and 
cadences of their teacher’s voice, while 
others do not recall the voice at all.
David Heathfield 
recommends retelling a tale 
using different techniques.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 11
 Some imagine hearing distinct sounds 
as they retell the story, such as 
trickling water or birdsong; others 
hear no sounds at all.
 Some students are physically involved in 
the action of the story and imagine they 
are in the shoes of the central character: 
running, hiding, fighting, and so on. 
Others feel they are outside the story, 
watching the events happening.
People’s sensory experience is different 
at different moments in the story, too, 
and is determined by a multitude of 
factors, such as their emotional state 
and whether the events in the story 
remind them of personal experiences.
So when you tell the story to your 
students at the outset, be aware of your 
body language, your voice and the 
sensory descriptions you give, and allow 
for the fact that the students will all find 
their own way of imagining and retelling 
the story. 
How potent is the fancy! 
Geoffrey Chaucer
Focusing on mental imagery in 
storytelling makes a positive difference 
to the students’ ability to remember and 
retell a tale. In fact, it is the most 
effective way for students to fully learn 
what the language they are hearing and 
using means.
When retelling a story, students will 
revisit the imagined world of the story 
they created when they were listening. 
They will go inside that world, 
imagining the characters’ appearance, 
their ways of moving and speaking, as 
well as other sensations in that story 
world, such as sound, smell, taste, 
movement and temperature.
A useful technique involves getting 
the students to map a story they have just 
been told by doing a short sequence of 
sketches. This map then acts as a visual 
prompt for the retelling. The students 
themselves choose what to draw and do 
not need to show anyone else. There are 
instructions for a story mapping activity 
on page 12; these can be used with any 
short folk tale. The example above is 
The Snake’s Tale, which was told to me 
by Nafeesa Hajir, a Kurdish woman I 
taught at INTO University of Exeter. 
You can find a video of me telling this 
tale to international learners of English 
on YouTube.
A poor shepherd led his sheep into the countryside to 
graze. There he took out his flute and began to play. 
Within moments, a snake appeared and the shepherd 
became afraid, but the snake raised its head high off the 
ground and began dancing to the beautiful tune he 
played on the flute. When the shepherd finished playing, 
the snake disappeared into its hole in the rocks 
and returned with a gold coin for the shepherd. 
The poor man picked up the coin and returned home, 
but he told no one about the dancing snake. 
The next day, he returned to the same place to graze his 
sheep and played the same tune on his flute. Again, the 
snake danced and, when the shepherd finished playing, 
the snake left and came back from its hole with a gold 
coin. Day after day, the shepherd played for the dancing 
snake and kept the secret from everyone. However, one 
day the shepherd had to travel to the city, so he called 
his son to him and told him what he must do.
That day, the shepherd’s son took the sheep to graze in 
that same place and began to play the same tune on his 
father’s flute. The snake came and danced and, when 
the shepherd boy finished playing, he was rewarded 
with a gold coin. 
The next day, the boy returned with the sheep and 
played upon the flute. As he played, the shepherd’s son 
thought: ‘Why should I get just one gold coin when the 
snake hasso many hidden away? If I kill the snake I can 
take all its gold.’
The Snake’s Tale
When the snake danced close to him, he picked up a 
stone and threw it hard at the snake. He wanted to kill 
the snake, but the snake was too quick and only lost 
the end of its tail. The snake quickly turned and bit the 
shepherd’s son, killing him with its poison.
When the shepherd returned from the city he learnt 
that his son had been killed by the snake and was full 
of sadness. At the same time, he knew that his son 
had not done as he should.
The next day, he returned to that place with his flock of 
sheep and began to play on his flute. Soon the snake 
appeared, but it did not dance. ‘Why do you not 
dance?’ asked the shepherd.
‘No longer will I dance. I will never dance again until 
man has learnt to be true. You can no longer play as 
before and I can no longer dance as before, because 
when you see me, you will remember your son, and 
when I hear your flute, I will remember my tail.’
©
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12 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Student 
storytellers
David Heathfield is a 
freelance storyteller 
and teacher trainer. 
He is the author of 
Storytelling With Our 
Students: Techniques 
for Telling Tales from 
Around the World 
(DELTA Publishing).
www.davidheathfield.co.uk
Students often comment that, when 
they retell a story, it is the longest piece of 
uninterrupted English speaking they have 
ever done. Naturally, when their teacher 
and the students themselves acknowledge 
this achievement, student confidence rises. 
A potent technique indeed!
To cut a long story short …
Retelling a tale is an effective language 
learning activity at all levels, provided a 
‘can do’ atmosphere is created. Students 
will soon realise that the more times they 
retell the same tale to different people, 
the better their storytelling becomes. 
Students need opportunities to practise if 
they are to become confident classroom 
storytellers, and they will succeed if you 
put both teacher and student storytelling 
at the heart of your teaching.
no one else need to see what they draw. 
Then invite them to talk in pairs about 
the snake they imagined. They can 
choose whether or not to show each 
other their drawings. 
Point out that most people see clear 
pictures in their imagination when they 
are being told stories. Explain that one 
way of remembering the events of a story 
is to do a story map by drawing a limited 
number of images as a sequence of very 
quick sketches linked by arrows. Let the 
students know that you drew six sketches 
when learning The Snake’s Tale, and only 
show them the back of your sheet of 
paper at this stage so you don’t influence 
what they draw. Tell them that they can 
learn to retell the story by each doing 
their own six-sketch story map, which 
no one else will see. Tell the story again 
and suggest that the students close their 
eyes and notice images while they listen. 
Before, the students had one minute 
to draw the snake; now, they need to do 
six images in three minutes on the other 
side of their sheet of paper. Some 
students will probably finish with time 
to spare, while others will need to be 
encouraged to draw more quickly. 
4 Get the students to tell the 
story in pairs.
Next, put the students in pairs, sitting 
face to face, and get them to take turns 
to tell their version of The Snake’s Tale, 
glancing for reference at their own story 
map, but without letting their partner 
see it. It’s a good idea for the student 
feeling more confident in each pair to go 
first. The listeners give full attention to 
their storytelling partners and prompt 
them only if they request it.
After all the students have told the 
story for the first time, show them your 
own story map, making it clear that there 
is no single correct way of mapping a 
story. Ask the pairs to talk about how 
useful story mapping is for remembering 
the story. If they want to at this stage, 
they could show and talk about their own 
story maps and compare them with yours.
Some students may benefit from 
hearing the story from you again before 
you ask them to tell it a second time to a 
different partner. This time, they put away 
their story maps and imagine seeing the 
pictures they drew as they retell the story.
5 Extension activity
Encourage your students to retell the 
story to people they know outside the 
class – and to be prepared to report 
back in the next class on what those 
people say about the story itself and 
about the way it was told. 
Student 
storytellers
A story mapping activity
1 Learn the story yourself.
When you have read the story for the 
first time, take a blank sheet of A4 
paper and quickly sketch a sequence of 
about six images that will help you to 
retell it. The first image might show a 
stick figure man who is playing a pipe 
while a snake dances. There may or may 
not be sheep nearby. Put arrows between 
the images to make a simple ‘story map’. 
Only spend three minutes doing this: it 
should be rough, just like the sketches 
your students will do. The first time you 
rehearse telling the story, hold the map 
in your hand as a prompt. Then put it 
away and tell the story again.
2 Tell the story to your students.
Explain to your students that they are 
going to retell the Kurdish story you are 
about to tell them. As you tell the story, 
imagine following your story map but 
don’t have it in your hand.
3 Help the students learn the 
story.
Give out sheets of plain A4 paper and 
ask the students to spend a minute 
drawing the dancing snake while they 
think about the story. Make it clear that 
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14 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
T his is an extended article on 
‘creativity for change’, which was 
started by Brian Tomlinson in Issue 
92. The article has been written by a 
group of language educators who are all 
part of The ‘C’ Group: Creativity for 
Change in Language Education, whose 
aim is to facilitate creative change in 
language education. Each author wrote a 
part and then passed the article on to the 
next author, and so on until the article 
was complete. In this final instalment, we 
hear from Alan Maley, Hitomi Masuhara 
and Chaz Pugliese. Brian Tomlinson then 
sums up.
Factors in implementing 
creativity
Alan Maley
There are five points I should like to make, 
before examining some of the factors that 
might be involved in implementing 
creativity.
1 Like Rod Bolitho in ETp Issue 93, I think 
creativity is readily recognisable but 
difficult to define. The word is so widely 
used that it can mean almost anything.
2 I believe that creativity is at the heart of 
learning, but it is not usually at the heart 
of education. Institutionalised education 
depends on control, measurement and 
conformity. Creativity (rather like its 
cousin, critical thinking) is anathema to 
systems based on control. However 
much they claim to be promoting 
creativity, institutions are dependent on a 
control paradigm, and thusresistant to 
anything which threatens that control. As 
a result, creativity will always have a hard 
time of it.
3 Foreign language teaching, on the 
whole, rates rather low on creativity. 
Teaching is, by its very nature, a 
conservative profession. The 
institutionalisation of teaching into regular 
classroom hours encourages the 
development of relatively comfortable 
routines. Examinations further encourage 
conformity. And, in the present global 
economy, market forces tend to 
discourage ELT publishers from taking 
creative risks.
4 The current obsession with smart 
technology risks confusing novelty with 
creativity. We need to remind ourselves 
constantly that technology should be a 
tool in the service of creativity and not a 
substitute for it – to think how to use the 
new technological advances in creative 
ways, rather then being used by them.
5 Both Jane Arnold and Peter Lutzker 
have referred in this extended article to 
the need for teachers to ‘create a space 
for others to be creative’. I heartily concur. 
The need for ‘perceptive openness’ is 
also key, especially in responding 
creatively, in the moment, to the 
unpredictable unfolding of the classroom 
event. But I would argue that teachers 
themselves need to be creative, partly to 
offer a role model. Creativity is a mind-set 
which is constantly scanning for 
opportunities to do things differently.
Creativity theory
Some of the findings from creativity 
theory (such as those from Teresa 
Amabile and Margaret Boden) suggest 
the importance of the following:
 Playing around – with words, with 
ideas, with techniques … . The playful 
element is key to creative learning and 
has been mentioned by other 
contributors to this article.
 Leaving room for ‘chaos’ to operate by 
offering rich, varied inputs and 
challenging, open-ended activities.
 Trying out new ways of adapting old 
practices.
 Using heuristics and analogy to 
stimulate new thinking. (See 2 below.)
 Building in constraints which scaffold 
creative activity. As Stephen 
Nachmanovitch puts it: ‘structure 
ignites spontaneity’. (See 1 below.)
 Using minimal inputs for maximum 
outputs. 
 Allowing time and silence for ideas to 
incubate. This, too, contrasts with the 
current drive for speed and immediate 
returns on investment.
 Making unusual juxtapositions using 
the random-combination principle. 
(See 3 below.)
 Drawing on other domains, outside 
language pedagogy, for inspiration.
 Being aware that novelty is not enough. 
In order for an innovation to be 
accepted and implemented, the 
context into which it is introduced has 
to be ‘ready’ – or made ready for it – 
and has to perceive its relevance.
 Convincing learners that everyone has 
the capacity for creativity. 
 Ensuring that we give due attention to 
the preparation and verification stages 
of the creative process. Not everything 
is ‘fun and games’. 
 Keeping in mind, however, that delight 
and pleasure are an integral part of the 
process.
Encouraging creativity 
There are several ways in which we can 
promote creativity in the classroom:
1 Using constraints 
In creative writing, for example, activities 
can be set up with rules which both 
stimulate and support creative language 
use, as in acrostics, stem poems, 
mini-sagas, etc (a suggestion from Jane 
Spiro).
2 Using heuristics 
The most famous heuristic is John 
Fanselow’s ‘Do the opposite’. Others 
would include ‘expand’, ‘transfer to 
another medium’, ‘reverse the order’, etc. 
Heuristics may not always lead to positive 
outcomes, but they help get us out of the 
rut of routine – and unless we try them, 
we will never know.
C is for creativity
Alan Maley, Hitomi Masuhara and Chaz Pugliese discuss promoting creativity.
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 15
3 Using the random-combination 
principle 
This involves putting things together 
which have no apparent connection – and 
finding a connection. Jane Spiro suggests 
making new metaphors by combining 
words from two lists at random, and using 
this as a basis for creative writing.
4 Using improvisation activities 
Here we put people into a situation which 
they then have to work out together, 
simply by interacting with others in the 
moment, with no preparation.
Here are some closing thoughts:
‘The teacher’s art is to connect, in real 
time, the living bodies of the students with 
the living body of the knowledge.’ 
(Stephen Nachmanovitch)
‘It would be a simple enough thing to do, 
if only simplicity were not the most 
difficult of all things.’ 
(Carl Jung)
‘It is difficult
to get the news from poems;
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.’ 
(William Carlos Williams)
General creativity
Hitomi Masuhara
So far in this article we have focused on 
creativity in education, language learning 
and teaching. I would like to seek 
implications from the literature on general 
creativity, supported by insights from 
cognitive psychology, neuroscience, 
evolution and animal behaviour studies.
Creativity and correlates
For me, creativity is an inherent 
mechanism that the brain has cultivated 
in its evolution in order to ensure survival 
and development. The neural networks 
are constantly established, renewed and 
reconfigured, according to external and 
internal environmental changes. In this 
sense, the brain itself is fundamentally 
creative. This seems to explain the 
irrepressible manifestation of creativity. 
Creativity can be non-linguistic as well as 
linguistic, but having language and 
conscious awareness enables humans to 
articulate, record and substantiate 
transient and ephemeral creativity in 
concrete forms. The implication of this 
neural view of creativity is that, regardless 
of individual or cultural differences, as 
Xiuqin Zhang and Katie Head assert, 
anyone is potentially capable of creativity, 
though there are evidently different kinds 
and levels of accomplishment.
Creativity and play
Studies of ‘play’ have attracted a lot of 
attention in recent years as a vital source 
for work on creativity and brain 
development. Stuart Brown, for example, 
argues how ‘free play’ is a rich breeding 
ground for creativity in animals, children 
and adults. Teresa Narey points out that 
play goes beyond mud play in a nursery 
prior to the evolution of the mammal. 
Animals in the wild must be alert and 
watchful so as to protect themselves from 
predators. Play also activates the crucial 
areas of the midbrain that control 
emotional association and memory 
formation and retention. Researchers 
argue that play has evolved and persists 
because it encourages physical and 
mental agility and creativity – which is a 
preparation for unexpected situations and 
new environments. Studies indicate that 
deprivation of play results in a lack of 
divergent thinking and flexible social 
adjustment. 
Melinda Wenner argues that free play 
should not be confused with structured 
play with predetermined rules, such as 
games of Scrabble, sports and pre-
school activities. Structured play may 
foster cognitive, physical and social skills, 
but free play provides more opportunities 
to try out unconventional behaviours in 
response to environmental novelty. 
Wenner notes worrying recent reports of 
free play being replaced by structured 
play and pre-school lessons, which may 
be taking away developmental 
opportunities for creativity.
Implications
What seems to emerge is that creativity is 
not an additional luxury but an 
indispensable part of development and 
self-fulfilment. Creativity plays a vital role 
in effective and durable learning. In L2 
teaching, are we not biased toward 
linguistic communication and are we 
giving enough attention to non-linguistic 
expression of creativity?Stories, mime, 
drama, non-linguistic creative responses, 
for example, may not involve speaking, 
but these engaging activities provide 
ample opportunities for exposure to and 
internalisation of language in use. If the 
learners are in an unthreatening 
environment, they are likely to be more 
expressive and teachers can attune to 
their non-linguistic as well as linguistic 
reactions. Do we give enough space or 
opportunities for learners’ voluntary free 
play in L2 teaching? Sandie Mourão 
reports research on the effect of teacher-
led play classes, followed up by L2 
child-initiated play in which the learners 
are given time and space for enjoyment.
to development and innovative use of 
technology. ‘Free play’ means child-like, 
curiosity-driven, imaginative, 
spontaneous, open and unstructured fun 
activities using the mind, the body, 
objects, language and social interaction. 
There are no set goals or rules, apart from 
the inclination towards enjoyment. There 
is no right or wrong. Free play may 
include ‘world play’ in which participants 
play roles, living in stories and fantasies. 
Michele and Robert Root-Bernstein report 
a high correlation between world play and 
creative endeavour among successful 
scientists as well as artists. 
Creativity must come from 
somewhere in evolution. Some clues can 
be found in the studies of play. According 
to research (such as that by Gordon 
Burghardt and Brian Sutton-Smith), play 
behaviours seem to be controlled by 
ancient regions of the brain that existed 
Play has evolved and 
persists because it 
encourages physical 
and mental agility 
and creativity – which 
is a preparation for 
unexpected situations
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16 • Issue 95 November 2014 • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • www.etprofessional.com •
Successful cases from various parts 
of the world demonstrate that developing 
creativity can be resource/cost-friendly 
and doable in curriculum design, testing, 
teacher training, methodology, materials, 
teacher training and in classrooms, 
without drastic changes or demanding 
preparation. In fact, from a ‘free play’ 
point of view, providing more resources 
may be taking away the space and 
opportunities for creativity. What we need 
is freedom and encouragement to try 
something different and fun. 
What do we need to 
know?
Chaz Pugliese
My vision calls for schools, educators and 
policy-makers to stop just paying lip 
service to creativity and start ‘walking the 
talk’. For teachers, creative, imaginative 
thinking and teaching is not an option, it’s 
not an add-on to the curriculum, and it’s 
not something to try out for kicks on a 
Friday afternoon. It’s a way of looking at 
education, it’s a state of mind, a 
declaration of war on conformity, a 
reflection on how we go about the 
business of educating people. Teaching 
creatively and promoting creativity in our 
schools requires a major shift; it entails a 
big, fundamental change in education. 
The questions I’m interested in exploring 
here are these: How do we go about 
implementing the changes that are 
needed? In other words: How do we 
teach creativity? And can creativity 
actually be taught? Before we attempt to 
answer these questions, we need to tear 
down a few myths: 
Myth 1: Creativity – the cluster of 
skills needed to produce an idea or 
manufacture a product that is original 
and valuable, as Robert Sternberg 
defines it – is for just a few lucky gifted 
individuals. 
This may be true for the type of creativity 
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘C-type’ 
creativity, displayed by eminent people. 
But luckily, there’s another type of 
creativity that is much more accessible, 
and that is the everyday ‘c-type’ creativity. 
As it turns out, this latter form of creativity 
can be learnt. 
Myth 2: Creativity depends on a flash 
of inspiration. 
Creative thinking is actually systematic, 
disciplined and logical. 
Myth 3: Creativity is a fixed, unitary 
trait. 
Research has shown, time and again, that 
this is not so, and that creativity is a 
dynamic phenomenon that may change 
over time. 
Myth 4: Creativity is just thinking 
outside the box (ie divergent thinking). 
Researchers talk about creativity being a 
cocktail of various skills, of which 
divergent thinking is only one. 
entails a blend of your own creativity with 
someone else’s. So, devising an original 
idea around, say, a dictation exercise 
would be an example of combinational 
creativity. Risk-taking is about getting out 
of your comfort zone and stepping into the 
learning zone. It’s a necessity, rather than 
an option. Playfulness is the ability to play. 
To quote Csikszentmihalyi: ‘there’s no 
question that a playful attitude is typical 
of creative individuals, coupled with 
perseverance and endurance.’
What could go wrong? 
What has just been outlined above, whilst 
it may facilitate the creative process, is no 
guarantee that creativity will indeed 
happen, for the road is paved with all sorts 
of obstacles. The most formidable of these 
is fear of changes. As teachers, we may 
be reluctant to embrace changes because 
we become what we teach, and our 
techniques, our methods, are inextricably 
linked with our own persona and become 
‘us’. Teaching differently entails a 
temporary loss of identity, which would 
outweigh the advantages of using more 
creative approaches to teaching. In 
addition to fear of changes, there are other 
nasty stumbling blocks: fear of other 
people’s reactions, fear of failure, fear of 
accepting failure, fear of disappointing, 
fear of ‘rocking the boat’, fear of 
uncertainty. Clearly, there can’t be any 
magic wand to make all these negative 
feelings disappear, but perhaps these 
thoughts might help us deal with them: 
 Create a climate for creativity. Create a 
sense of urgency, talk about changes, 
embed them in a vision, and then get 
other people to understand and accept 
this vision. 
 Find your tribe. Being part of a 
like-minded community is invaluable in 
helping you find your creative voice. 
 Find a mentor. Fostering your creative 
spirit often requires a guide, someone 
who believes in you, trusts and 
encourages you to take a creative leap 
and jump off the cliff. 
A school that fosters a spirit of discovery 
and is not driven by grades, scores and 
tests can be created. Creativity can’t be 
the only answer but it would certainly 
constitute a step in the right direction.
As teachers, 
we may be reluctant 
to embrace changes 
because our techniques 
are inextricably linked 
with our own persona
We also need to remind ourselves that 
creativity is a process, and that the journey 
is easier if we take into account three 
elements. The first is the creator’s 
motivation: the great Federico Fellini used 
to say that he needed an excuse for being 
creative. A very useful starting point, then, 
is: What do I need to be creative for? Once 
we’ve established that, we need to ask 
ourselves whether we have enough 
experience in our field to come up with 
something truly innovative. If I haven’t 
spent a considerable amount of time in a 
given field, I risk reinventing the wheel. The 
third element worth remembering is that 
we acquire creativity if we use strategies. E 
Paul Torrance has listed as many as 135.
Creativity strategies
Four strategies that seem to work for me 
are: simplicity, combination, risk-taking 
and playfulness. Simplicity means working 
with minimal or no materials, using people 
as your main resource. Combination 
C is for 
 creativity
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• www.etprofessional.com • ENGLISH TEACHING professional • Issue 95 November 2014 • 17
Amabile, M T Creativity in Context 
Westfield Press 1996
Boden, M The Creative Mind Abacus 
1990
Brown, S with Vaughan, C Play: How It 
Shapes the Brain, Opens