A library of practical ideas for teachers from classroom games and activities to discipline and teacher improvement. Feel free to submit your own ideas.
Business English Ideas1. Shorten
It is difficult for a native speaker to appreciate just how much the length of a text can make it difficult to understand due to factors like not being able to find the right information to answer a (more…)
Although a good EFL exam class teacher will break the students slowly into real exam practice and spend as much time boosting their confidence as showing them how challenging the exam will be, sooner or later the students are going to need a taste of the real thing. Setting your classes up as much like the real exam as possible could (more…)
1. Challenge each other
The best way to make students care about answering the questions correctly is to make those questions ones written by their classmates. Writing those questions to challenge the other teams (more…)
Although in basic terms our job as an EFL exam teacher is to get students used to the real format of the exam, there are many reasons for not always using realistic exam texts or exam tasks. One is that it can ruin their confidence and cause panic each time they see an exam from then on. Another is (more…)
Giving students points in class has so many benefits in terms of motivation and classroom control that some teachers of kids and even adults use games and other activities with points in almost every class (more…)
Applying for a job in English is a stressful and important use of language skills that often comes up in class but is rarely true for more than one or two people. Below are 15 games and other (more…)
1. Musical gapfills
Give the students the lyrics of a song with some words blanked out. It is best if those are words they can guess through rhyme, collocation, logic or (more…)
1. Shared graded reader reviews
Get students to write a review of the book they have read and read each others’ reviews before they choose their next book. When they write the review of that title, (more…)
1. Present Continuous Mimes
Students mime whole Present Continuous sentences until the other students say the whole correct sentence. It is important they don’t stop until people guess (more…)
1. Set yourself goals
One of the things that can make teachers lose motivation is the whole thing becoming a grind of lesson after lesson with no clear final aim. There is another whole article on possible goals to keep yourself motivated (more…)
