English Learning Games for Children

Newspaper Crazies
Newspaper Crazies takes newspaper or magazine articles as the starting point for regular and irregular verb recognition. You'll need some newspapers or magazines.
Aim: Have students recognize and identify regular and irregular verb usage.
Activity: Newspaper Crazies - takes a newspaper or magazine article as the starting point for verb recognition
Level: Intermediate
Outline:

• Have students sit in their seats/desks.
• Today, we are going to play a game called “Newspaper Crazies.” In this game, you will each receive a piece of newspaper, a pencil and a pen. It is your job in five minutes to circle all the regular verbs you recognize in pencil, and all irregular verbs in pen. I will set the timer and at the end, you are going to share all the verbs you found with a partner.
• Pass out one piece of newspaper, one pencil and one pen to each student.
• Let students search for verbs for five minutes. As you monitor students, check to see if they are circling correct regular and irregular verb forms. If they are not, stop them and have them read the verb aloud. If they still do not recognize their mistake, talk them through it by having them use it in a sentence.
• Let students share with a partner for about three minutes.
• Observe students play the game. For students who struggle, give them help and make a note in an Activity Log.

English Learning Games for Children

Young Learner's Board Games for ESL Classes
A fun, classic young learner's game is "Simon Says". In this classic game, one student tells the other students what to do by beginning: "Simon says ... touch your nose / count to five , etc. ". If the student says "touch your nose" and the students perform the command they are out. Of course, this game takes a lot of attention on the part of the teacher.

In this variation on "Simon Says" students break up into small groups and play a board game following commands similar to those of "Simon Says". After the students have completed the game, they create their own board game using commands they have created on their own.

Many thanks to my niece, Laura Vranos, who was so kind as to draw these beautiful game boards!
Aim: Fun and vocabulary learning focusing on various movements and commands
Activity: Board Game
Level: Young Learner's lower level classes
Outline:

• Have students write four or five commands they have learned in class down in a notebook (i.e. touch your nose, clap your hands, count to five, etc.).
• Make photocopies of the board game with the commands. Break students up into groups of four and five and take turns.
• Moves are based on the toss of a coin: heads (the face side) move two spaces - tails (the number side) move one space.
• Circulate around the room making sure that the students are performing the commands correctly.
• Once students have played the ready version of the game, give them the empty copy - or have them draw their own - of the board game.
• Have students combine their various commands and write them out, dividing the board into 12 to 15 spaces.
• Get students to exchange their games, challenging other groups to complete the games they have designed on their own.

Teaching Grammar in an ESL / EFL Setting

Teaching grammar plays a central role in every ESL / EFL teacher's classroom. The important question that needs to be answered is: how do I teach grammar? In other words, how do I help students learn the grammar they need. This question is deceptively easy. At first look, you might think that teaching grammar is just a matter of explaining grammar rules to students. However, teaching grammar effectively is a much more complicated matter. There are a number of questions that first need to be addressed for each class:

• What are the objectives of this class? Is the class preparing for an examination? Is the class improving their English for business purposes? Is the class preparing for summer holidays? etc.
  The answer to this question is important as it will help you decide on how much grammar really needs to be taught. If students are preparing for a Cambridge Exam then grammar will play a large role in your lesson plans. On the other hand, if you are teaching a business class, linguistic formulas may play a larger role as you provide the learners with standard phrases for written documents, participating in meetings, etc.
• What type of learning background do the learners have? Are the students at school? Have they not studied for a number of years? Are they familiar with grammar terminology?
  Adults who have not been attending school for a number of years are likely to find grammar explanations confusing while as students who are currently studying will probably be much more adept at understanding grammar charts, expressions, etc.
• What learning materials and resources are available? Do you have the latest student workbooks? Do you have no workbooks at all? Is there a computer in the classroom?
  The more learning resources you have the easier it will be for you to employ different strategies when teaching your students grammar. For example, a group of students who like using computers could use the computer to study a certain grammar task while another group who prefers spoken explanations might prefer to have you explain the point with a number of examples. Obviously, the more varieties of learning opportunities the better your chances are that each student will be able to learn the grammar point well.
• What kind of learning style does each student have? Is the learner comfortable with standard right brain learning techniques (logical charts, study sheets, etc.)? Does the learner work better with listening and repeating exercises?
  This is one of the most difficult aspects of teaching - especially teaching grammar. If you have a class of learners with similar learning styles, you can afford to use a similar approach. However, if you have a class of mixed learning styles then you need to try to provide instruction using as many different methods as possible.

Once you have answered these questions you can more expertly approach the question of how you are going to provide the class with the grammar they need. In other words, each class is going to have different grammar needs and goals and it is up to the teacher to determine these goals and provide the means with which to meet them.
Inductive and Deductive
First a quick definition: Inductive is known as a 'bottom up' approach. In other words, students discovering grammar rules while working through exercises.
For example:
A reading comprehension which includes a number of sentences describing what a person has done up to that period in time.
After doing the reading comprehension, the teacher could begin to ask questions such as: How long has he done this or that? Has he ever been to Paris? etc. and then follow with When did he go to Paris?
To help the students inductively understand the difference between the simple past and the present perfect, these questions could be followed with which questions spoke about a definite time in the past? Which questions asked about the person's general experience? etc.

Why Is Writing More Difficult Than Speaking?

For many English learners learning to write fluently in English is much more challenging than learning to speak fluently. Even for advanced level learners, written communications can come much more slowly in English than spoken communications. There are a number of reasons for this:

• Written communication is more formal
• Spoken communication allows for more 'mistakes'
• Less reflection goes into spoken English than written English
• Expectations are much higher for formal written English

It is important when teaching written English skills - especially for business English - to be aware of the challenges that learners will face when learning to function in a written English environment.
The following points can be helpful when considering how to teach English writing skills:

• Acquiring speech is an unconscious act, whereas learning to write takes a conscious effort on the part of the learner. One reason why many individuals find it difficult or impossible to write is because of the necessity of learning a mapping skill in order to use written language.
• Written language must be filtered through some sort of system, this system can be phonemic, structural or representative, etc. The individual must not only learn to recognize the meaning of words orally, but also go through a process of transcribing these sounds.
• The process of transcribing sounds requires the learning of other rules and structures thereby cognizing a previously unconscious process.

Another reason some individuals might find it difficult or impossible to write, is that written language takes on many different registers depending on the function of the written word. Often, these functions are totally foreign to spoken language and can thus be considered 'artificial' to the speaker. These functions are often only used in written speech and are therefore even more abstract to some individuals than the already difficult transcription of simple spoken language into an alphabet. These layers of abstraction, beginning with the transcription of oral sounds into a written alphabet and advancing to solely abstracted functions of written language, are daunting to many individuals who then understandably become frightened of the process. In the worst cases, where individuals do not possess or do not have the opportunity to learn certain cognitive skills, an individual might become fully or functionally illiterate.

What is TESOL?

TESOL (also known as TEFL) is the acronym for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages and taking a TESOL course is your passport to a world of travel and adventure teaching English abroad. There is a tremendous demand for TESOL qualified teachers worldwide with job opportunities in just about every country around the globe