GRAMMAR CAN BE FUN

This workshop is designed to be of interest to practising teachers who are looking for new ways of livening up their classes, keeping the attention of their students and optimizing learning. Some of the activities will be immediately applicable in the format in which they are presented; others will require some adaptation.

1. Personal information action chainHalf of the attendees are given a card with a question on it. They memorize the question, return the card to the facilitator and then ask the question to the person sitting to their left (who was not initially given a card). The person responds and then turns to his/her left and asks the question again. In this way, all the questions are passed down the line.

Examples of questions: What’s your name?; Where do you live?; How old are you?; How many brothers and sisters have you got?; Are you married? etc.

2. Guess the famous personalityA student sits with his/her back to the screen. The teacher projects the image of a famous person onto the screen. The student asks yes/no questions about the personality.

3. Mime presentation (past continuous)Three students are invited to the front of the class and told to mime the action that they were doing at 7 o’clock, 10.30 and 2.30 the previous day. The rest of the class have to remember the action and then, prompted by the teacher, produce sentences of the type:

At 7 o’clock X was having a shower.

The exercise can be extended in open pairs to produce negative forms. Student A produces a false sentence (At 10.30, X was having a coffee) and is corrected by student B (No, he wasn’t having a coffee. He was reading the newspaper).

4. Battleships (past continuous/past simple)

When …

I

Ph

one

rin

g

Pet

er

arri

ve

Roo

f fa

ll

in S.o

. ste

al

my

car

Bom

b

fall

Fat

her

b

reak

leg

Have bath

Cook lunch

Watch TV

Sleep

Listen radioPlay with dog

Students are given a battleships grid (see above). Instead of the squares being identified by a letter and a number (A1, B2, etc.), they are identified with elements that students have to extend to form a sentence with the past simple and past continuous. Students get into pairs and try to destroy their opponent’s boats by producing sentences such as, “When the phone rang, I was having a bath.”

5. Memory matching presentation (passive)Cards are blu-tacked to the blackboard in two columns. In one of the columns, the cards have a number on the side facing the students, and in the other they have a letter. Students call out a combination of cards, one from each column. If, when turned over, it is clear that there is no connection between the two, they are turned back again. If there is a connection, students have to produce a sentence linking the two (e.g. Picassso painted Guernica). When all the connections have been made and all the sentences produced, the order of the elements is inverted so the students can produce passive sentences.

6. Generative situation presentation (causative have)Teacher sticks a picture of a normal-looking young man on the blackboard and uses flash cards to elicit sentences about his daily activity (e.g. He cleans his shoes, He makes his dinner, etc.). Then, teacher sticks up a second picture of someone rich and famous (Isabel Presley, Rey Juan Carlos, etc.) and elicits the causative have equivalents (She has her shoes cleaned, She has her dinner made, etc.).

7. Grammar transformationsStudents are put into pairs and each given a card of the following type:

1

A meteor or comet struck the Earth.

The Earth ______________________________________

1

The Earth was struck by a meteor or comet.

A meteor or comet _______________________________

Student A tries to complete the second of the two sentences. Student B corrects. When Student A has successfully produced the correct sentence, the roles are reversed.

8. Story telling to generate a particular structureTeacher tells the class a story about a (supposed) personal experience. Students are then asked to write down what happened in a list of short sentences. For example:

John went to the beach.He saw Kevin.They went to the bar.Kevin was late for a date (etc.)

Once they have the basic elements of the story, they have to generate the target structure (in this case, the 3rd conditional):

If John hadn’t gone to the beach, he wouldn’t have seen Kevin.If he hadn’t seen Kevin, they wouldn’t have gone to the bar.If they hadn’t gone to the bar, Kevin wouldn’t have been late for a date.