Grab your student’s attention and spice up a reading…

Just a few tricks of the trade can put your students into a proper mood for … reading!

Think of your lesson plan as package. Behind every lesson, you have the English Language. On the outside, you have the wrapper. That wrapper is your lesson plan/your teacher personality/your mood. Our job as great teachers is to present to our students a fantastic, tasty wrapper for them to gobble up our language.

Today’s post won’t tackle moods or your personality – no, this is posted in the methodology section so take a guess and you could be right. Yep! It’s about methodology. Specifically: Pre-teaching vocabulary before doing a reading. There are a lot of reasons why you want to pre-teach difficult vocabulary before any exercise – some I agree with (helps student understanding), some I don’t (for more advanced learners they need to develop their ability to understand from inference and context).

However, thinking of our product (the English language) and our buyers (our students) then we need to make sure they want to do our activities. Of course we can start talking about intrinsic/extrinsic motivation and how this applies to that (academia is always waiting to put forward random arguments at the wrong time) but if they have both intrinsic AND extrinsic motivation then I think it’s a win-win situation anyway.

In the video below I go on to explore more of these methods and ideas in a clear-cut way. I’ve left out a lot of jargon simply to get to the matter of the issue.

For this activity the basic steps are:

1. Find the key words in the text and put them on small cards to hand out to the students.
2. Explain what they mean to each student if they don’t understand.
3. Have them draw a picture representation of those words for 2 minutes.
4. Students hide their cards so the other students can’t see them and then walk around observing the drawings.
5. Students now try to write what they think the other students’ photos represent. (Sentence, word, list, topic… etc.)
6. At the end, the student who draws the photo confirms the other students’ suppositions about the content.
7. Begin with your reading/listening/speaking activity.