Chapter 6: Holding the Reins and Letting Them Loose – Giving Students Practice 99
The answers to questionnaires like these are usually limited, so they provide
excellent controlled practice of the tenses.A survey on musical tastes may incorporate questions in various tenses:✓ Past tenses: What was the first CD you bought? Had you heard all the
tracks before you bought it?
✓ Present tenses: What are you listening to these days? Do you use CDs,
MP3 or a different format?
✓ Future tenses: Will you be going to any concerts this year? In your opin-
ion which artist will be ‘the next big thing’?
Students can distribute the questions and mingle to conduct short interviews
with each other.Mingling (as though at a dinner party) is a great way to incorporate group
work and create a buzz.After that they can collate the information and prepare graphs and charts
to demonstrate the results. As a freer writing activity the students can now
prepare reports on their findings. They could also have a final discussion
analysing the reasons for any surprising results.Playing Mastermind
You’ve probably seen this game on television. It‘s the one where a contestant
prepares to answer questions on a specialist subject. Well, in the classroom
you can organise a similar game that allows groups of students to research a
particular topic (maybe an area of vocabulary) and answer questions about
it. They can ask each other questions you’ve prepared and later write ques-
tions themselves.Apart from the revision of particular topics, a sub-aim is to get students using
questions with and without auxiliary verbs, as in the following examples:When did this happen?What happened?
Which film did Brando make in 1978?Who directed Jurassic Park?So that you can reduce TTT (teacher talking time), hand the questions over
to another group. For example, if Team A prepared Hobbies as their specialist
subject and Team B prepared Occupations, each team can have a quizmaster