Chapter 20: Getting Youth on Your Side: Coping with Young Learners 297
✓ Cul8r: See you later
✓ GMT: Greenwich Mean Time
✓ IOU: I owe you
✓ Lol: Laugh out loud and lots of love
✓ MC: Master of ceremonies
✓ MTV: Music television
✓ PTO: Please turn over
✓ R&B: Rhythm and blues
✓ VIP: Very important person
Even if students recognise the abbreviation, make sure that they can say it
correctly. For example, they shouldn’t make VIP rhyme with ‘skip’ but say
each letter.Playing Kim’s game
This well-known game tests observation and memory. In the classroom you
can use it to teach or reinforce vocabulary.To play, you gather together 20 objects that teenagers use and lay them out
on the desk but cover them with a cloth. Uncover them for two minutes or
so to let students look at them, cover them up again, then get the students
to write a list of what they were from memory. I like to choose things that
students use every day but don’t know the name for in English, such as an
eraser or ear-phones.Offering advice with problem pages
Scores of magazines and websites offer advice to troubled teens. I use
readers’ letters as a basis for reading and writing activities. Students can
each become the agony aunt or even submit their own problem for another
classmate to answer.