70 Part II: Putting Your Lesson Together
✓ Photos: Celebrity photos seem to work particularly well in EFL lessons,
perhaps because of the glamorous international flavour they give your
lesson. Save old magazines, or even catalogues, as photographs are
great for explaining the meaning of a word, or setting a context.
✓ Videos: Short video clips really grab your students’ attention and lend
themselves to further activities in the practice and production stages,
which I cover in Chapter 6.
✓ Realia: The term for real objects you use to help you teach. Students
feel involved when they get to touch something or move it around.
Realia works to reinforce learning for visual and kinaesthetic learners
alike.
In a lesson aimed at teaching ‘used to’ and ‘any more’ to contrast the
past and present, you can bring in an old childhood photograph. I usu-
ally bring in a photograph of myself aged ten, dressed in school uniform
and complete with dodgy 70s hairdo. First you find out if the students
recognise you. Let them have a giggle and guess how old you are in
the picture. Then tell them that you had hobbies at that age and ask
students to make suggestions about what they were. Show the clues
like stamps or a skipping rope. With each suggestion say ‘Yes, I used
to... ’ or ‘No, I didn’t used to... ’. When they’ve guessed one or two
hobbies correctly you can switch to the present and ask whether they
think that you still do that activity. This leads to the statement, ‘I don’t
do it any more’.
You can sometimes find cheap children’s games and activities that you can
adapt for the classroom. For example, children’s playing cards are often pic-
torial, showing animals or a variety of jobs. Model cars and trains are useful
when you explain transport words or describe directions (left, right, forwards
and so on).
Travelling along timelines and tenses
In TEFL and in Western cultures in general, you represent time as a straight
horizontal line showing the past on the left and the future to the right. With
a timeline, you can show how tenses refer to an aspect of time and compare
them. So timelines are most common in a presentation of a new tense.
By using timelines you help students to understand the function of a tense –
what it does basically. However, you need to highlight the form of a tense or
piece of grammar too. In other words, show exactly what it looks like.
