Chapter 6: Holding the Reins and Letting Them Loose – Giving Students Practice 91
To encourage communication in pairs, get students to share some materials
by handing out one worksheet or text for two students to share. If it’s some-
thing they each want to keep, you can give out another copy later.
You need to have your wits about you for pair work activities. It isn’t quite
as easy to control students when they’re all speaking at once and the noise
level can be pretty high. However the students are generally happier because
they’re actively involved.
I talk about pair exercise in the next sections.
Ranking
With a list of vocabulary you can have pairs discuss the appropriate rank
from best to worst, or most to least useful perhaps. You can have students
practise the target vocabulary and the expressions for justifying opinions as
well. You need to have taught them expressions of opinion well beforehand,
though, and you can use examples by first of all asking a few students, in
front of the whole class, for their opinions about the vocabulary.
With your partner, decide on the most important electrical items from the list
to have in a kitchen with 1 the most important item and 8 the least important.
freezer
microwave
dishwasher
kettle
cooker
toaster
fridge
food processor
Filling an information gap
Use activities in which students talk to each other in order to access infor-
mation. The idea is to give them different information about the same topic.
Instead of just looking at the other person’s worksheet, they have to ask for
what they need to know.
