While we were all struggling to move online in March 2020, Rachel Jeffries, Pedagogical Lead at Cambridge University Press Spain led a wonderful webinar on Assessment and Primary School learners.

Rachel began the session by introducing us to Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle, encouraging us to place the Why? at the centre of everything we do.

Now let’s fast forward to my recent work with a group of pre-CELTA English language teachers. They work in a private language school and their manager wanted to provide them with some training. My first step was to observe a sample of their teaching so I could propose a programme.

Using Sinek’s Golden Circle as a tool for reflection (his TED talk is a great introduction, too!), I felt that the teachers had considered the What? (albeit exercises from a coursebook and / or similar) and were thinking about the How? (the students often work alone, sometimes in pairs but rarely in English. The teacher is on hand for correction and explanation). However, the Why? (a sound underlying belief about teaching and learning) was difficult to identify.

We agreed to use the following as our starting point for the Why?

‘Our aim is to provide engaging, motivating and demanding classes which are designed to develop the skills and command of language necessary to meet communicative objectives in the real world.’

Our approach to teaching and learning, Lacunza – International House.

Then we moved outwards in our ‘golden circle’ to consider the How? and the What? After three sessions, we had made some progress. In our final session, we decided to explore ways to get these exercises off the page to make their teaching and their students’ learning more engaging, motivating and communicative.

Getting exercises off the page

Here are five of our favourite ways, all of which would probably work with most course book exercises.

1 Beat the teacher / Find the treasure (AKA Hangman)

Write the following on the board, where each line represents a letter and get the students to work out the unit title.

Unit 5: _ / _ _ _ _ / _ _ _ _ _ 

(The answer is ‘A Good Sport’, taken from Unit 5 Gold Experience B2, Pearson)

Once the students have guessed the unit title, ask them in groups to write down 10 words (nouns, verbs or adjectives) they expect to see in the unit. Award points for words which none of the other groups have guessed, e.g. if Group A has written ‘referee’ and none of the other groups has written it, Group A gets a point. Then, the groups swap their lists of words with another. Set a time limit for them to try to find as many of these words written on the pages in the corresponding unit as possible.

Extension: Using their words, each group writes 3 interesting questions about the unit topic. Swap around the group members and ask the students to take turns to ask and answer their questions.

2 Sentence beginnings

Dictate 8 – 10 sentence beginnings for the students to write down. The last word in each sentence beginning should be an adjective which is followed by a preposition. Next ask them to draw two vertical lines and ask them to guess the missing word – it’s the preposition. Then ask them to complete the sentence with a verb in the …ing form in an original way (give your own example and elicit some more from around the class).

Now, read out one of your own sentence endings and ask the students to guess your complete sentence by asking a question.

Teacher: Speaking English

Student: Are you rather good at speaking English?

Teacher: Yes, I am. That’s why I love speaking English!

The students continue this activity in small groups but you may need to help them with forming their questions.

Extension: The students can test themselves on the preposition by covering the middle column with their finger. This activity works well with phrasal verbs and also verbs which are followed by an infinitive or …ing.

3 Random Words

With a gap-fill text, dictate the missing words (max. 8 – 10) to the students and ask them to write them in a random order in their notebooks; e.g.

From Gold Experience B2 Unit 5 p68, Pearson

Ask the students in small groups to look at these words and try to predict the content of the text from these. Next read out the text, when you come to a gap, say ‘banana’ (or another silly word) and encourage the students to choose the correct word from the random words. With a lower level, first read the text with the answers (i.e. no gaps) and ask the students to tick the random words as they hear them. Then read out the text again but this time say ‘banana’ when you come to a gap. The students shout out the correct answers.

The students now complete the exercise in their books. Then ask them to close their books and try to reconstruct the text again using the random words. They could do this in the form of an interview, where a reporter interviews an expert on their knowledge of the subject.

Note: Random words also works well where students have to underline the correct answers in a text (dictate all the options) and also with a complete text (dictate some of the key words).

4 The 3 Rs (Reuse, Reduce and Recycle)

Reuse and recycle the same exercises and texts for further practice AND reduce your preparation time (no need to prepare anything else). For example,

• Student A reads out a sentence in the exercise or text and replaces the answer or key words with ‘banana’. Student B guesses the missing word.
• Student A reads out a sentence but changes one of the key words. Student B identifies the key word and corrects it.

A The 2021 Olympics were held on the moon.

B On the moon? Are you serious? The 2021 Olympics were held in Japan.

• Student A says two or three key words and Student B reconstructs the sentence.

5 My takeaways (self-reflection)

(many thanks to Xana and Paula da Nagy, IH Lisbon / IHWO for this idea)

Encourage your students to write down 3 words, expressions or sentences that they have learnt in the class. Ask them to promise to use these in a future speaking or writing activity. Hold them to their promise!

In the training session, I also asked the teachers to write down three takeaways and encouraged them to try them out over the following week.

What are your takeaways from this blog post? And have you got any other suggestions for getting coursebook exercises off the page? Leave a comment below or get in touch directly via the contact page.