What many students really enjoy are problem-solving tasks. They are engaging, amusing, and don’t usually require much preparation by the teacher. The good news is that you can teach grammar in a fun way using them. It is important to design problem-solving tasks in a way that makes students likely to use the target language (context, again!). So if your students need revision on expressing quantity, tell them that they are throwing a dinner party for ten people and that together they need to agree on the amount of food and drink they will buy. To work with modal verbs, ask your students to imagine that they are opening a language school and that they need to decide on five rules that teachers and students must follow. Tell your more advanced students who need to practise Third and Mixed Conditionals a bit more to come up with five major events in world history and decide how they could have gone differently under certain conditions, or how our world would be different now if they hadn’t happened.
Games are appealing to all students, so don’t hesitate to use them to teach grammar in a fun way to adults, not only kids and teens. Even the most dull activity can be turned into something fun, especially if you add a competitive element to it. If you feel that your students need some drilling, and don’t just want them to mindlessly repeat sentence after sentence, do it with a twist. Give one student a sentence in the target language. Let’s say you’re practising verb patterns and a student reads the following sentence: I expect her to be on time. Their partner has to ask three questions, repeating all the parts of the statement, and the first student has to respond with anything that comes to mind. The conversation could go like this:
Some other examples could include: They suggested buying it., She threatened to take his watch., or He tried calling her. Students might collect points for each correct question, or the person who comes up with the highest number of queries could be the winner.
If your students are a bit creative (and they usually are!), give one of them a word and ask them to explain it to other students using the target language only. A spoon can be described using Second Conditional (If I didn’t have one at home, I wouldn’t be able to eat soup.), verb patterns (I once tried eating a sandwich with it, but it didn’t work.), Mixed Conditionals (If they hadn’t been invented, we would use forks to stir tea.) or Passive structures (It is usually made of metal and it is used in restaurants.) These can be quite challenging, so before doing the task in class you might try creating such sentences yourself, but remember that students are often more imaginative than we think.
On our website, you will find numerous lesson plans to teach grammar in a fun way. You can have a look at them here. We’d also like to hear about your ideas to make grammar fun! Comment below so that we all can learn from each other 🙂
Wow. Brilliant. Some great ideas there! Thanks. I occasionally use the virtual platform Gather (gather.town) with my kids and young adult online classes (works best with groups but 1-to-1’s okay too). The Escape Room on it is great for getting students to work together and use problem-solving language to try get out.
We have been publishing flipped lesson plans since 2019, and are really happy how popular they have become among our teacher community. We want to share with you what flipped classroom is, how it benefits students and how to use our worksheets to apply flipped classroom for teaching English in your classroom.
Flipped classroom is a blended learning-teaching model based on the principle that the classroom is where the active part of learning should take place. It’s ‘flipped’ (or ‘inverted’) because it requires students to do some preparation before the lesson so that the time spent with the teacher is used more effectively. Before the lesson, students have their first look at a new language or a video, and get ready for what is going to happen in the lesson. During the class, the focus is on getting semi-controlled and free practice, using the new language structures, and discussing the topic of the video. In other words, the lesson is about production rather than passive learning this way, the precious classroom time is used more actively.
Problem-solving tasks, debates, role-plays, discussions and brainstorming are often skipped by ESL teachers due to lack of time. The flipped classroom approach allows for these interactive activities to take place. The pre-class part of a flipped lesson might also focus on establishing the lesson context to make students prepared for what they will study in the classroom.
Introducing the flipped classroom approach allows students to take control of their learning process and become more autonomous. They are able to study at their own pace or watch a video as many times as necessary. They are also more motivated and more likely to engage in the lesson. Additionally, students are exposed to English outside the classroom, which helps create a habit of doing it more often.
Researchers have found that the flipped classroom method applied to ESL teaching makes students more confident and prepared for language production. Students achieved significantly better results, almost 30% higher, when the flipped model was applied. Flipped classroom also allowed students to acquire a more independent learning culture. Want to know more? This study analyzed the potential of flipped classroom in ESL teaching and this one presents the results of applying flipped classroom for teaching English grammar to B1 students.
The flipped approach has proven to be really beneficial, but preparing materials for a flipped lesson is very time-consuming. This is where ESL Brains comes into play!
Pre-class activities – This part sets the scene. It lets students independently study new grammar or lexis, watch a video, prepare arguments or notes for the lesson. In other words, it provides context for the in-class activities.
In-class activities – This is the part where students practise what they have studied, discuss the issues from the video and expand what they already know. They do lots of speaking and use the target language in different situations.
You can see where the pre-class and in-class sections start in the Teacher’s Version of a flipped lesson plan (or as transition slides in e-lesson plans). What we recommend doing is to send your students only the pre-class section before your lesson, so that they are not tempted to have a peek into what’s going to happen during the lesson (and to prevent some overly-excited students to do everything before the class). If you use PDFs, split the Student’s Version into two files – the pre-class and the in-class ones. We tend to fit the pre-class section on 1-2 pages so you can easily divide the file. With e-lesson plans, it’s even easier. You can copy+paste just the slides that your students should get before the lesson. It’s also a good practice to send your students the answer key a day before the lesson so they can check their work. Of course, you need to establish some rules with your students so that they do the pre-class section before getting the key.
For the flipped lessons, does the Lesson Time (60 mins, 75 mins, etc.) include the time the Student spends at home, or is this the in-class time only?
The lesson time given refers to the in-class part of the lesson. As we have been creating this type of lessons over years, we will review older Flipped lessons to make sure that’s true everywhere on the website.
As you probably have already realized we love using videos for teaching English. You may wonder why? First of all, that’s how people consume media nowadays. We stopped reading and turned to video (YouTube) and audio (podcasts) as the primary type of online content we get, whether these are vlogs, how-tos, educational videos or news pieces. Secondly, video is much more engaging than text as it involves more senses. There’ve been studies [1] [2] [3] proving that using authentic videos (e.g. from YouTube) for teaching languages motivates students, makes their classes more interesting and benefits the whole learning process. However, authentic videos can be enhanced to serve specific purposes in your classroom and further engage your students. And that’s where interactive videos come into play!
Video is a media format that usually isn’t so interactive as the only thing you can do is to rewind, pause or fast forward a video. Not much of an interaction, I would say. But when we add annotation to a video to enrich its content, then it starts being really interactive. There is a multitude of things we can actually do: add open-ended questions, multiple choice questions, fill-in tasks, insert text boxes, add links, extra sound and commentary or a reflective pause. The possibilities are really endless and I’ll share with you some examples below to introduce you to the world of interactive videos.
ESL LessonsBefore we start with some examples, I want to assure you that creating an interactive video is a piece of cake. There are many online services where you can use a YouTube or Vimeo video to create interactive video for teaching a language. Personally, I’ve used three: Edpuzzle, Playposit and iSLCollective. The last one was created specifically for language teaching purposes and is the one I’m most familiar with that’s why I’ll show you some ways you can use it to develop interactive videos for teaching English.
Our first interactive video was based on a TED-Ed video called “The ethical dilemma of self-driving cars”. Our approach here is to make this video interactive by introducing reflective pauses and open questions. These questions correspond to the questions posed
during the video. This way students get involved into the concepts discussed in the video and can talk them through before continuing. Additionally, we provided a vocabulary list attached to the video so students can check more difficult words before watching.
This approach resulted in a more engaged discussion as students could confront their ideas with what the narrator in the video presented. We also noticed that the fact that students learnt to expect that something will happen made them more focused and interested in the video. You may say there is not so much interactivity added as most of the annotation involves reflective pauses but even such a small change was enough to make a difference. By the way, the lesson plan with this really cool video is one of your favorites. See it yourself here.
Another lesson plan with interactive video I want to present is called Filter Bubbles. Here our approach is to focus on listening comprehension. We used there open comprehension questions, multiple choice questions, listening for details tasks. All of these tasks are either focused on comprehension or vocabulary.
This way we built in standard paper tasks into the video so that students can focus on watching and not writing things down (quick tip: you can easily replay a few seconds of the video before a question if your students need to listen again). We found out that students are more engaged into watching the video and we saw better comprehension results. One comment: don’t add questions more often than every 30-40 seconds.
In our Flipped Classroom lesson plan called The Story of Frida Kahlo (with Advanced Past Tense review) we added grammar tasks to the video. Students must watch the video and understand the context to answer grammar tasks correctly. For the sake of simplicity, we only used single-answer multiple choice questions with focus on past tenses. Basically, it means that we added a typical grammar task to a video. While it may not sound like rocket science, it actually makes it more fun, and a boring grammar task evolves into an interesting story of the famous Mexican painter.
I still feel that I’m just scratching the surface of interactive videos. iSLCollective has many features which I haven’t explored yet, including assigning videos as homework, listen and tap or even taking advantage of various play modes. I hope we got you excited about interactive videos and our examples inspired you to explore this idea further. Don’t wait any more, just try it yourself, it’s simple and fun.
