Recently, I have been doing a lot of talks to teachers involving low-tech or no tech at all. One talk that went down particularly well in the Netherlands used an idea centred around grids, which I had been shown many years ago by Michael Carter at International House Seville, Spain. Grids are easy to create in Microsoft Word, and they can be used in lots of ways to practise different features of language.
Grids
The two grids shown below are simple examples which can be created very quickly, using pictures from the ‘Clip Art’ function of Microsoft Word. The language focus is present simple questions using What time …?, telling the time (here, o’clock and half past) and the use of s in third person singular questions. The students work in pairs and ask each other questions to complete their grids.
Adapting the grids
The great thing about grids is that they are extremely flexible. For example, I could change the first question to Where does/do … have breakfast? just by changing the information in the ‘Breakfast’ column to things like at home, in a café, at work, in a restaurant, etc. I could also change the last question to What does/do … watch on the television? by simply changing the information from times to things that each person watched, such as the football, a soap opera, etc. The same grid could be used to practise yes/no questions or questions in other tenses. To make a bigger change, I could replace the images with different ones and change the verbs that the students have to practise.
Tip
At the start, you might like to put the target structures on the board and then, when the students are doing the activity and have the structures clear in their minds, you can wipe them off. I always go through the verbs first, and just make sure the students know what each picture represents, eg to have breakfast, to start work, to have lunch, to watch TV.
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This is a simple way to use technology that almost all teachers have at their fingertips. It will enable them to make controlled- practice activities really quickly. The grids can be saved and used time and time again, or they can be altered to suit different classes and different learning goals.
Student A
Student B
Russell Stannard is the founder of www.teachertrainingvideos.com, which won a British Council ELTons award for technology. He is a freelance teacher and writer and also a NILE Associate Trainer.
Keep sending your favourite sites to Russell: russellstannard@btinternet.com