Video transcript - Bringing the world into the classroom
A classroom is a bit of an artificial place so how can you bring the real world in and make learning English seem more of an authentic experience? I’m Jo Gakonga from ELT-Training.com and I’ve got an idea for you that will do just that.
Start in class with the topic of a favourite place. I don’t mean a big holiday destination or somewhere you’ve always wanted to go. Just a place where you often go that makes you happy. For me, it’s this beach, that’s near where I live, but it could be your garden, or a park, a shopping mall, or even your bedroom. Give the learners a model and introduce vocabulary and phrases that the learners can use to describe theirs. This will depend on their level of course but you could give them adjectives to describe the place... or how they feel about it... or prepositions of place to talk about where things are in this place... or language to help them talk about why they like it/ how often they go there, what they do there... or all of these.
Get them to draw a quick sketch of the place and prepare to talk about it and describe it. Then ask them to tell three different people about their place – while you monitor and help.
To really bring the outside in, if your learners have a smartphone and can bring it into class ask them to go to the place and make a short video of them describing it for homework- you could get them to show the same three people the video and see if their original description was a good one. Even if not everyone in the class does this homework (I know that can be a problem!), you could put them into groups of three or four to see one video.
I hope you and your learners enjoy this activity. Try it out and let me know how you get on in the comments below.
See you soon.
