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The British Council/BBC website Teaching English is probably the most important English language teaching site on the web. It brings together everything busy teachers need for the classroom and the staffroom – lesson plans and worksheets, teaching tips, web links, teaching articles and lots of information about professional development – training, conferences and qualifications. Teachers can customise their own area on the site to provide personalised content. The site contains interactive and multimedia material including teaching videos, blogs and podcasts, and discussion forums. It also features regular guest contributors – teachers from around the world and ELT specialists from the UK.

Teaching English has agreed that a small number of other English language websites, including Listen to English, can use some of its material. I hope you find it useful!

  

Many students of English are concerned about climate change and “green” issues generally. They enjoy learning new vocabulary about environmental issues and participating in exercises. Here are some lesson ideas (reproduced here by permission) from the BBC/British Council Teaching English website.

Environmental Issues

This lesson introduces learners to some of the main issues related to climate change. Learners focus on dictionary skills and the pronunciation of strong and weak syllables in long words. Focusing on the lexis in detail will help them recognise and use these terms outside the classroom.

Topic: Environmental problems

Age: Teenage/adult

Level: B1+

Timing: 60-90 minutes

Aims:
By the end of the lesson learners will be able to:

• understand important causes of environmental problems and some solutions
• extend their understanding of lexis connected to climate change and environmental issues
• improve understanding of pronunciation information given in a dictionary
• take notes and retell information to others
• use expressions of certainty when discussing events likely to happen in the future

Download lesson plan

Download worksheets

How Green Are You?

This lesson looks at ways the learners can take to reduce their impact on climate change. Learners will carry out two surveys and summarise their findings as a report.

Topic: Being green

Age: Teenage/adult

Level: A2+

Timing: 60-90 minutes

Aims:

• To interview others to complete a survey and summarise findings in a report
• To develop questionnaires on current behaviour using present perfect forms
• To understand the actions learners can take to reduce their impact on climate change

Download lesson plan

Download worsheets

Save Water

This lesson looks at the causes of water shortages locally and internationally, and learners will produce a poster giving advice on saving water in the home or in the school.

Topic: Water shortages

Age: Teenage/adult

Level: A2+

Timing: 60-90 minutes

Aims:

• To talk about the use of water in every day life
• To give advice to others on their role in water conservation

Download lesson plan

Download worksheets

  

Here is a great idea for an English class, especially a children’s class. I comes from the BBC/British Council teaching English website and was written by Katherine Bilsborough. It is reproduced here with permission.

This is a drawing and speaking activity that is fun to use with primary classes to revise the present continuous form. It is easy to set up and requires no preparation or materials, except a board and a board pen. Students will need a piece of paper and a pencil. This version practises the present continuous form but other versions can practise other tenses. Children like it because it allows them to practise grammar in a safe environment. By repeating the same question and answer a number of times students become more confident and make fewer and fewer errors. They also like it because the drawing adds an element of fun to the activity and allows students who might be good at drawing but less good at English, to excel.

Level: Elementary and above

Age: Primary (can also be used with older students)

Preparation

On the board, draw a simple background scene such as a park with some gardens, a river and a few trees. As you build up the picture, elicit the vocabulary from the students by asking a few simple questions.

What’s this place? What am I drawing now?

Add a simple stick drawing (of yourself) in the scene. You should be “doing” something (e.g. sitting by the river eating a banana). Label the picture of yourself with your name. Point to it and say “This is me. It’s 12 o’clock and I am sitting by the river, eating a banana.”

Procedure

• Give each student a piece of paper and a pencil and tell them to copy the picture on the board. Give them a limited time of about 4 minutes. They should include the stick drawing of the teacher.
• Tell the students to add a drawing of themselves and label it. They should be in a specific place and doing something. Explain that if necessary they can add other elements to the picture. Explain that students shouldn’t show their picture to anybody.
• Write these two questions and answers on the board. If possible elicit the answers. It’s 12 o’clock in the park. Where are you? And what are you doing? I’m sitting by the river. I’m eating a banana.
• Explain that students should walk around the classroom speaking to their classmates. They should ask and answer the question on the board. Each time a student answers, they should draw that student in the picture, doing the action. Then they should label the student.
• The activity finishes when each student has drawn and labeled all of their classmates in their picture; all doing different things in different parts of the picture.

Extension

Students can do a follow up writing activity. They should start with the following:

_It’s 12 o’clock on Saturday and everybody is in the park. Everybody is doing something.

The teacher is sitting by the river eating a banana.

I am ….

… is …._

Display pictures and texts around the classroom.

Other versions

• Change It’s 12 o’clock in the park for Last Saturday at 12 o’clock … and change the tense to the past continuous
• Change It’s 12 o’clock in the park for Next Saturday … and change the tense to the future continuous.
• For older students, make the activity a “scene of the crime” activity, with each student being a potential witness to a crime that has occurred in the park. You will need to change the question to Where were you and what were you doing when (somebody stole the bike)?

  

Alternative content

Article by Nick Peachey

Level – intermediate and above

Reading can sometimes be a very solitary experience and many teachers prefer to get students to do it at home, but with the right kind of text and the right tasks, reading can be turned into a fun, collaborative and communicative experience. This lesson exploits an authentic text taken from a British Council ‘UKinfocus’ website and has a range of quite simple tasks that students work through in groups. There are also a range of suggestions for follow up tasks.

Plan components

Lesson Plan: – guide for teacher on procedure including answers to tasks.
Download lesson plan 74k pdf

Worksheets: – exercises which can be printed out for use in class. The worksheet contains:

• Pre-reading
• Jigsaw reading task
• Collaborative comprehension task
• Vocabulary development task
• Discussion task

Download worksheets 65k pdf

Note: The audio is not essential for the lesson but you may like to use it in class as an optional element.

  

 Get MP3 (1 MB | 3:07 min)

This article was written by Nick Peachey

This is an idea I learned when I first started teaching and still use to this day. The main focus of the activity is on developing writing skills, but it’s also good for developing listening and reading skills and also for practising past tenses and descriptive vocabulary.

The activity should work at most levels above elementary, as long as your students have some knowledge of past tenses, but it works best when they also know past continuous / progressive too. All you need to get things started is a sheet of plain paper for each pair of students.

The listening part comes first:

• Ask the students to draw the face of a person in the top right-hand corner of the page.
• Once they’ve done this ask them to give the person a name.
• Then on the top left of the page ask them to write five adjectives to describe the person’s appearance.
• Next ask them to write five more adjectives to describe the person’s character.
• After they’ve done this ask the students to write three things that the person likes doing.
• Then ask them to write who the person lives with.

In this way they build up a character profile for the person they are going to write about.

The writing part:

• Now dictate the following sentence to your students: ‘It was a dark and stormy night and’. Stop at this point and ask them to write in the name of the person they have drawn and followed by the word ‘was’.
• Then ask the students to complete the sentence from their imagination and add one more sentence.
• Once all the students have added a sentence to their stories, get them to stop and pass the paper to the pair on their right (this means that every pair of students now has a new character).
• The students then read through the information and the beginning of the story and then add one more sentence to it.
• Once they’ve done this you ask them once more to pass the paper to the next pair on their right. Continue to do this with each pair of students adding a sentence to each story, gradually building up each story as the papers are passed around the class.
• Continue with this until you decide that the students are starting to lose interest or have written enough and then tell them to finish the story.

Follow up:

• Once all the stories are complete there are a number of follow-up options you can try.
• Put the stories up around the class and get the students to read them all and decide which is best.
• Give each pair of students a story and get them to try to find and correct errors.
• Get the students to write the stories up on a computer and then ask them to add more description and detail to the stories.

This activity is fun and creative and has always worked well for me both with adults and younger students.