Blog & Teach

Here we are with some new wonderful stuff from The British Council. Now it is time for listening activities.

Big City Small World is a series of listening clips related to a group of young people from all across the world who live together in London.

Every unit deals with different topics and it contains different tasks which can be downloaded, printed and distributed among your students. You can optionally read the transcript of the audio as you do the activity. The topics are really catchy and up to date… very interesting drills basically created for teenagers and young adult learners.

Ed Tech Ideas has published a very interesting post which we could easily turn into a very good activity for the English classroom.

Starting out with a very nice poster on student bullying in the U.S., some questions are placed, as well as some advice to students… very clear statements that can be easily discussed in class. Try to elicit other ideas and opinions out of the data which appear in the graphic poster. Data are shown really clear and can be easily understood.

Here are two examples of how we can work with short silent clips in the classroom: Vimeo has many high-quality video-clips which can be used in many different ways.

The first one we are showing here is a nice short clip of 2 minutes about the story of a seed. It is called “Seedling”:

Seedling from Lee Tao on Vimeo.

It would be nice to have our students describing what is happening, and predicting what will happen next… or, describing the characters appearing in the clip. I’m sure you can think of other possibilities!

The second one is “Paraphernalia”… a story of a girl and a boy… and a plane:

Paraphernalia from Sabrina Cotugno on Vimeo.

Why don’t you put text into pictures? The story is really easy to follow and there’s silent dialogue which can be easily completed… students can create a written dialogue or they can put voice to the clip! It is a very engaging activity which students will love.