Getting them settled...

What activities can you use to settle the class as soon as they come in?

How can you give them all something to focus on, so that when everybody is there, and you're ready to begin, you can get on with the lesson?

NB. The context for this blog post is a situation where students turn up to the class in drips and drabs, maybe because they've just had PE, or they're coming from different parts of the school, or they've just had lunch, or whatever. (I don't want to get into a discussion about whether or not we should make students line up outside the class until they are all present and silent, as that is not what this post is about.)

The suggestions below are based on using a projector or interactive whiteboard (IWB), and they are examples of things that you can just put up on the screen and leave there, requiring no interaction with the board or your computer until you are ready to move on.

Using mini dual texts to present vocab in context in MFL lessons

I think there is a growing sense that MFL teachers spend too much time introducing new vocabulary. It's the kind of thing MFL teachers have been doing for years: present vocab / choral repetition / individual repetition / selective repetion such as repeat if it's true / what number is it? / is it A or B? / what's missing? / playing simple games in front of the class with the vocab, etc, etc. I'm sure all MFL teachers are familiar with this sort of thing. Lots of singing and dancing at the front of the class & lots of noisy repetition from students.

Vocab mats etc are used by some to avoid the need to spend so much class time presenting new vocab: give them

Text Match exercises - what to match? (3) Gapped words or letters

Text Match is probably the most used component of TaskMagic and can be used in so many different ways...

This series of blog posts - "Text Match exercises - what to match?" - explores some ideas for the kinds of things that teachers can use as the basis for their text matching exercises. Each blog post contains screenshots of - and links to - interactive exercises as well as worksheets which can be viewed online, downloaded, printed etc. (SCROLL DOWN FOR THE WORKSHEETS)

Text Match exercises - what to match? (2) Sentences with gaps

Text Match is probably the most used component of TaskMagic and can be used in so many different ways...

This series of blog posts - "Text Match exercises - what to match?" - explores some ideas for the kinds of things that teachers can use as the basis for their text matching exercises. Each blog post contains screenshots of - and links to - interactive exercises as well as worksheets which can be viewed online, downloaded, printed etc. (SCROLL DOWN FOR THE WORKSHEETS)

Exploiting short dialogues / situational dialogues

In a previous post (see here), I discussed how it was possible to exploit a source text to generate a whole range of interactive exercises and worksheets based on the text itself, as well as on the lexical items within the text, and how this can be achieved in a matter of minutes using TaskMagic3.

This post will take a quick look at how short transactional or situational dialogues (or any short series of exchanges on any topic) can be exploited in a similar way, using the Dialogues component of TaskMagic3 as the starting point.

Using Find it! - beyond simple "Find the French" activities.

This post will take a quick look at a couple of extra ways of using the Find it! feature of Mix and Gap in TaskMagic.

The most usual (and easiest) way of using Find it! is as a simple "Find the French / German / Spanish" exercise, where you set prompts in English for

the words or phrases you want the students to find in the TL text. The benefit of this is that it's easy to