Level B1

The general knowledge quiz will get your students listening intently for 10 minutes. The ten questions contain plenty of repetition and redundancy to help students get there in the end, even if they miss a bit along the way. Read it aloud yourself or use the mp3 provided.

This is a fun way to introduce the topic and vocabulary area of describing people. It is a sample activity from English Result Intermediate by Mark Hancock and Annie McDonald (Oxford University Press)

This activity is based on one of the lessons in our book Pen Pictures 3 (Oxford University Press). In this version, the picture story has been made into a video to help insipire the students before they do the writing task.

This is an activity to raise students' awareness of the way words are modified in connected speech. In particular, it focuses on the way consonant sounds are linked, elided or assimilated.

This activity helps to make students more aware of the divergence of pronunciation and spelling in English. In order to do the crossword, they must be able to think of the word as a sequence of sounds rather than as a sequence of letters. More pronunciation ideas?

This is a short mystery story in two parts. The questions challenge students to imagine or deduce what happened. The story was inspired by the Roald Dahl tale The Landlady, and I first wrote it for New Ways to Go 4 (CUP).

This is a short murder story, with a note taking activity. The story is rich in past simple passive, and there is an extension activity to focus on this language point. There are audio downloads in case you want to make this into a listening activity rather than reading.