My teaching career began in Liverpool, way back in 1979, where I worked as a secondary school teacher of History. I taught all ages and levels, but found myself particularly intrigued by the challenges of pupils who seemed to lack motivation.
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.
IATEFL young learners sig journal CATS, Spring 2000
Writing has a bad reputation in many schools, for both teachers and students. For the teacher, it means marking a pile of compositions and they are almost always worse than expected. For many students, writing is a boring chore and an “opportunity” to make a lot of mistakes.However, we believe that writing can be a very interesting and involving activity for students of English.
I’ve just got back to work after attending the extremely successful 35th TESOL-Spain National Convention in Bilbao. From the various talks I went to, I gathered that some teachers and test writers are using coursebook materials to help them devise tests and examinations which are pegged to CEFR levels.
Nowadays, many courses claim (either directly or indirectly) to be compatible with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). I'd always thought that there must be more to this than simply using the CEFR levels to situate a course.
In this activity, students read an article in favour of internet censorship. Then they prepare for a class debate for and against this kind of censorship. The activity is inpired by the debates in For and Against by L G Alexander (Longman 1969).
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.
Each level of Pen Pictures is accompanied by a Teacher's Book which provides detailed teaching notes, answey keys, ideas for mixed ability classes, suggestions for follow-up activities and photocopiable tests.
