Mark Hancock

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.

The students read a holiday email which is full of nonsense and contradictions. They have to identify the nonsense and say what is wrong with it.

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?

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 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).

In this group discussion, the students have to rank 5 different crimes in order of seriousness and decide on an appropriate punishement for each.

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.

Here's a song/rhyme to focus on the pronunciation of the past tense ending -ed. There are three audio tracks to download: the poem read aloud; the poem read aloud with backchained drill repetitions for students to pause and repeat, and finally, the poem as a song lyric accompanied to music.