Tips for skills, Vocabulary, and grammar

Speaking lessons

1. Remember that students need to hear the new language several times before speaking. 
2. Help students understand the meaning of the new language, not just the form and structure.
3. Concrete words can be taught with pictures, but abstract words need more context.
4. Let students involve their own opinions and experiences. They are learning to communicate, not be a parrot!
5. Help students to understand the type of context in which the new language is used. 
6. Give multiple opportunities to practice the language, starting with controlled practice such as repeating, and then to uncontrolled practice where the students use the language from memory.
7. The final activity should involve all the students interacting. Good examples are information gap exchanges, surveys, questionnaires, mingle activities, pair games, interviews, group role plays, and so on.

Listening & reading lessons

1. Change the difficulty of the task, don't alter the material.
2. Give them a chance to check their predictions.
3. Always give them a task before listening or reading.
4. Make explicit the skill you are developing.
5. Always let students check answers in pairs before whole-class feedback.
6. Give a different task each time you read or listen to the same material. Try to vary the tasks.
7. Tasks should go from easy to difficult. One way to do this is to provide several options for answers early in the lesson, but don't give any support later in the lesson.

Listening & reading strategies

1. Activate prior knowledge and schema (memories) before reading or listening by showing pictures, asking questions, and getting students to discuss what they already know. This will help them to comprehend the text later in the lesson.
2. Ask students to predict what they will read or hear. You could show the cover of the book or provide some keywords as hints. Students could draw a picture or think of questions they expect to be answered in the text.
3. Get students to visualize in their mind what they are listening to or reading. You can ask them to describe the characters, the setting, or objects in the text. Students can draw pictures or create a comic strip.
4. Encourage students to think about questions while they are reading or listening. Students can write these questions, ask each other, or role-play an interview of some of the characters. Think about using all 5W + 1H question words.
5. Connect the text content with the learner's personal lives and experiences. This is called personalizing or text-to-self. Students will be more interested if they feel a personal connection to the text.
6. Connect the listening or reading material to other texts that have similar themes or content. This is called connecting text-to-text. For example, other stories that have similar characters or news reports from different sources.
7. Connect the text to things in the real world beyond the classroom. This is called text-to-world. Use the Internet, maps, magazines, and newspapers to put the content in context in terms of history, location, and culture.
8. Identify the main themes, the details, the purpose, and the opinions in the text. Think about the text type, for example a narrative has a beginning, a middle and an end. A persuasive text or transactional conversation may contain various opinions or differing views.
   
9. Inferring, also called "reading between the lines", is when the listener or reader tries to guess extra information that is not clearly stated in the text. Ask students to guess and infer further details that are not included.
10. Ask students to evaluate the text. Do they trust it? Do they agree? How does it compare to other similar texts? What score would they give it? How could it be improved?