Hey Andy,

I don't actually have that much experience with teens, but like always discussing the weather, a British person can't actually ignore a request for help.

Websites; seriously the podcasts on here are amazing. Choose a topic that will interest your students, and that's more or less age appropriate and go for it. You probably know about onestopenglish.com already, but that has some nice age appropriate stuff. They also have methodolgy hints and tips if you want to read up on teaching teens.

Don't re-invent the wheel. There are loads of good resources made for teaching teens, you just have to find them and adapt them to your teens. You're in a school- raid the library.

My favourite book- 701 classroom games and activities. If you can find a copy of this lying around your school nab it.

My favourite activity; "help me, help me I have a problem."

You need a list of phrases for giving advice (if i were you, how about+ing, have you thought of, you could) and a set of maybe 4 problems (lost your car, always sleep through the alarm, corked a bottle of wine- not age appropriate, but you are in France, locked out of the house). I do this with a projector, but you can board the vocab and tell the students the problems.

When you go in the class, get their attention. Tell 'em your dog has died, your upset, ask for their advice. Elicit as much as possible. Thank students, explain this is the activity your going to do; giving advice/making suggestions. Put students into groups of four, go over vocab, talk about intonation, drill...Get one student from each group to come up, explain their problem. Send them back to their groups. The idea is student 1 explains the problem to their group, the group gives advice. Hopefully using the vocab. Monitor, give it 5 mins, then get S1 to give feed back on the best piece of advice. You can do as much error correction feedback as you like. The student 2 comes up, gets a problem, goes back and asks for advice. This is almost always good fun, provides a good reason to talk- we all want to help each other :) The students reporting also give seach student an opportunity, if only briefly, to talk to the teacher, something that some students really like.

The activity above is based on a function. Think of thing students might want to do in English and give them a try. Another thing I would suggest is instead of focussing on teaching english, try teaching in english. The fancy name for this content integrated language learning (CiLL). If they are interested in football, teach them about football. Even better get them to teach you/each other.

Not sure how helpful any of that is to you, but if I come across anything that might interest you I will post it.

Good luck,

Sa

p.s Even though your not a BC bod, download the langauge assistants manual on the language assistants website; it is a fantastic resource, it's got loads of good tips, activities and links

Dear Andy,

Getting students actually involved with the English language and culture is a challenge. It can be a hard task to perform, but it is very rewarding. I have ytaught to many age and language levels and after having lots of experience with different kinds of groups, I came to an interesting conclusion: the key for getting them involved and motivated it to get to know them better.

To get to know the student better and asses their likes and dislikes in order to get them closer to the English culture/language, I like to play a viriety of games in the classroom. There's one which I really love and it can be played with all ages and levels. I get pictures of activities, places, things people enjoy in other cultures and I show them each picture, getting them to classify each on as boring or interesting. During the activity you see the students' reactions to their classmates answers and you can build your own assessment, finding out what they are truely interested in so that you can include a bit of relevance to your following classes.

For instance, once  I found out (through this game) that my students hated sports and really loved cartoon characters. So during the semester, every once in a while, I'd prepare a class related to catroons and in the end they felt motivated to start watching cartoons in English and learnt the English names of famous characters like Goofy and so on. I used The Simpsons to get them closer to the American culture and we had great and fun classes.

I hope I have helped you!

Best wishes,

Carla D'Elia 

Carla D'Elia - English Teacher

Hi Andy

I am listing down two activities which will go down well with the age group you are training right now.

STORY TELLING

Make your students sit in a circle. Tell the whole class they need to tell a story. One student will speak only one sentence. He will then call out the name of any classmate and that student will continue from where the first student left. He again speaks a sentence and calls out the name of the third student. Make it clear to the class that they need to make the story as creative and mad as possible.

For example, A student can say, 'One day Harry saw a frightening sight'

The second student says, 'He saw a lion having a quarrel with a traffic policeman'

The third student says, 'The lion had a date with his girl and the traffic police charged him for beating the red signal'

You can decide as to when the game should finish. Give an indication to the class to finish the story, before the last 3 rounds. The entire class will listen very carefully since no one knows whose name will be called.

This activity is simply hilarious and mad!

CATCHING A SEAT

Assuming that your class strength is 15 have 14 chairs placed at different angles and ensure there is lot of moving space between chairs. The number of chairs should be one less than the total class strength. Ask one student to stand in the middle. The other 14 students can take any seat. Tell the class that you will make a statement. If the statement applies to them they should change their seats, but they cannot take seats to their immediate left or right. In the meanwhile, the student standing in the middle at the start of the game needs to catch a seat for himself. At any given point of time one student will be left standing.

Just to give some examples, your first statement could be 'I like students who love their parents'

Obviously the whole class will get up and change their seats. Your second statement could be 'I like students who have brothers or sisters'

Since this is a tiring game you need to decide when the game should end.

All the best.