Food flashcards

Preparation

These activities take little or no preparation. You can either cut pictures from magazines, use online images or download the ones we have provided here.

© All images are copyright Chris Tribble, King's College, London University and used with his kind permission.

Procedure

• Learners look at the pictures and try to name as many items as possible. This could be limited to food or could include other items in the picture.
  • If your learners are competitive you could put them in groups for this and set a time limit.
  • You could even supply bilingual dictionaries to help them discover the new vocabulary for themselves.
• Get the learners to describe the setting for the meal.
  • Is it formal / informal, in a house, restaurant, romantic etc?
  • Which meal is it (breakfast, dinner, etc.)?
• There is a common saying 'We are what we eat.' Get the learners to try to describe the people who might be eating this meal.
  • What can you guess about a person from the food they eat?
  • Describe the person you think who cooked the meal/will eat the meal?
  • Where are the people now?
• You can get your learners' personal reactions to the pictures.
  • Which meal would they most/least like to eat? Why?
  • What country does the food come from?
  • How is the food similar to/different from the food from their own country?
• You can also use the pictures in a popular speaking exam format by asking the learners to choose two pictures and compare and contrast them.
  • Ask them to try to discuss the pictures in pairs for two minutes.
  • If you have confident learners, you could make this more interactive by getting pairs to do this in front of the class.
  • The rest of the class should listen and award marks out of ten for their performance (extra marks for clear pronunciation, good interaction and range of vocabulary; minus points for incoherence and repetition).