CHARACTER ROLE PLAY: Each student takes one of the central characters in the article. The teacher can add more. Students with the same roles discuss their characters and plan what they will say in the role play. The teacher sets the scene for the role play.
STUDENT DECIDED ROLES: The teacher outlines the nature / situation [...]

Ideas to provide students with the language to move from the news article into conversation.
EXPONENTS TO MOVE FROM ARTICLE TO CONVERSATION: Providing suitable exponents can enable learners to more confidently talk about a text they have in front of them. It is quite natural for anyone armed with a newspaper, magazine or book to want [...]

Activities to aid students’ reading or listening comprehension and to reduce the cognitive burden and pressure of “cold” reading / listening.
GAP FILL: A traditional exercise in which students reinsert words that have been taken out of a text:
Put the words on the bottom into the correct gaps.
Landmine elephant gets new foot

EXAMPLE: New developments in ________ [...]

Pre-reading and pre-listening ideas to ease students into interaction with the article, expose them to vocabulary and ideas and thus make the article easier to negotiate.
TRUE/FALSE CHOICE: Create a series of true/false sentences. For each proposition, include one sentence that is true and its false partner.

Circle the sentence that you think is correct
Google wants to [...]

Many of these activities are intended for five- to ten-minute bursts of activity, although many could be used for extended fluency practice.
WORDS BRAINSTORM: Teacher writes a keyword related to the news article on the board. Students spend one minute brainstorming all of the words they associate with that keyword. Students talk about the words in [...]

Parts and Goals of a Listening and Speaking Course
The Four Strands
The basic argument, is that a well-balanced language course should consist of four roughly equal strands:

Learning through meaning-focused input; that is, learning through listening and reading where the learner’s attention is on the ideas and messages conveyed by the language.
Learning through meaning-focused output; that is, [...]

Ideas to “test the water” regarding students’ opinions towards news and current events stories. This writing also contains additional ideas to increase students’ motivation to study English using news stories.
1. THE NEWS HABIT: Encourage your students’ news reading / viewing / listening habits, whether it be in their L1 or in English. Keeping up with [...]

English Skill Level: Advanced Beginning to Advanced
Grade Level: Secondary to Adult
Background
By and large, vocational English (VESL) grew out of adult education ESL programs that determined the need for programs that are more particularly focused on work place skills. VESL developed to meet the needs of ESL students who planned on entering the workforce or who [...]

English Skill Level: All
Grade Level: All
Also Called: Learner-Centered Curriculum
Background
The learner-centered approach is a general orientation toward language teaching that has evolved since the 1970s in reaction to teacher-fronted, top-down language teaching classrooms and curriculum. In general, a learner-centered approach focuses on the background, needs, and expectations of students to create a more effective, authentic, and [...]

English Skill Level: All
Grade Level: All
Background
Family literacy is based on the belief and related research that students will be more successful in school if their parents prepare and support them. Family literacy was first developed to prepare emergent readers for school success by giving information and activities that parents could use with their children to [...]