It’s summer time and your students are already thinking about the beach, lazy mornings not having to get up and spending time with friends and family. The trouble is of course, it is also a time when your student’s English will start to get a bit ‘rusty.’ As soon as people stop having exposure to a language, they start to lose it. So what could your students be doing this summer to keep in contact with the language?
Reading
I can’t emphasize how important reading is. When you read a few pages of a book or an article, you are processing literally 100s if not 1000s of words and keeping them fresh and active. Quite recently I met up with an old friend who used to speak very good Spanish. We had both lived in Spain and both left Spain in 1999 but now he can’t speak hardly a word of Spanish ( he doesn’t read in Spanish), while my Spanish is still pretty good ( I read in Spanish all the time). So I really encourage your students to pick up a few readers this summer. Readers these days cover a huge range of topics and interests. Express Publishing’s ‘Discover our Amazing World series’ is an excellent series as children learn lots of useful information as well as practice their English. I love the combinations of pictures, text and the videos that support the reading material.
Listening
There are lots of free websites that offer listening material. Listenaminute is a nice site at around PET level. It offers a couple of useful interactive games that the students can play after reading or listening to the articles. One of the games (Quiz 1) asks the students to rebuild the text sentence by sentence by choosing from 3 options and the second game, which I really love, requires the students to rebuild the whole text word by word (Quiz 2). The students seem to really enjoy these activities.
Another useful site is ELLLO.Org. What I like is that it has lots of dialogues and monologues with a range of accents from speakers all over the world. These days most people will use their English to speak to other foreign people (English as a lingua franca) and that means being exposed to all sorts of different people speaking English, not just native speakers. ELLLO.org has exercises that go along with all the listening material and also includes the scripts of the recordings. You can even download the listening material.
I like having texts and audio together as I can read the text while I hear the audio of someone saying the text at the same time. Then after I like to listen to it again line by line and then read the same text aloud. I really find it helps me to compare my own pronunciation with that of the audio.
Songs
Lyricstraining.com is quite a unique site though it is not always available in all countries. Students can choose from literally 1000s of songs and listen and complete the lyrics. The songs come in four levels and users are able to replay lines of the songs if they don’t understand them and they can ask for help too. Lyrics training gives you points depending on how well you complete the song’s lyrics. Some students seem to enjoy this site and use it all the time. If they sign up ( it is free) they can see their progress as the site keeps a record of all the songs they have listened to.
Video
For younger learners there are some nice cartoon channels in YouTube that have cartoons in English with subtitles. One thing is simply to search on YouTube and find random videos with subtitles. Searching for ‘Cartoons with English subtitles’ will bring up hundreds of sites. Another way is to look for collections and lists of videos that users have collected together. Here are a couple of useful ones.
Football crazy
I am 52, a season ticket holder at Chelsea Football Club and still play football twice a week. I guess I am football crazy and I know lots of children are too. It is nice to see that more and more women and girls are interested in football too. A great website for learning about football is the British Council Premier Skills. It has a collection of video interviews with footballers on a range of topics and then related tasks.
Quizlet
I am sure most of you are aware of Quizlet. It is one of the most popular revision vocabulary tools on the internet and has literally millions of users. You can use it with your students to revise and practice the new vocabulary in your lessons but students can also use it for on their own. There are literally thousands of sets of cards that are already made, so students don’t need to make cards. They just need to know how to search for them, organise them and then work with them. I have made a small video that quickly introduces you to Quizlet and shows you why it is so useful.
http://www.teachers-corner.co.uk/russell-stannard1-dont-let-your-english-get-rusty-this-summer/
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