So, given this huge amount of Christmas nerdiness, I have hugely enjoyed compiling a list of my favourite Christmas activities for the classroom.

They range from games to more structured activities, from videos to songs and readings, from paper-based to online activities. Most of them can be used flexibly from low to higher levels. One thing they have in common is they all require students to do something that’s not necessarily employ some given language we’ve given them, i.e. they can be used as tasks.

So, without further ado, here they are: my favourite 10 Christmas-themed activities! You can read on or download them as a handy pdf:

1. Christmas bingo card generator (any level)

I bet you have played bingo at least once in your life. Well, so have our students, and we can use that knowledge and that spirit of competition to play a Christmas-themed game (and review a bit of vocabulary while we’re at it). The cool thing? You can quickly and easily create your own set of Christmas bingo cards with this website. Enter the Christmas vocabulary your want to include in the game, decide your settings, click next step and choose “30 cards for free”: here are your bingo cards ready to print!

2. Write a letter to Santa with prompts (A1-A2)

This activity is well-suited for lower levels, though anyone can do it as we could all write a letter to Santa. Thanks to this online activity, students have to answer simple questions and at the end, the website pulls the answers together to form quite a cool letter to Santa Claus.

3. Christmas memory (A1-B1)

Remember Christmas? Have your students play this Christmas-themed memory game: set them a time and ask them not only to play the game but also to write down as many of the things they see. At the end of the set time, which students won the most and also remembers the most words?

4. All I want for Christmas is you: elision game (A2-B1)

If you came to the LanguagEd Day, you’ll remember that in my webinar, I talked about using gap-fills creatively and gave a tutorial on how to use Lyrics Training (and if you didn’t come, you can still watch all the videos and slides). For Christmas, I thought I’d put the two together, so I took the uber-famous song by Mariah Carey and made a gap-fill game with a twist: the words gapped are all examples of elision, i.e. the last sound is omitted in the way they’re pronounced. For example, think about how Carey says “all I want for Christmas is you”: the /t/ in the word want is omitted. Students listen and play the game, then you can ask them if they noticed something in how all the words are pronounced. If they didn’t, you can tell them! This raises their awareness of how English is pronounced in real, spontaneous speech (aside from, of course, training their listening skills).

5. Christmas taboo cards (any level)

Taboo is truly one of the games I’ve played most often in class, especially at the end of long lessons, long days or – as is the case now – a long semester! Print these Christmas-themed taboo cards. Put students in teams and taking turns, one person in the team has a set time (maybe give them a bit more than the one minute in the standard game) and they have to explain the words in bold on the cards without using the other words. You can review some vocabulary in class in the previous days or remove some cards if you think they’ll be too difficult. Better yet: why not give students 20 minutes to make their own cards?

6. Google Santa Tracker (any level)

Did you know Google has quite a few Santa-themed games? My favourite is this Elf Glider. It’s easy to play and accessible: an elf on a glider has to dodge a number of obstacles. Put students in pairs and set them a time (I’d recommend 5 to 10 minutes). First, student A will play the game and student B will write down the names of as many of the objects the elf dodged. Then, the students swap roles. They continue swapping roles until the time ends. If they need help finding the names of the obstacles, they can be allowed to use a dictionary. By repeating the game, they repeat the task: one of the many advantages of task repetition is vocabulary consolidation (not to mention the motivation given by the competition aspect!)

7. December holidays around the world reading (A2 and up)

As you probably know, December is not just Christmas. There are lots of resources out there about the many other festivities celebrated in December but this text is nice and short. You can do lots of things with it: brainstorm all the holiday names students know, ask them to check them against the ones in the text. Or you can print the text, cut it into paragraphs, divide the class into groups and then assign a holiday to each group. After reading about their holiday, each person from each group will join another group and tell the rest of the new group about their holidays. Another idea: divide the students into groups or pairs, give them the names of the holidays and a set amount of time to find as much information as possible about it. Then, give them the text: how many things did they find? How many more did they learn from the text?

8. Video: The Weirdest Christmas Traditions From Around The World (A2 and up)

Did you know that the Austrians believe in Krampus, Santa’s evil twin? Or that the Indians don’t decorate pines but banana and pear trees? These are only some of the interesting weird facts about Christmas from countries around the world that you’ll find in this Buzzfeed video. You can ask your learners to share the weird traditions they know, from their families, hometowns or other places. Tip: you may need to slow down the video to help learners understand.

9. Twenty questions on Christmas (any level)

This game can easily be customised for any level. In groups or even as a whole class, one learner chooses a Christmas object and all the other learners can ask up to 20 yes/no questions to guess what the object is. If they guess with 20 questions, they win. And I bet you can see the grammar benefits of this straightaway: it’s a great chance to review and consolidate the interrogative form and short answers (yes, it is/yes, it does, etc).

10. Submit your New Year’s wish to the Times Square wishing wall (any level)

I’ve left this for the end because I’ve done this one for years and my students always enjoy it. It has real value and it’s a prime example of a proper real-life task. As you probably know, Times Square in New York is the place to be for New Year’s Eve, with its traditional celebration: the ball drops (and you can watch it live, by the way), confetti flutter all around, everyone is happy. The brilliant thing is anybody can write a wish for the new year, submit it to the Times Square website and it will be printed on a real piece of confetti used on 31 December! Students normally get quite excited as their words will be part of a real celebration all the way across the Atlantic. To help lower level students, give them some prompts to start their wishes, like “for next year, I would like/I want/I wish…”

So these are my top 10 activities: I hope you like them! If you try out any of them, please let me know how it went!

May I also take this opportunity to wish you all a restful and pleasant holiday season with your loved ones.

If you’d like to download all these ideas in a handy, printable pdf, here it is:

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As you know, I did, and I already shared some lesson ideas on Marcell Jacobs’ historic win in the men’s 100m race.

But today, I woke up to this video, which is… how do I put this delicately? Oh, yes, pretty funny to watch (for an Italian, that is, not so much a Brit!).

It shows the last few seconds of the Men’s 4 × 100 metres relay at the Olympics, where Italy beat Great Britain by a hundredth of a second.

The video can obviously be seen as pretty amusing to an Italian audience, but it may also have some potential for the English Language Classroom, which got me thinking:

Here are all my ideas. Of course they don’t make a coherent lesson plan: to do that, you need to follow a much more structured approach.

However, they are hopefully some inventive little ideas that you can either use in your classes or apply to other video extracts.

1. Trim the video

The beginning of the video can be a little unclear to school-age students, so I decided to make it into a 4-second (rather than 5-second, huge difference, I know!) video. The result is this video, which starts at 1 second:

Learn how you can start a video at a specific time on YouTube at this page. This can be a useful skill when you find a good video for a class but want to only show the final section.

For more ideas on good videos to use with teenagers, see our top 8 video ideas.

2. Sentence stress

As we know, stress in English utterances is specific to the language, as certain words (normally, content words like nouns and verbs) are stressed – unless of course the speaker wants to emphasise certain words on purpose.

Failure to recognise and be attuned to English sentence stress is a frequent cause of listening problems. As I discussed in a previous article, listening can be taught and developed through an approach that focuses on developing the processes of listening, one of which is recognising stressed words.

In the video extract, the speaker says:

Is it going to be gold for Great Britain? No, it’s Italy!

Ask your learners to recognise which words are stressed (e.g. ‘gold’): this will also help identify and reflect on how the unstressed words are pronounced (see below).

3. Common reductions

Listen to the video again: does the speaker actually say “going to”? No, he says “gonna”.

Gonna as a short for going to has become common, especially in spoken English. Ask your learners to try to transcribe the section and then have them focus on how going to is produced as gonna. You can then focus on:

• Other similar reductions they may be familiar (or unfamiliar) with, such as wanna or gotta
• The extent to which such reductions are appropriate for different genres and situations. We can no longer say, for example, that gonna is unsuitable for the written word or for formal situations: how about, respectively, texting and Bush and Obama using gonna when addressing the nation?
• Look up going to in YouGlish and have your learners listen to how it is pronounced differently by different speakers. As you will see, sometimes it’s not even pronounced gonna, but I’mma

4. Weak forms

The extract contains a few weak forms, i.e. syllables that are not stressed in an utterance and are hence pronounced differently, often with a schwa sound.

For example, the word for in “is it gonna be gold for Great Britain” is not pronounced /fɔːr/ but /ˈfə/. This can be a good introduction to the theme of weak forms in typical words like an, and, it, etc.

5. Elision

Another interesting feature of connected speech is elision, whereby a sound is dropped.

Watch the video again: which sounds are dropped?

Well, for example, the /d/ in gold!

Read more about features of connected speech in this article.

6. Glottal stop

And now onto one of the most typically British features of connected speech: the glottal stop. As the name suggests, it is a glottalisation of the /t/ sound.

Can you spot it in the video?

Yes, it’s so coincidentally in the pronunciation og Great Britain!

7. Great Britain: a bit of geography, politics and history

The video mentions Great Britain. This would be a cool springboard for a broader discussion of the term Great Britain, including:

• What it means politically and the differences with the UK or the 4 nations
• Why Great Britain is one team at the Olympics but then has multiple teams in the Euros
• The history behind Great Britain

8. Grammar: It as a dummy subject

Did you notice that the speaker in the video says “no, it’s Italy”?

Well, what does it mean in this context? Does it carry any meaning or is it used as a dummy subject? A good question for a bit of emergent grammar.

9. Intertextuality and background knowledge

Now, the video can make you chuckle if you’re Italian, there’s no question about it. It has been shared widely because it’s so funny to watch (again, for an Italian, not so much for a Brit!)

This video can be used to reflect on background knowledge: why is it funny? What background knowledge (e.g. about previous Italian wins, about the Italian-British rivalry) is needed to understand why it’s funny? This is also useful for broader awareness of the role of background knowledge in listening comprehension.

To emphasise that the video has been regarded by many as funny, show them this video: someone even made a remix of the video!

10. Personal response

People will react differently to videos and, more broadly, to events. The video can lead to some interesting discussions if learners are asked, for example, how the video made them feel or what their thoughts were on the Olympics. You may also have students of different nationalities in your classroom, so that might add to the discussion. This can also take the form of a writing task in which students choose their 3 favourite events in sports history and describe them.

Ah, believe it or not, I’ve made it to 10 ideas out of a 4-second video!

Can you add any ideas to my list? Let me know in the comments section!

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In this blog post, I’d like to talk about something that I feel we as teachers tend to avoid: our failures. Sometimes, no matter how scrupulously you plan a class, it just won’t go well. And while there may be several different reasons for this, sharing experiences can help improve our practice.

As teachers, the pressure to always succeed can be overwhelming, so acknowledging, sharing and reflecting on what went wrong and why that may be can only aid in normalising failure as a part of life, and perhaps becoming active and positive recipients of feedback in the future. By the way, don’t take my word for it: have a look at Thomas Farrell’s views on teacher reflection as a tool for development.

The story

​So here I am with what I’m hoping will be only the first episode of What Went Wrong, on features of connected speech. I was teaching a one-to-one class based on this text and I thought I’d exploit it to do some work on connected speech with my B2 learner. I focussed on this extract:
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I arrived at the youth centre that morning feeling full of trepidation. There was a gang of 12 helpers including me and each pair had been allocated a particular age group. Mine was the 10 to 11 year olds. Even with the planning meeting I had attended the week before, I worried about whether I was up to the task. Why hadn’t I read through the copious lesson plans we were given beforehand? And wasn’t the average 10-year-old more interested in the latest Play Station game than making things with paper and glue?

and asked my learner to make some hypotheses about how this text might be read at normal speed by a Brisith speaker (as we both live in the UK), what the content words would be and what reductions might occur in spontaneous speech. I was hoping specifically to elicit weak forms of function words such as “a” and “of”, as we’d talked about them before.

My aim was never for her to gain productive competence of these features, but indeed receptive competence that might help her with her decoding (by the way, see Cauldwell 2018 if you’re interested in how weak forms of function words cause decoding problems in listening or our post on listening instruction). Therefore, I didn’t ask her to read the text out loud, but just to listen to me read it and confirm her hypotheses.

WWW moment

The student made her hypotheses, but when I started reading, she would interrupt me at times and ask me to repeat so she could hear better. The fundamental issue with this is that by stopping and starting, I wasn’t reading in exactly the same way and she was (understandably) hearing slightly different things. I then proceeded to read the whole text again without interruptions so that she could further check her hypotheses. Eventually, she’d picked up on a few features, which I was happy with, but seemed a little confused and tired.

What I learned from all this

• when practising listening to features of connected speech, make sure learners are sufficiently familiar with them. Upon reflection, this was a bit too soon for her and she would’ve benefitted from further and more controlled exposure to these features;
• relying on your own reading of a text may be convenient, but no two reads will ever be the same; therefore, the next time, I will record my voice and play the audio file to ensure consistency;
• with this kind of practice, the learner has to concentrate hard on some very small details: all of this is cognitively demanding and this might be why she interrupted me. Next time, I will give her the recording so that she can decide for herself when to pause, rewind and listen again, which will be far more personalised;
• I need to further emphasise that, at least at an initial stage, this work is for receptive rather than productive purposes. Especially if your learners are living in an English-speaking country, like mine is, they may want to try their hand at producing these features straightaway, but if input-based theories SLA theories have taught us something, it is that having learners produce the target language straightaway will not necessarily help them transform input into intake.

That’s all for this episode of What Went Wrong: sharing my moment of shame has really helped me reflect, I hope it will help you too!