The roll of any language teacher is to come up with language activities that allow a student to develop their skill and comfort with the language being studied.  This is a never-ending quest that requires a certain amount of dedication and time commitment.  What you develop as a teacher will really depend on the level of your students (both in terms of language ability and age), as well as exactly what it is that you are currently teaching.  Activities for speaking are not usually the same as an activity for a writing class.

That said, there are a few things that are common to all language activities that you develop.  Here are a few ideas that I have found help me keep on top of planning and developing appropriate language learning activities.

• Language Activities should be Recyclable - Your activities should be easily recycled and used again, either with the same students, or a new crop of students in a future term.  You want to have language activities that you can create once and use many times.
• Language Activities should allow for skill area inter-linking - Ideally your activities should have some way of interlinking between several skill areas.  This means that when you are doing a writing activity, there should be some component which lends itself to a speaking activity perhaps.  In writing, doing peer conferencing is a good example of this.
• Language Activities should have multiple uses - When you are creating activities, try to make some that allow you to use them for different skill areas with minimal changes. A good example of this would be using photographs for practicing/developing descriptive language.  With very little effort pictures can be used for writing or speaking (look at this picture for 5 minutes and then write about it. vs. look at this picture for 5 minutes and then tell a partner about it…and then write about your partners using what they told you as a reference).

 If you keep these three simple concepts in mind as you develop language learning activities for your classes, you will save yourself a great deal of hassle and end up with much more cohesive lessons that require less effort on your part to plan and develop.

Comments are open - drop a note if you have other techniques that help you out.

Cheers,

Eric

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