A Smorgasbord of Vocabulary & Listening Activities

Happy June!

This month, I have a delightful array of free activities and resources to boost your teaching joy!

Doublets Vocabulary Activity

I recently read through Alan Maley’s 50 Creative Activities, part of the Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers series edited by Scott Thornbury. I’m well on my way to a sizable collection of these bite-sized guides, and I highly recommend them! 

One of the activities I implemented with my own students was “Double Trouble” (p. 88), to teach common lexical doublets. Doublets (also called binomials) are two words joined by and, or, to, or by. A common example would be aches and pains or all or nothing.

Maley provides a suggested classroom activity of writing both halves of a doublet separately on two index cards (e.g., [all or] on one card, and [nothing] on the other.) Make enough cards for each student in your class to get one, then have students circulate around the room to locate the missing half of their doublet.

For my online classes, I created a presentation where the first word is on one slide and students can try to guess the word that pairs with it. You can access the presentation here–you are free to use these slides in your own classroom if they would be a good fit for your students!

If you are using the slide presentation, I recommend giving an example to illustrate the meaning of the doublet before asking students to guess the missing word. You might say, “It’s all or ___ with this exam. If I don’t pass, I fail the course." Chat GPT is a great resource for coming up with examples that will be relatable to your students. For the previous example, I used the prompt: please give me 5 examples of common uses of the phrase "all or nothing."

A doublet guessing game would also make a fun warm up activity, using just one or two each time. At the end of class, quiz students on the doublet(s) they learned at the beginning of class to see if they still remember!

Listening Activity: My town 

I’ve recently recorded some 5-minute listening activities to use with my low intermediate students and wanted to share one of them with you! 

This one is called Pros and Cons of Your Town and the video includes captions that students can follow along with as they listen. In this recording, I talk about the town where I live, and some of the things I like and dislike about it.

I use these activities as a springboard for conversation, and the audio includes several questions that students can ask and answer with a partner, or they could also be used as a writing prompt.

There is also a quiz to accompany the listening activity, which you can access and share with students using the link.

I would love to get your feedback if you use this activity in your classroom, as I am considering making these available to teachers and would like to know how you used them and how it went. 

I am also happy to share the audio-only file and/or transcript with you if you would like to use either of those as part of the classroom activity. Just email me at [email protected] and I will be happy to send them your way.

Recommended Video

Learn English with Bob the Canadian is one of the YouTube channels I routinely recommend to my students, and this month he came out with a new video I have already shared with several of my students: 14 Ways to Answer the Question, “How’s it going?” 

You can spot an experienced teacher as opposed to many of the “teacher-influencers” on YouTube by their comprehensible pacing, skilled explanations, and clear examples, and Bob definitely checks all three boxes!

Recommended Podcast Episode

The American English Podcast is one of my 5 Podcast Recommendations for English Language Learners, and Shana’s two-part conversation about Cultural Curiosities like double-dipping, tipping, and to shoes-on vs. shoes-off houses, is a great listen for your high intermediate and advanced students!

Happy Summer!

For those of you on summer break, here’s wishing you a wonderfully relaxing time of gardening, pool time with your kids, vacation, farmer’s marketing, or whatever the season has in store!

Bethany