This document provides an overview of teaching techniques and strategies presented by Lucy Castañón Ralph at the Teacher Training Center. It includes icebreakers, classroom management strategies, techniques for teaching language skills like listening, speaking, reading and writing. Specific activities are described like a silly dictation for listening practice and a jigsaw puzzle challenge for speaking. Grammar instruction techniques are discussed that avoid explicitly teaching grammar rules. Important websites for teachers are also listed. The document aims to equip teachers with engaging and effective methods and activities.

1. “Teaching Techniques”
Presenter: Lucy Castañón Ralph
Teacher Training Center

2. Breaking the Ice
• Write down the following words on a scrap of
paper, keep what you write secret from those
around you:
2. The name of a fruit
3. The name of a vegetable
4. A number between 1 and 200
5. Do you like football?
6. How many pencils and pens do you have?
7. What is the first thing you do every morning?
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3. These things are actually:
1. Your first name
2. Your family name
3. Your age
4. Are you married?
5. How many children you have
6. Your job
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4. Now you:
• Must stand up and go around the
class and ask the personal questions
and share information about your
new selves.
• Shake hands and make eye contact
when meeting new people.
•GO
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5. Techniques for Better Classroom
Discipline
1. Focusing
2. Direct Instruction
3. Monitoring
4. Modeling
5. Non-verbal cuing
6. Environmental
control
7. Low-profile intervention
8. Assertive discipline
9. Assertive I-Messages
10. Humanistic I-Messages
11. Positive Discipline
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6. • Golden Rules About Classroom Management
• 1. Ensure that you have clearly stated rules and
procedures with established consequences that
are expected and reviewed regularly. All students
must know the rules, routines and expectations.
• 2. Never continue on with instruction when the rules
are being broken - pause, delay and ensure that
you have your student's attention.
• 3. Catch your students using appropriate behavior
and praise them!
• 4. Use behavior contracts when necessary and
follow up with appropriate incentives.
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7. • 5. Be sure that your instructional periods are NOT
too long, students need to be mobile throughout
the day.
• 6. Provide individual , personal cueing and
prompts to certain students as needed.
Sometimes just touching a student's shoulder will
bring them back to task.
• 7. POST the important rules - keep it short, no more
than 6 and refer to them often. These should be
posted after the class has brainstormed them.
• 8. Make sure you are teaching to all the various
learning styles your students have. A student who is
not being reached is more likely to be a problem.
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8. Teaching Language Skills
• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading
• Writing
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9. Listening
A Silly Dictation
Aim:
• Good with higher level students to allow
processing of language.
• Encourage thinking skills as well as
listening and writing.
• Laughter is great at helping to create a
positive and energetic classroom mood.
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10. Procedure
• Tell the students you have a cough today
but you are still going to do a dictation. If
they don’t hear words, they will just have to
guess what you said.
• Read out a joke like the one below and
dictate as usual but don’t read all the words
– cough instead of saying certain words e.g.
Eleven people were cough on a rope, under
a helicopter, ten men and one cough.
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11. • Students have to guess what the missing
words are and write them in, either
individually or in pairs.
• After checking whether they guessed
correctly, they could discuss the joke and
why/if they found it funny.
• They could also try telling jokes they know in
their mother tongue in English.
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12. • Eleven people are hanging on a rope, under a
helicopter, ten men and one woman. The rope is
not strong enough to carry them all, so they
decide that one has to leave, because otherwise
they are all going to fall. They are not able to
name that person, until the woman makes a very
touching speech. She says she will voluntarily let
go of the rope, because as a woman she is used
to giving up everything for her husband and kids,
or for men in general, and is used to always
making sacrifices with little in return. As soon as
she finishes her speech, all the men started
clapping their hands......
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13. Listen and discuss
• Imagine by John Lennon
• Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
• Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
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14. Teacher Training Center
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
In a brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one

15. Speaking
In groups of six discuss the following questions:
• What does the author mean when he says
“You may say I’m a dreamer?
• Who’s the author singing to?
• What does he want to express in his song?
• What feelings are awaken when listening to
this song?
• Do you know who John Lennon was?
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16. Jigsaw puzzle challenge
• Take 3-4 large pictures/photos and stick them on
card. Pictures can come from Sunday
supplements, travel brochures, calendars,
magazine adverts etc. Pictures specific to students’
interests will motivate them e.g. film stills, cartoons,
news stories, famous paintings, famous people.
• cut out the picture in two pieces.
• Give each student in the class a jigsaw piece. They
must not show their piece to anyone.
• Students then mingle and question each other
about what is on their puzzle piece to try and find
the other person with the piece of the same jigsaw.
• The object of the game is to find the other and put
together the jigsaw.
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17. Writing
• With the pictures you have in the envelopes
you should write any of the following:
• Commercial
• Poem
• Letter
• Note
• Story
• Riddle
Show your master piece to the class.

18. Teaching Grammar Without Teaching Grammar
Grammar has a bad reputation because:
• it has often been taught as a separate skill strangely
disassociated from the rest of language learning
• students have had to learn the labels for language
e.g. ‘past continuous’, which can be like learning a
third language
• students have had to do lots of grammar exercises
that have had little or no meaning for them
• it’s not been fun
• it’s not been meaningful
• it’s not been memorable
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19. When teaching Grammar the following aspects of the language
items need to be focussed on – see checklist below
practice
form
pronunciation
context
meaning

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20. Teaching grammar: can/able to
• Can means is able to, as well as is permitted to.
• e.g. I can speak Japanese. / You can smoke in
the café.
• Make sure you focus on one meaning and
don’t muddle them up.
• Context - Choose a clear context to introduce
the meaning
•
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21. • Pictures are very good for presenting
grammar. For can/able to you can
have a picture like this (draw one on
the board, or find an appropriate
picture in a magazine)
“This is Mighty Mike. He can pick up an
elephant.”
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22. This is Weedy Will. He can’t pick up a
chair.
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23. Elicit other sentences from the students. Give
them prompts if they do not have enough
language to think of their own sentences like
• - pick up a table
• - fight a crocodile
• - break a door
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24. • Using real examples from the class will
ensure that they are meaningful for
students. If you add some very silly ones,
you will get the attention of students and
they may be motivated to add their own
examples.
* concentrate on allowing students to hear
the target language. Later they can see
the written form, but now they should be
digesting the meaning through the
context and teachers’ questions
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25. Drilling Grammar:
• This is a very valuable activity and students
need to hear and repeat target language
to get their ears attuned to it and their
tongues used to producing it.
• Model the target language e.g. He can
pick up an elephant. Ensure you use the
schwa in can. Allow students to hear the
model sentence a number of times.
• Get students to repeat the sentence all
together – you may need to say 1-2-3 get
them to say it at the same time

26. • Get individual students to repeat the
sentence so you can check that they have
got it right
• Repeat with other example sentences: He
can’t pick up an elephant. She can speak
Japanese.
• Allow plenty of opportunities for students to
hear and say the target language. See
below for practice ideas.
• Form – students need to be able to
recognise and produce the written form
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27. Teacher Training Center

28. Give students this grammar grid:
can’t She
an elephant pick up can He
4 3 2 1
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29. And ask them to add words to columns
1,3,4
basketball play
spaghetti cook They
swim We
Spanish speak I
a crocodile fight can’t She
an elephant pick up can He
4 3 2 1
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30. Questionnaires
Produce a worksheet like this (using
vocabulary students are familiar with):
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3
2
1
cook play tennis speak French swim name

31. Talking about famous people
• Ask students to bring in pictures of their
favourite pop, film or sports stars.
• In groups students tell their classmates
about their stars:
• e.g. Jennifer Lopez can sing, dance and
act. She can’t cook.
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32. • Students write sentences under their pictures
and display them on the class notice board.
• Make it a game. Have students write their
can / can’t sentences on cards without the
names of the stars. Put them all up on the
class wall and get students to read all of
them and try to match them to the correct
stars. Students can be encouraged to find
out some interesting facts about what the
stars can or can’t do for homework.
Students won’t mind doing this if it is about
stars they like!
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33. Tips for Teaching Vocabulary
http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/dorian_gray/1/
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34. The sullen murmur of the bees.
a. Angry
b. Willing
c. Happy
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35. You shrug your shoulders?
a. Raise
b. Shrink
c. None
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36. How perfectly hideous they are!
a. Extremely nice
b. Extremely ugly
c. Exciting
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37. Don't flatter yourself, Basil !
a. Praise
b. Offend
c. Ridicule
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38. They can sit at their ease and gape at
the play.
a. Look in surprise
b. Enjoy
c. Horrify
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39. What odd chaps you painters are!
b. Mosquitoes
c. Men
d. Animals
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40. Look at the following words and in
groups guess what they mean.
•Gingerly
•Harlem
•Plait
•Gingham
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41. •Read and find the words in
the “Sweet Potato Pie”
excerpt and match the
meanings with their
definitions:
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42. a. Gingerly
b. Harlem
c. Plait
d. Gingham
………a cotton cloth
which has a pattern
of colored squares on
a white background
……..City in NY inhabited
by African Americans
……..Carefully
……..Pig tail or braid
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43. Very Important Web Sites
• http://www.teach-nology.com/teachers/lesson_plan
• http://dictionary.cambridge.org/
• http://www.pearsonlongman.com/map/index.html
• http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/
• http://www.english-to-go.com/
• http://toeflpractice.ets.org/
• http://www.flo-joe.co.uk/cpe/students/tests/index.ht
• http://www.m-w.com/
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