Using Web Resources in your Classes

Release Date : 16.06.2010

The internet offers us a myriad of opportunities to supplement our exam course-book materials - here are just a few suggestions. There’ll be more in later articles!

Cloze and crossword activities:
These can be used to develop use of English skills (for example, for Paper 3 in FCE, CAE and CPE). Open cloze focuses primarily on grammatical words (prepositions, auxiliary verbs, pronouns, determiners etc), while crosswords obviously focus on vocabulary.

Oxford University Press have two very nice tools that allow you to create quite sophisticated open cloze tasks and crosswords – they are based on OUP course books (New English File and Headway respectively), but both allow you to use your own input to make your own materials:
Cloze Generator: www.oup.com/elt/global/products/ef_teachertools/preint/
Crossword Maker: www.oup.com/elt/global/products/headwayteachertools/

Cambridge exams also feature multiple-choice cloze, where each gap has four options – here, the main focus is on vocabulary. You could use Cloze Generator here too, but you’d have to supply the four options (including the correct one!) yourself.

To have access to OUP’s full range of online materials, you’ll need to join their Teacher’s Club: this is free, and just a matter of providing your e-mail address and a user name. Another site that allows you to create a variety of word puzzles is Puzzlemaker: http://puzzlemaker.discoveryeducation.com

Making your own discourse reading materials from downloads:
Because it’s so easy to download a text, you can quickly make materials to develop your learners’ discourse reading skills for Paper 1. The discourse reading task is the one where learners have to decide which paragraph goes where in the text: this can be challenging, so you will need to develop this skill, not simply test it. Some ideas:

1 scrambled sentences:
copy the original text and save one copy as the key. Use cut and paste to scramble the sequence of the sentences in the other copy. Students reassemble the text correctly - make sure that this is achievable: there must be sufficient cohesion and coherence in the original to make it possible. As a variant, add two or three sentences which don’t belong - these must be discarded by the students.

2 scrambled paragraphs:
copy the original text and save one copy as the key. Use cut and paste to scramble the sequence of the paragraphs in the other copy. Students reassemble the text correctly - again, make sure that this is achievable: there must be sufficient cohesion and coherence in the original to make it possible

3 jigsaw texts:
copy two different but somewhat related texts (eg two texts connected to holidays), and save copies as the keys. Then mix the paragraphs of the two texts into one combined version - the learners have to separate this back into the two original texts.

4 discourse cloze - sentence version:
copy the original text and save one copy as the key. Cut up to seven sentences and paste them in random order below the main body of the text. Mark the cuts with numbered gaps. The learners must place each sentence in the appropriate gap. Again, ensure that the task is feasible.

5 discourse cloze -paragraph version: 
copy the original text and save one copy as the key. Cut up to six paragraphs and paste them in random order below the main body of the text. Mark the cuts with numbered gaps. The learners must place each paragraph in the appropriate gap. As above, ensure that the task is feasible.

For all of the above, you can use materials taken from publishers’ web sites at the appropriate level, from BBC World Service Learning English, or from non-ELT sites (generally suitable only from FCE upwards).

Using BBC World Service Learning English
This web site has lots of activities for your learners to do at home – and some can be modified for use in class (eg see above, as a source of texts):
www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/

In addition to the interactive grammar and vocabulary activities – best done at home – there is the regular Words in the News section, which features authentic reading and listening practice, combined with a vocabulary focus. The stories appear three times weekly, and the archive dates back to 1999 – plus there are separate stories in the Business and Sports, arts and entertainments sections. So that’s an awful lot of authentic texts for you to choose from!

Your learners can practise their reading and/or listening skills at home, of course, but the material also lends itself very well to classroom use. For example, in your BEC classes, you could use the archive to follow a business story at (say) three chronological stages. As a development of the above, and if you have time, you can try the following (especially with BEC V & H, and CAE & CPE classes):

1 multi-source texts: use different web sources to compile two to four shortish texts which cover different aspects or viewpoints of a topic. For example: India - Rough Guides, BBC World Service Learning English, New York Times, Guardian. This will help to expose learners to a range of text types, which is useful for the “short extracts” task in CAE and CPE reading (paper 1), for example.

2 compare & contrast: a variation of the above is take texts covering exactly the same topic from two (or perhaps three) different sources.