Ask the three groups to come up with five to ten adjectives to describe their group state of mind and put these up n the board

8.    Ask the three groups to come up with five to ten adjectives to describe their group state of mind and put these up n the board.

9.    Round off the exercise by telling the class that when de Bono asked different groups of people to do this kind of exercise, it turned out that primary school children mostly saw advantages, business people had plenty of both while groups of teachers were the most negative.

Note

Advantages the students offered:

In a hot country you can collect rain water.

It won’t drip round the edges.

You can use it for carrying shopping.

It’s not dangerous in a crowd.

It’s an optimistic umbrella.

It’s easy to hold if two people are walking together.

With this umbrella you’ll look special.

It’ll take less floor space to dry.

This umbrella makes people communicate. They can see each other.

You can paint this umbrella to look like a flower.

You’ll get a free supply of ice if it hails.

 Presentation Listening to time

Grammar:	Time phrases
You can use this idea to practice a variety of different structures-see variations bellow for some examples   Level:	Upper intermediate to very advanced
Time:	40-50 minutes
Materials	None

Preparation

Invite a native speaker to your class, preferably not a language teacher as they sometimes distort their speech. Ask the person to speak about a topic that has them move through time. This could be his country history. The talk should last around twenty minutes. Explain to the speaker that the students will be paying close attention not only to the content but to the language form, too.

In class

1.    Before the speaker arrives, explain to the students that they are to jot down all the words and phrases they hear that express time. They don't need to note all the words!

2.    Welcome the speaker and introduce the topic.

3.    The speaker takes the floor for fifteen to twenty minutes and you join the students in taking language notes. If there are questions from the students, make sure people continue to take notes during the questioning.

4.    Put the students in threes to compare their time-phrase notes. Suggest the speaker joins one of the groups. Some natives are delighted to look in a ‘speech mirror’.

5.    Share your own notes with the class. Round off the lesson by picking out other useful and normal bits of language the speaker used that are not yet part of your student’s idiolects.

Example

One speaker mentioned above produced these time words: only about ten years/there was a gap of nine years/ at roughly the same time/over the next few hundred years/from 1910 until the present day/it’s been way back/ within eighteen month there will be/until three years ago/when I was back in September

Variations

Choose the speaker who is about to go off on an important trip. In speaking about this, some of the verbs used will be in a variety of forms used to talk about the future.

Invite someone to speak about the life and habits of someone significant to them, but two lives separately from them, say a grandparent. This topic is likely to evoke a rich mixture of present simple, present continuos, will used to describe habitual events, ‘ll be –ing etc.

Note

To invite the learners to pick specific grammar features out of a stream of live speech is a powerful form of grammar presentation. In this technique the students ‘present’ the grammar to themselves. They go through a process of realization which is lot stronger than what often happens in their minds during the type of ‘grammar presentation’ required of trainees on many teacher training courses. During the realization process, they are usually not asleep.

Guess my grammar

Grammar:	Varied+question form
Level:	Elementary to intermediate
Time:	55 minutes
Materials	None

In class

1.    Choose a grammar area the students need to review. In the example below there are adjectives, adverbs and relative pronouns.

2.    Ask each student to work alone and write a sentence of 12-16 words (the exact length is not too important). Each sentence should contain an adjective, and adverb and a relative pronoun, or whatever grammar you’ve chosen to practise. For example: ‘She sat quietly by the golden river that stretched to the sea’.

3.    Now ask the students to rewrite their sentences on a separate piece of paper, leaving in the target grammar and any punctuation, but leaving the rest as blanks, one dash for each letter. The sentence above would look like this:

--- --- quietly -- --- golden ----- that --------- -- --- ---.

While they are doing this ask any students who are not sure of the correctness of their sentence to check with you.