 7. Activities for Teaching Reported Speech in the ESL Classroom When teaching reported speech the potential for mistakes, errors, and the general difficulty is enormous due to the number of changes that are made with verb tenses, patterns, pronouns, questions, time expressions, etc. It's important to cover the subject slowly with lots of verbal practice at every opportunity. There are plenty of standard change the direct speech to reported speech activities, but your students will soon tire of these if you overuse them. Here are some ideas which have worked well in the EFL classroom and will give your students a good amount of talk time in a variety of ways. The Go Between Game This is a fun dispute role play that is ideal when students are split up into groups of three, although four can work too. Give students prompt cards with their roles, husband versus wife neighbor versus neighbor friend versus friend server versus customer politician versus voter. Also have topic cards to help them make a statement complaining about the other person, for example, husband versus wife, food temper cleanliness going out television. One of the three or four students is nominated to be the mediator or go between and must report the complaints and responses as they are given to them. For example, the wife might say to the mediator, he threw some plates when he was angry, which would be reported to the husband as she said that you had thrown some plates when you were angry. Try to keep the arguments going for as long as possible before swapping roles. Have the mediator pass judgment at the end of each round for an added element of fun. The Lying Game This is a fun game whereby students are given statements that they can either use as they are written or adapt and others must try to find out whether they are telling the truth or lying. There is a similar game that's popular on UKTB called Would I Lie to You? For example, a student may take a slip of paper with my brother is a pilot and can either say this or something similar of their own choice, such as my brother is a brain surgeon. Other students then take turns to ask natural questions in any tense to find out more information, such as where did he study and then say whether they think the statement is true or false by saying something using reported speech. For example, I think it's false because he said he had studied medicine at the London School of Economics. Pelmanism, concentration, many people will be familiar with the game concentration. It's also known as pelmanism and is used as a standard activity in the ESL classroom based on memorizing cards or other objects placed in front of the players. This lends itself well to the standard change from direct to reported speech activity by having eight pairs of cards with direct speech and matching reported speech on them, such as I ate six sausages for lunch matching with you said that you'd eaten six sausages for lunch. Students play in groups of two to four with the cards facedown, separating the direct and reported ones, and take turns turning over one, changing to the matching form and then turning over another. If they match, the student keeps them, if not they are turned back over and the next student has a go. The student with the most cards at the end of the game is the winner. You could have the students make their own version for other groups to use. Guess who? This is a fast moving game that requires minimal preparation other than having slips of paper or card with vocabulary for people on, such as mother, teacher, police officer, best friend. These words also need to be on a word bank that students have in front of them. The aim is for students to get others to guess the word that they pick up by using reporting verbs. For example, this person told me to get out of the car equals police officer. Think about how to maximize the fun factor depending on your class size. Perhaps see how many words can be guessed by a team in 30 seconds before changing to the next team. Reported speech tennis. This can be played in pairs, singles tennis or groups of four, doubles tennis. Put verbs in a given form on cards which are placed facedown on the desk. A student picks up a card and must make any sentence using the verb. The opposing student must then report back. Example with took, I took an exam last week, she said she'd taken an exam last week, they receiving student repeats the process back using the same word. For example, I took my brother to the airport yesterday. Students continue and see who makes a fault first, keep score like tennis. Who asked what? This is a mingling activity that's best suited to larger classes. Prepare simple questions for students to ask each other and put each on a separate slip of paper. Example questions are can you play the guitar, are you going out tonight, give each student just one question and have them mingle around asking the question to as many people as possible and making a note of answers. You can then have a two-stage feedback session, both of which will use reported speech. Firstly, you can question students about what others had asked, what did Kay ask? She asked if I could play the guitar. Secondly, you can ask students what they found out, Tom said he was going out tonight. Find someone who. This is similar to the who asked what activity but is suited to any class size. Create a simple questionnaire for students to mingle with, asking each other questions and recording names and answers in note form. An example question could be find someone who went out for a meal last week. Ask where. Allow time for students to tell you what they found out, practicing use of reported speech. For example, Liz said she had been out for a meal in town last week. Are you ready to teach English abroad? Do remember that reported speech requires a lot of practice by students learning the language, so these ideas should enable you to ensure students have fun whilst improving their English skills. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. Seven activities for teaching the present perfect for the ESL classroom. Teaching new tenses to students of a foreign language is often not as easy as you might anticipate, especially when the tenses you are trying to teach them does not exist in their native language. The following seven activities for teaching the present perfect for the ESL classroom will help your students pick up the tense in no time. 1. Great accomplishments. This is a great warm up activity to make your students understand what the present perfect is all about. After teaching the structure of the tense, have your students write down two to three things they have accomplished in their lives. When they are finished, have your students share their statements with the class. For example, I have won a speech contest, I have traveled to America or I have learned to play the piano. 2. Have you ever? This exercise can be an add-on to the great accomplishments game or also played separately. For this activity, have your students write down statements about what they did in the simple past on a sheet of paper. For example, I ate Thai food yesterday. Next, have your students exchange their sheets of paper and add statements using the present perfect in the word before, such as Anne has eaten Thai food before. Then, start a discussion about whether other students have or have not done the activity mentioned before. 3. How many times since? Have your students come up with common daily activities and collect the responses on the board. Next, call up the students in turn and ask them how many times they have performed this action since a certain point in time. For example, how many times have you brushed your teeth since last night? A student might answer, I have brushed my teeth twice since last night. Once the students feel confident, have them form questions with the vocabulary on the board and ask other students. 4. Great ambitions. Ask your students to write down two to three things that they have not done yet but are planning to do. This exercise focuses on the correct usage of the word yet together with the present perfect. A possible answer could be I haven't been to Europe yet, so I really want to go there next year. 5. Most deprived. Have your students move their chairs to sit in a circle, one student stands in the middle of the circle and announces something he has never done before. All of the students who have done it need to stand up and find another chair and the student from the middle of the circle also needs to find an empty chair. The student that is unable to find an empty chair takes the next turn. 6. Bucket lists. Have your students create a bucket list for this year, this summer holidays are their life. Next, the students present their bucket list items to the class and ask their peers if they have done one of the actions they mentioned. 7. Sensor 4. These two words are often confused by students of the English language. Therefore, it is recommended to spend quite some time covering their differences. Have your students form an equal number of statements using since and for and share them with the class. Start a discussion about the sentences and explain any incorrect usages. Are you ready to teach English abroad? These seven activities for teaching the present perfect for the ESL classroom are ideal to help your students understand the structure and usage of the present perfect. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching it in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. 7. Activities for teaching modal auxiliary verbs in the ESL classroom The number of combinations of modals and usages is enormous, so TEFL certified teachers often spend a lot of time trying to find an activity that suits their particular teaching point. Here, we give you some adaptable ideas which should save you time thinking or searching, assuming you already have good grammatical knowledge of the subject and a little bit of creativity. It's often better to spend a bit of time creating your own material rather than looking fruitlessly on the internet. You will also be able to personalize the content for your students, improve your own skills and build up a great resource bank. If you need to improve your knowledge of modal auxiliary verbs, look at your ITTT course materials. Language Tennis A standard ESL classroom game that students, young and old, always seem to enjoy. It involves minimal preparation beyond planning the initial prompts. Either write your prompts on slips of paper or put them on the board. Organize students into two teams and have them line up in two rows. The idea of the game is for you to criss-cross up the line of students getting them to say alternatives until such time as something is repeated or a student can't think of anything new. At that point, the opposing team gets a point and you start with a new prompt at the person that was last to speak. Some suitable teaching points might be. Cannability Can possibility should advice, must obligation. Negatives can be used for any of these too. Language you would expect students to use for the prompt can possibility on a beach would be, you can sunbathe, you can play volleyball, you can see waves. If you manage to get up and down the line without any errors, simply end that round and move to the next prompt to keep up the fun variety element. Mill drill mingling another standard ESL classroom activity that generates very natural use of the target language. Create a questionnaire which students use to ask each other questions and to record their answers. This lends itself well to any combination of modal and usage with a little creative thought. For example, can, could or may for requests can be turned into a fun activity whereby students must respond to their requests in the negative, giving different polite reasons. Create your questionnaire so that students can record the names of the people they've spoken to and the reasons given. They choose the best responses to tell the class at the end of the activity. For example, may I borrow your pen? Responses could be as simple as no, sorry you can't because it's run out of ink to no, sorry you can't as you press too hard and might damage it. Group discussions or debates. Whilst this may not be suitable for lower level students, it is a great one for pre-intermediate level and above. Set students up into groups and give them a question to discuss and report back about. It's best not to have groups larger than four students so that you help maximize individual student talk time. You can also encourage quieter students to contribute during the feedback session. This works particularly well for showed advice. Give each group the same question from an agony ant column and allow them a few minutes to come up with some advice. Discuss their suggestions in the feedback session and then repeat with another problem. This repetition should help students improve the use of the target language each time. Other suitable topics are can possibility, set groups up as travel agents, must obligation prohibition, strictest company rules and will promises create an incentive scheme. Board games. If you have access to board games such as snakes, shoots and ladders, they are a great resource for the ESL classroom since all you need to do is vary the accompanying cards that students play with to match your teaching points. You could also create your own A4 sized game board on a computer without too much effort. If you only have access to a monochrome printer, simply put different symbols in the squares that students game pieces will land on. Make up some sets of cards with different tasks on to match your teaching points and mark the backs to match the symbols or colors in the various squares on the board. Students each have a game piece and take turns rolling a dice and moving their game piece along the board. When they land on a square they must pick up a corresponding card and complete the task correctly or move back to where they came from. Some suitable tasks are 1. Correct the mistakes, he must find a new job. 2. Answer questions, name 5 things you mustn't do on a plane, 3. Complete sentences appropriately, you breathe to stay alive, 4. Put sentences into the past or future, a challenging task, people must pay taxes. 100 years ago people, 5. Lucky dip. Language from previous lessons. Information exchange. This is a great activity for getting students to practice forming questions, to find out missing information and works for any combination of modals and usages. You can either create two versions of a text with missing information or a table. An example beginning of a text could be. Text A. When guests check in, they must show proof of identification. People who visit or hotel should, before going out each day, etc. Text B. When guests check in, they must dot people who visit or hotel should leave their keys in reception, before going out each day, etc. Student A would ask. What should people do before going out each day? Student B would ask, what must guests do when they check in? Students work in pairs or threes, with a stronger student partnering a weaker student and mustn't look at each other's texts. They take turns asking questions, to find out the missing information. This is a valuable practice because even students at higher levels make basic mistakes forming questions with modals. How often have you heard what you can see in a restaurant? Draw the sentence. This has to be one of the simplest activities for a teacher to set up and can result in a lot of energy in the classroom. One of the great things about this activity is that it can include positive, negative and question forms. For example, you shouldn't drive fast just needs a drawing of a car with 180 km per hour beneath it and across through the drawing. The game works best if the class is divided into two teams and one student from each team comes up to the board at the same time. Have slips of paper in an envelope with sentences or questions on and tell the students to take one each so that they have different things to draw. They both start drawing at the same time in the first team to guess their sentence gets two points. The quickest team can then try to guess the other team's sentence for a bonus point. It gets loud if you have a big class so you need to listen carefully. Repeat the game with different students drawing each time. Marked up dice. Six-sided dice are ideal resources to use for practicing modal auxiliary verbs. You can either use regular dice or make them yourself with a card. Have two to three dice per group of students, depending on the content of your lesson. On one dice stick or write different modals from your lesson on each face, write different usages on another and symbols for positive, negative and questions on the last one. Students take turns rolling all three and try to make suitable sentences or questions with the prompts. You can combine this with some sort of reward for the correct language such as tic-tac-toe, knots and crosses. Are you ready to teach English abroad? Hopefully, these ideas have inspired you to create your own library of fun activities for teaching modal auxiliary verbs that both you and your students will enjoy. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll-free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. Seven activities for teaching passive voice in the ESL classroom. Passive voice is something native English speakers can use without much thought but it can be difficult for language learners to master because the switch from active to passive voice is quite an involved process as many EFL teachers find when they first attempt to present it. Here are some fun activities that you can use in the classroom to help your students practice using this tricky language pattern. Do remember when you adapt these games that not every verb or tense in the English language can be used for the passive voice. Change the room. This is a tried and tested game that's been used with the passive voice for a long time. It's a lot of fun and easily adaptable to past and present tenses, although you may need to be creative if you want to use any future forms. Divide your class up into teams and send one member from each team out of the room for one to two minutes. Have other students move things in the room and then call the students back in. The idea is for them to say as many things as possible that have been changed within a time limit, awarding a point for each correct sentence. It's important to set a time limit so that as many students as possible get a go. The sort of language you should expect is the table has been moved. Have students enter the room without notice that chair is being moved. The curtains were being closed when I walked in. To maximize student talk time, you can then have each student say something that wasn't spotted at the end of each round. The board markers were put on a chair. Quiz. Although this idea may require a bit of research and preparation, it's well worth it as you'll be able to save it for future lessons. There are also plenty of resources on the internet where you'll be able to find ready-made passive voice quizzes. Students are put into teams and given prompts on slips of paper such as 65% of Greenland cover by ICE. Each team has a different prompt from which to make passive voice statements. In this case, it would be a present simple passive 65% of Greenland is covered by ICE. You award a point for making an accurate sentence, then each team must make a sentence either agreeing or disagreeing with their own figures. In this case, the closest to the correct answer, 85%, gets the point. Other examples are the use of animals or countries. Seals eat by crocodiles, false polar bears. Spain visit by the highest number of tourists in the world every year, false France. This activity lends itself well to past passive as well. Describing a process. Passive voice tends to be taught at higher levels, so this is a useful activity when teaching business English, particularly to people involved in manufacturing or customer service of some sort, such as in a hospital or airport. It involves very little preparation by the teacher other than planning the scenarios. The students are put into groups and must create a flowchart type description of a specified process. The tense must be consistent with your lesson, but you would expect students to create something like this, the raw material is delivered to the warehouse. All material is inspected before being passed to the production area. It is first moved to the preparation area. Relate tennis game. An easy to set up activity that's a lot of fun and can be used with a variety of tenses. Set the class up into two teams and have them in lines facing each other. Give a vocabulary prompt to start, such as rice and students have to create a passive voice sentence using the patterns from your lesson. The game works by having a student at the front of the line create a sentence, then the person opposite. Them and the other team must say something else. Work your way up the line back and forth until someone either repeats what has already been said or can't think of anything new. The opposing team gets awarded a point when you restart the game with a new prompt from where it left off. Examples with rice could be. It's grown in Thailand, it's eaten all over the world, it's sold in bags, it's used in many dishes. You can vary the tenses used depending on your lesson. It has been sold in. It will be used. It's being. You can also vary the type of start prompts, animals that are found in Africa, example lions are found in Africa. Things that are made in Germany, example cars are made in Germany. Languages that are spoken in Europe, example French is spoken in Europe. Jenga. This is a simple, fun and versatile idea if you have access to some Jenga sets, sometimes known as tumble down tower. This is best played in groups of two to six students, so you'll need enough sets to suit your class size. Write a verb on each block in a raceable ink or on slips of paper that you put face down on the table, remember that only transitive verbs can be used for passive. Write passive and active on separate slips of paper or card and also put these face down with each set. Students take turns in taking out a block and turning over a card and making sentences in either active or passive is appropriate. If the other students agree that the sentence is correct, the next student has a go. If it's incorrect they must repeat the process. The idea is not to be the student that causes the tower to collapse. Have an amusing forfeit, for example, if they do, they must clean the classroom. You can restrict this to one tense or allow the use of any tense depending on the focus of your lesson. Roll a play, blame it on your sister. What child hasn't done something wrong and blamed a brother or sister for the damage? This can be made more realistic for the students by setting them up in small groups to roll play as a family. You might also have them act out their favorite example in front of the class at the end of the activity. Have two students in each group play the siblings and one or two has parents who pass judgment. Have them swap roles regularly. Give the parents prompt questions such as how was the window broken? Have the siblings blame each other using passive voice such as the window was broken by a stone thrown by Kay? No, it was a ball kicked by Joe. A nice variation is to have the two siblings create reasons which blame a third party. No, it was broken by a big bird. The question doesn't have to be in a passive voice, but you should encourage maximum use of the passive in the excuses. For example, how did the cake end up on the floor? It was knocked off the table when Kay walked past. Mill drill, mingling. A find someone who, questionnaire is a very simple and effective activity which can be designed to include whatever tenses you've covered in your lesson and generates a lot of natural student talk time. Create a questionnaire form with two headings. Find someone who, more information. Below the first heading, have question prompts such as that has been awarded a prize. Students use this to ask their classmates questions in the passive voice. Have you ever been awarded a prize and then record the name of whoever they find that has together with some follow up information having asked something appropriate using the passive voice such as why were you awarded the prize make sure you allow time at the end of the activity for students to report back. Expect something like Nick was awarded a prize for being voted employee of the month. Don't expect all the follow up information to be in passive, but do encourage natural responses. Are you ready to teach English abroad? These activities for teaching the passive voice will help you create fun lessons that your students will most certainly enjoy and benefit from. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. Seven activities for teaching the past progressive for the ESL classroom. Teaching grammar patterns often involves a lot of class time and the more activities you have up your sleeve as a teacher the better. The following seven activities for teaching the past progressive for the ESL classroom will help your students pick up the tense in no time. 1. Memory challenge. Pull up an image with a lot of actions going on for example, people engaging in different activities at a park or another public place. You can either hand out printed images or show it to your students on an overhead projector or TV. After having your students analyze the image, turn off the TV or collect the prints and start asking what the people in the photo were doing. 2. People watching. This is a great activity you can perform outside of a classroom with the whole class or for each student as homework. The first part of the activity consists of heading to a public area to watch people going about their business. Have your students bring a piece of paper and a pen and take notes of what people are doing. Later, the students report back what they saw people doing in the past progressive. 3. The lack of the draw. This game is great for practicing the structure of the past progressive. Write down several time words on small cards or slips of paper, for example yesterday at 5 p.m., the day before yesterday at 3 o'clock in the afternoon or last night at 9 o'clock. Then, place them in a box or a bag. In class, your students will draw a card and make a sentence about what they were doing at that specific time using the past progressive. 4. What you didn't do. Put your students into pairs or small groups and have them make lists of what they did yesterday. Then, have the students ask for actions that were missing from the list, like why didn't you do your homework? The other student responds using the past progressive, such as I was playing with my friends. 5. So much in common. The goal of this activity is to find common things the students did at the same time. Pair up your students in the classroom and have them ask about what they did over the weekend. For example, what did you do on Saturday at 7 p.m.? The student answers something like I was playing soccer with my brother. The teen who finds two common actions the fastest wins. 6. Strange explanations. This activity is very popular among young students and for it to work, you should encourage them to think as creatively as possible. A student asks a question starting with when I saw you, such as when I saw you you were sticking bubblegum to your shoe. The other student now needs to give a plausible yet funny explanation why he did so. For example, I was filling in a hole in my shoe with bubblegum. This usually results in a lot of laughter in class. 7. My alibi. Set up groups of four to five students in your classroom and have them work together for a crime investigation role play. One student plays the investigator whose job it is to find out who stole a cookie from a cookie jar or something more serious for older students. The investigator goes around asking the suspects in their group what they were doing at different times when that theft occurred and the suspects answer using the past progressive. It works best if you assign actions to the students beforehand and also name a secret thief. Are you ready to teach English abroad? These seven activities for teaching the past progressive for the ESL classroom are ideal to help your students understand the structure and usage of the past progressive. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. 7 Activities for Teaching the Simple Present for the ESL Classroom ESL teachers often encounter difficulties when teaching grammar patterns to students abroad. The following seven activities for teaching the simple present for the ESL classroom will help your students pick up the tense in an easy and efficient way. 1. Daily Routine This is a very good activity for when you start discussing the simple present and how it's used for routines and regularities. You can place the students into groups or pairs and have them discuss their daily routines. What do they do in the morning? In the afternoon? In the evening? You can then also have them write up a schedule of their daily routines and share their findings with the class later on in a class discussion. 2. Cultural Norms This activity is great for introducing adverbs frequently used with the simple present. Have your students share things that people do in their country culture usually, normally, typically, etc. For example, in my country, people usually eat rice for breakfast. The next step is then to encourage your students to make negative statements including adverbs like never, rarely, infrequently, etc. 3. Classmate Interviews This activity is useful for new classes where the students aren't too familiar with one another. Set up your students in pairs and have them ask each other about their families, hobbies and interests using the question do you like and what do you like to do in your spare time? After a certain amount of time, have each student introduce their partner to the whole class. Here, they practice using the simple past in the third person singular saying things like Bobby likes to play football in his spare time. 4. Spanish Pesetas Extraordinary Sensory Perceptions Sensory observations are always expressed using the simple present. Therefore, have your students observe their surroundings at school or at home and have them take notes. Hereby it's important for them to use and describe all five senses, sight, hearing, feel, touch and taste. 5. Where Am I? Similar to the previous activity, students are encouraged to use all five senses to describe a place they would like to be in. They make five statements or more describing that place to the rest of the class. The other students must then guess the place. This is also a great opportunity to review the uses of at, on and in when describing places. 6. Present Simple Bingo Mingo For this type of bingo game to work, brainstorm a list of get-to-know-you questions with your students and write them on the board. For example, do you like to listen to music? Do you drive a car? Do you play the violin? Next, give each student a 5x5 grid whereby the center square is blank. The students then fill in the questions from the board into the remaining squares on the sheet. When done, the students mingle around the classroom and ask each classmate one of the questions. If someone answers yes, they write down his or her name into that square. The first person with five names in a row wins. 7. Weekend Party This is a great activity to play before the weekend. Ask your students what they usually do on the weekend. Have them share their routines with the class. If you like, you can even have them write up a paragraph about their ideal weekend and then read it aloud to the rest of the class. Are you ready to teach English abroad? These seven activities for teaching the simple present for the ESL classroom are ideal to help your students understand the structure and usage of the simple present tense. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. Send us an email or call us toll-free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today. 4. Activities for Teaching Future Tenses in the ESL Classroom In a previous post, we looked at various teaching ideas for future simple and here we're going to describe some fun ideas for teaching three other future tenses. There are a wide variety of usages for future tenses and it's always important to make sure your activities focus on the usages that you've taught in your lesson. For example, future continuous can be used to talk about an ongoing action at a point in the future. A fixed future event, polite enquiries are to predict the future or the present. Predicting the present is one that students often have trouble conceptualizing so we might as well start from there. Predicting the present. When someone we care about is going on a long journey we often think about what they might be doing at any given time. When we do this, we typically use the future continuous tense such as Rosie will probably be getting on the plane about now or don't call her now, she'll be cooking dinner. A nice activity for this is a guess who came whereby the teacher prepares a list of celebrities that the students are likely to know. These will normally be world famous people such as the Queen of England, David Beckham, George Clooney, Elton John etc. It's well worth checking with some other members of staff or friends beforehand though as people we think of as world famous may be unknown in some parts of the world. The idea is for the class to be divided into teams and each team is allocated a name by the teacher and they have to create clues using future continuous for others to guess the person. An example could be this person will probably be practicing the piano right now. You could think about ways to make this competitive as students tend to enjoy this and consider handing out a name bank for each team to guess from if they struggle with guessing. A great way to end this game is to have students think of famous people themselves and continue the game. It really doesn't matter if the teacher doesn't know the celebrity because students can tell you about them in English once they've been correctly guessed. Ongoing action at a point in the future Another way we use the future continuous is to talk about what we will be doing at some point in the future, such as this time next week I'll be sitting on a beach. We can use future continuous to talk about arrangements when we want to give some kind of reminder or warning, such as I'll be leaving for work at eight o'clock if you want me to give you a lift. We can also use it to make excuses if we don't want to do something such as go out on a date that someone you don't like has invited you on. There's a classic TEFL game called a date from hell which can be used to practice this. Half the students in the class are given a page representing a diary and they mingle speaking to each other trying to make dates with other people in the room. The aim is for respondents to create amusing reasons for not going on a date and the students asking the question make a note of them to report back at the end of the activity. Examples are Sue can't go to the cinema with me on Saturday because she'll be washing her hair and Mark can't go bowling with me on Sunday because he'll be tidying his room. Expected achievements at a point in the future. Moving on from something we will be doing at some point in the future, we can also talk about what we will have done by a point in the future by using the future perfect tense. This is often used when planning careers or life achievements, by this time next year I will have finished all my exams. It's also acceptable to use other modal auxiliary verbs here instead of will, such as should, might, may. An enjoyable activity that works well with this is to set students up in small groups to invent an extremely successful future career for themselves for example as musicians, politicians or travelers. Examples of what to aim for could be musicians. By this time next year we'd have signed a contract with a recording company. In two years' time we will have performed in many countries around the world. A good way to use this is for each group of students to have exactly the same role and get them to describe their future career to the class in the most optimistic and ambitious way. Something that will have been continuing up to a point in the future. The future perfect continuous describes actions that will continue up until a point in the future. The activity will have begun sometime in the past, present or in the future, relative to now and is expected to continue in the future. When we use this, we're projecting ourselves forward in time and looking back. It's certainly challenging to teach and you're unlikely to teach it to any students below intermediate level as an EFL teacher. This isn't a blog to teach grammar but an example that you might relate to is, I will ill have been teaching EFL for four months by the time I moved to Vietnam. This doesn't tell us when the action of teaching started in relation to now. When combined with still, the future continuous refers to events that are already happening now and that we expect to continue some time into the future. For example I'll still be paying for my house when I'm 60 years as old. As so often is the case, the simplest activities are the most effective even with the more difficult teaching points. Set students up in small groups and give them two stacks of cards with prompts, time markers, next July in two years' time, and verbs, work, live, learn, wear, dot, dot. Alternatively, you could make some cardboard dice and put the same information on the faces. Students either pick up a card from each stack or roll the two dice and make sentences using the prompts. This can be made more fun by setting it up as a tennis relay game, whereby the last student to speak is the winner of each round as long as they haven't repeated something that has already been said or made an inaccurate sentence. For example, this time next year live, I will ill have been living with my partner for 18 months by this time next year. Are you ready to teach English abroad? These activities for teaching future tenses will help you create fun lessons your students will most certainly enjoy and benefit from. Apply now for your TEFL TESOL certification course and start teaching in a matter of months. Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad. 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