Handbook of Teaching Ideas

Written to accompany the tales on the audio cassette The Wife’s Letter and other Tales (1995)

    • The activities are:

    • Reason to Beat your Wife
    • Pre-listening partner work: The secret of a happy marriage

    • Post-listening role play
    • Hot-seat discussion: This story should not be told
      • The Leprechaun and the Red Scarf
      • Pre-listening small group / milling work: magical creatures

      Post-listening: 1st & 2nd conditional
      • The Wife’s Letter
      • Pre-listening small group work: cut-up story

      Post-listening discussion: he war of the sexes
    • The Miller and the Professor
    • Small group work: using a skeleton to prepare to tell a story

      • Partner work: telling the story

      Voice and body-language
    • Rabbit and the Moon
    • Pre-listening small group work: prediction about the story

    • Vocabulary activity
      • Listening: skeleton writing

      Post-listening: using the skeleton
      • Old Woman and her Pig
      • Pre-listening: pronunciation activity

      Post-listening: Last-Line Race
      • Prayer the Gods Answered
      • Pre-listening: prediction exercise

      Post-listening discussion: Can this be a religious story with such an ending?

 

From the Introduction to A Handbook of Teaching Ideas

Why use these tales for English teaching?

These tales provide an opportunity for your students to be totally immersed in a wave of language. Sounds frightening, doesn’t it?
But the amazing thing is that students quickly find that instead of drowning, they are swimming. They are no longer working through a language exercise, they are enjoying taking part in real communication. An experience which is, for many, genuinely liberating.

Further topics considered are:

  • What these tales are
  • Who the tales are for
  • The aim of this cassette and handbook
  • How to use them

© Richard Martin 1995
All rights reserved.​

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