MariaVlachopoulou

It all started with a lesson plan based on an activity from Günter Gerngross, Herbert Puchta and Scott Thornbury's "Teaching Grammar Creatively". The activity aimed at teaching verbs of the senses-looks, sounds, smells, tastes, feels-a problematic area for students, at least the way it was presented in the school book of 6th grade.I needed something to make an impression, to stay with them after the lesson. So after the presentation and the consolidation I decided to try something I had never tried with this class before. Ask them to write poetry. When I started explaining the activity I was not at all sure if everybody would be able to cope with it. In fact, I thought that some students may even start nagging or refuse to do it.To my surprise, nothing of the above happened. On the contrary, the moment I explained what they had to do everybody-and I mean everybody-set to work. Some of them asked to work in pairs and I didn't mind this. So adapting the activity a ...

The most vivid memory of my school years is my dear English teacher, Naki, who used to make us circle prepositions spotted in texts, lesson after lesson. This is something I like to do with my students, too, from the beginning of my teaching career. It is a "ritual" we follow in every reading lesson and my students know it by now! Prepositions are an important part of the English language and they are everywhere! They are in prepositional phrases, phrasal verbs, idioms and expressions. They can go with verbs, adjectives or nouns and then we also have prepositions for time and place. Greek learners- and not only them,I am guessing- find it really hard to remember where to put it and if they remember that they need a preposition, they may still have problems in finding which one they should use. A problem with prepositions is that they usually cannot be translated especially if you try word-to-word translation - something Greek students try more often than needed- contra...