​Join 10,450 readers ​

​Add your words to our community Padlet​

Dear Reader,

While I missed you a lot last Sunday, there is one thing I missed even more: the ability to breathe unimpeded. I had one of the most horrendous flu bugs I've ever had, and it was only late September. One would hope the inevitable endless succession of bug after bug would start a little later in the year, but alas.

I could describe my state by saying that this bug floored me, or that it hit me like a ton of bricks, but today, I'm going to choose the most British way to describe this: this bug knocked me for six.

Why British, you ask? Before you worry: no, it has nothing to do with the infamous six-seven (pronounced six-sevvuhnn, of course) that I'm sure you would also love to eradicate from the face of the earth¹.

The idiom "to knock someone for six", like the flu did with me, has its origins in one of those cultural things you will have to learn about if you immerse yourself in Britain long enough: cricket. I only vaguely know about cricket because a) I weirdly live near a cricket ground and ) my friend Nathan plays it. I asked him to explain this idiom to me, then re-explain it to me as if I were 6 years old, then again as if I had never watched sports in my life. Stripped down to the studs, here's Nathan's explanation:

Cricket is a game with a bat and a ball. One person throws the ball (the bowler). Another person hits it with a bat (the batter). The batter scores points. When the batter hits the ball so far that it flies over the edge of the field without even touching the ground, that gives the batter 6 points at once - the highest amount of points.

That's why knocking for six means hitting really hard. Clear... ish, right? If you want to thank Nathan, add the word to the community vocabulary Padlet and I can show him what a difference he's made.

Now that I have miraculously recovered to a standing position, what do I have in store for you today? Well, I like listening to teachers, and last week, you kindly shared some of your biggest insecurities as English teachers. Interestingly, two of the main struggles were managing students' behaviour and engaging students.

These two are incredibly. tough. points for all teachers. But what if I told you they are very much connected? And there are ways to engage students so that we can prevent disruptive behaviour?

One key way to do this is through activities that involve movement: today, I'm going to give you 6 ways to transform everyday classroom activities and textbook exercises into tasks that involve movement (plus a bonus downloadable one about the Beatles, because I like the Beatles).

Ready with a drink in hand and a little pastry? Or if you're still in bed, have you got a comfy pillow?² Let's get started ⭐

---

A bit of news before we start

Very briefly: if you haven't heard, the Ministry is very likely going to be doing a new concorso soon. I've put everything we know about it in Italian in this article. I find it unlikely the concorso will be for all the classi di concorso, since there are so many winners that should rightfully get a place already; but nevertheless, it's always good to keep up with the news, so now you have the news.

---

Disclaimers 1, 2 and 3

Back to the idea of inserting movement into our classrooms: my SO works with robots, which (at least for the time being) don't tend to present too many personal idiosyncrasies; however, we teachers work with humans, and humans work in very different and complex ways. Hence my disclaimers.

The first disclaimer is that in order for you to get your students up and moving around the classroom, you will have to allow for some mess and noise. You might need to plan how to move seats and desks depending on the activity; you might have to inform colleagues that there may be a bit of noise at some point in your class; but most importantly, you might have to convince yourself that you're not a bad egg for causing that noise. Maybe you're already convinced, but if not, I hope this newsletter helps you out.

The second disclaimer is that in my experience with teens, the moment you dare suggest that they "stand up", your suggestion might be met with this exact face:

My suggestion to you: do not panic. Remain steadfast in your commitment to trying out kinesthetic activities (i.e. activities involving movement), safe in the knowledge that a) once they've got over the massive effort that standing up entails, students will enjoy the activity and the lesson flow will benefit from it and b) they pull that face for all sorts of things while enjoying saying "six-seven", so I wouldn't trust their judgement about everything.

The third disclaimer: kinesthetic activities are not always suitable for all learners. This is, however, the case with all activities: just like you'd adapt a long reading text for students with dyslexia, you're going to adapt a kinesthetic activity based on your learners' needs, including Special Educational Needs. On the plus side: giving students an opportunity to move will likely directly benefit students with certain SENDs, such as ADHD.

Why do I need to use movement, though?

Fair question and I could give you all kinds of reasons: standing up and moving can make the lesson more dynamic, break up more intensive individual or silent work, oxigenate students' brains and provide opportunities for some fun, which helps engagement.

But when I look back to the two key issues that emerged from your responses last week, they were managing behaviour and engaging students: I would strongly suggest that engaging students is really one of the best ways to prevent disruptive behaviour. Is this going to work 100% of the time with 100% of your students? Of course not, because nothing is; but if we build routines that keep students busy and engaged, they are much less likely to initiate disruptive behaviour in the first place³.

So, here are 6 ways to infuse your everyday activities with some movement:

1. Step left, step right

A good way to spruce up a true/false or ask learners to choose between two options: they all stand up, then step left for option 1 and step right for option 2.

Let's say you have this:

After the learners complete the exercise, instead of asking volunteers or specific students for the answers, which inevitably only gives you feedback on a few students, ask them to stand up and step left if they think the sentence is true and step right if they think it's false. That way, you get a sense of what the whole class thinks and which options were more challenging for most students.

Pro tip: you might find it useful to get something like this going on your whiteboard for, erm, the avoidance of doubt 👇

2. The split classroom

Other than whiteboard markers and blue tack, one of the things I like carrying when teaching is a roll of paper tape - the sort you would use if you were painting a room. I like to stick it on the floor to create a line that splits the classroom into two; then, I read out statements and the learners have to position themselves on the left or the right of the line depending on whether they agree or disagree.

Indeed, expressing agreement, but especially disagreement, is a wonderful way to engage teens, not to mention a basic human inclination that pushes us to do one of the main things learners have to do in a language classroom: communicate.

You can give them statements that relate to their own lives (hello, personalisation!) and that they are bound to have some feelings about, such as:

• Phones should be banned in all schools
• Teenagers under 16 years of age should not be allowed to access social media
• Students should be able to choose their own seats in the classroom

Students stand on the agree or disagree side of the classroom, you ask some of them to justify their choice (or groups come up with a justification together), which can later become the basis for a debate or an essay writing activity.

3. The opinion line

Another good use of paper tape: instead of splitting the classroom into two, you create a line on the floor using paper tape. You say or project statements, students have to position themselves on the line from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". This is better suited for activities that require some nuance - and it gives you the opportunity to work on that language to express nuance and degrees of agreement and disagreement.

4. The running dictation

Let me get this out of the way: if you prefer to watch videos, I gave an example of how to use a running dictation when teaching literature in my talk for Macmillan last month:

​

Now, let's say you have a reading comprehension: you can do it the standard way, which is fine, or you can sometimes introduce a little movement and engagement. In a running dictation, you print or make copies of a short text and hang two or three around your classroom. Learners work in pairs or small groups, with one acting as the runner and the other(s) as the writer(s).

The runner goes to the text, reads or memorises a chunk, and returns to the writer to dictate it. The writer writes down what they hear. The runner then goes back for the next chunk, and this repeats until the text is complete. Halfway through, or when you give a signal, the roles are swapped.

Would I recommend it for all kinds of texts and purposes? No, of course: first, I'd either do it with a short text or with the first section of a text.

Take this, for example:

Doing this whole text at this proficiency level as a running dictation is likely to take ages, so I would either assign different sections to different groups, then complete the activity as a jigsaw reading, or simply focus on the first section alone. I would also do it as an intro activity: students will likely later need to sit down and have some peace and quiet to re-engage with the text more intensively. As I said in the talk, I also like doing this with short gap-fills - some extra challenge, but the first pair to complete the activity (correctly!) wins, which adds engagement.

5. The four corners

A kinesthetic twist on the standard multiple choice exercise: say that you have a multiple choice exercise with 4 options, A, B, C and D. Print 4 papers, each one showing one of these letters in a pretty gigantic font size. Stick each paper in one corner of the classroom, then read out the questions: learners go and stand next to the option they think is correct. If there is disagreement, the students are already in groups and can chat to come up with a justification for their answer. Bonus points: they get to work with different students from the ones they might normally work with!

6. Form a line

And in the spirit of getting students to work with peers they wouldn't normally work with, which incidentally can help prevent some disruptive behaviour: ask them to form a line based on the alphabetical order of their name, surname, favourite singer, favourite food - the world is your oyster. Then, form new groups or pairs based on the line.

Bonus: lifting cards like a judge on Strictly come dancing

This involves less movement (and less chaos!) than the other activities. One of the things we need to learn when we learn to listen in a foreign language is recognising words within the stream of speech. An engaging and somewhat kinesthetic activity I've done to foster this is to take a song, select some key words, make cards with them and then play the song, asking learners to lift the correct card as soon as they heard the word. You can of course play this as an elimination game (i.e. you miss a word, you're out), or you can play it more chill by just asking them to lift their cards as quickly as they can.

Here is an example that will help you revise some extremely high-frequency words and word clusters at lower levels, courtesy of none other than the Beatles:

Download the table, print it, cut up the little cards, play Hello, Goodbye and play the game: Cards for lyrics task.pdf​

And with that, I will say goodbye for today, just like the Beatles! What do you think about the idea of working on engagement as a preventative measure for disruptive behaviour? Which of these kinesthetic activities might you try in your classroom? As always, I'm all ears.

But while I wait to hear from you, let me wish you a wonderful Sunday.

Take care, dear teacher ✨

¹ But of course if you're curious, it appears that the origins of six-seven (my fingers are physically cringing as I type this) are to be found in an American rap song that was featured in South Park. Don't you feel great knowing where (part of) the bane of your teaching existence comes from?

² Some of you have told me that you read my Sunday newsletter first thing in the morning, while still in bed. I really love knowing that the newsletter is some kind of a treat. If you read it from anywhere else - the kitchen table while having breakfast, the bathroom while brushing your teeth, the dinner table so you don't have to listen to your mother-in-law having her usual natter: I want to know, it'll make my day ♡

³ I'm an overthinker and a researcher by trade, which is why I never like one-size-fits-all solutions and shallow ideas that only treat an immediate problem without helping teachers find a framework that explains how things relate to each other. I also dislike platitudes, uninformed clichés about education and language learning (don't say XYZ if you want to sound like a native! Stop translating in your head! and the like), "methods" that promise to revolutionise English language learning and teaching (but are funnily often in clunky English themselves... or not in English at all) and a lot of other things. One day, I will have to decide what is more important to me: doing a podcast on all my English language learning pet peeves or saving myself from this reputation 👇

P.S.: My weekly suggestion for things to listen to/watch/read to improve your English while relaxing: British Prime Ministers seem to change as often as the football coaches of the Italian men's teams, so in fairness, you get a pass if you haven't noticed; however, by now you've probably heard that the UK has yet another Prime Minister. His name is Andy Burnham and he's not shy about the fact that he's from the North of England. You can hear it in his accent, which I suspect has become one of the main tools through which he differentiates himself from most other PMs in recent history; you can see it in his personal history, as his most successful role to date has been as Mayor of Manchester (indeed, the first couple of sentences in his Wikipedia page are an excellent example to help students finally understand the difference between present perfect and past simple, methinks); you might suspect he's from the North when you hear one of his first acts as PM was establishing a "Number 10 North", which is exactly what it sounds like: a replication of the PM's quarters in London, only located in Manchester. But if you still haven't had enough and you are as insatiably curious about accents as I am, I have a little gem for you: the episodes "Voices of Manchester" in the Word of mouth programme by the BBC. It features sociolinguist Rob Drummond, whose work is *chef's kiss* and it will give you such interesting insights into how people speak in Manchester and why. Be advised: it's nerd-only territory, but I think it's so worth it.

P.P.S.: I've got lots of ideas swirling around my little thick head for how to best support you in becoming the strongest teacher and strongest English speaker you can be. To that end, I need your valuable opinions, so:

At this point in your career, what is your main goal? Becoming a stronger English speaker (fluent, using idioms well, good pronunciation, not switching to Italian) Becoming a stronger English teacher (engaging students, managing bad behaviour, solving my teaching issues) I definitely want both Neither - I'll tell you my goal via email

As usual, thank you for your time <3

✨Cool things I heard this week

I finally understand the things I was doing "wrong" and needed to work on as a teacher. All because I started working with you. I didn't know what I didn't know!

What did you think of today's newsletter?

❤️ I loved it: well, thank you so much! Hit "reply" to let me know (it makes my day) or hit "forward" and send it to a friend

👉 I'm new, a friend sent me this: great to have you here! To receive this newsletter every Sunday (ish), for free, subscribe here​

🚀 I want more: no problem - check out all my previous newsletters with tips, lesson plans and ramblings here or subscribe to our YouTube channel​

👎🏻 Meh, I'm not sure: that's absolutely fine: you can unsubscribe from the Sunday newsletter (but still occasionally receive important communications about your courses) or Unsubscribe from all emails so you never each from us ever again.

Quick links

​Updated peparation programme for oral exam​

​Log onto your course​

​Our free resources​
​