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Instructions
Understanding instructions: grammar
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Making sure students understand your
instructions
19 ways to save class time and help everyone’s confidence by improving your classroom
instructions
1. Pre-teach
It always seems strange to me that teachers who pre-teach before every reading and listening
don’t do the same with instructions, as for me it is the other way round. For example, before a
board game I will show the students the board, dice and counters and elicit their names and the
actions you can do with them, and then start explaining (or eliciting- see below) how to play that
actual game.
6. Recorded instructions
You could also help students who don’t understand you by allowing them to listen to your
instructions many times, e.g. by giving them a recording or video that they can listen to or watch
as many times as they like before they start the activity.
10. Pictures
These can be used in the same ways as other parts of your class: matching the written
instructions to the pictures, putting the pictures in order by the stages of the activity, spotting
which picture shouldn’t be in the sequence, comparing the spoken instructions and the pictures,
etc. It might also be good to make a poster of typical instructions with pictures to illustrate each
one.
12. Explain (and maybe play) the game that it is based on first
Another category of key word is the name of the game it is based on. Most of my students don’t
know “dominoes”, “snap”, and “battleships”, but they might know “pairs”, “consequences”,
“Who wants to be a millionaire?” and “rock paper scissors”. Even if they don’t know the English
name, taking a normal pack of playing cards and playing Happy Families with it will help make
it much easier to explain the TEFL version. For example, I found the game Pronunciation
Battleships from the classic photocopiable book Pronunciation Games by Mark Hancock
impossible to explain until I thought to play a round or two of normal battleships first.
19. L1
Actually using L1 (the students’ first language) in the instructions stage should be a last resort, as
listening to (or reading, or speaking while guessing) instructions is one of the main real uses of
the target language for students who rarely use English outside the classroom. Translating
English instructions should especially be avoided, because then students get the idea that English
is something you ignore until L1 comes along. There might, however, be times when you would
have to abandon the activity just because you couldn’t explain it just in English. Choosing
something that is easier to understand may often be the right response but if you can’t think of an
alternative that is nearly as useful, some sensible use of L1 might be better than giving up on the
activity. Ways of stopping the whole instructions stage becoming L1 include: pre-teaching key
phrases with L1 translations then giving the instructions in English; explaining the game it is
based on in L1 and then explaining the TEFL variation in English; and providing a list of useful
classroom instructions vocabulary with translations for them to study at home before the lesson
with the tricky instructions.
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brand says: