This on-line support is provided by the British Council.

We recommend you take a look at the lesson plans below which should give you some new ideas.

Improving Pupils Answers  This short checklist is designed to get you together with your pupils to focus on ways of improving their answers to general conversation questions.

Keeping Their Attention  Attention can sometimes wander… Here are ten suggestions for keeping your pupils with you.

Working with Magazines  Magazines are obviously written material, but they provide a really good springboard for oral work and they are very motivating for students to work with.

Making Dialogs Fun  As an assistant, you’ll be asked to practise role-plays and dialogues on a regular basis. What can you do to liven dialogues up rather than just getting students to work through them mechanically, following the prompts?

Memory Skills - Exam techniques  Find out how you can use general memory techniques with individuals and groups of pupils. You can also find out about useful techniques for learning exam questions.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  This is the best teaching game ever invented! A a great lesson for revision as you can cover lots of topics quite painlessly.

What is Pelmanism?  Pelmanism is very useful in language teaching, you can input all sorts of vocabulary or structure and practising is fun. You can play pelmanism with one student, in pairs or in small groups.

Practising The Conditional Tense  The conditional tense is one which higher students should be able to use to gain access to higher grades at GCSE.

Keeping Roleplay Fresh  With pupils in Years 10 and 11 you will be asked to practice language that prepares them for the GCSE oral exam. Here are some ideas to make these lessons more interesting.

Talking About Holidays  Holidays are a really important topic at GCSE. Pupils often choose this theme as their main conversation topic in their oral exam.

Texts and Topics - finding motivating texts  Working with interesting texts gives you the chance to help pupils improve their skills and you can build into your lesson practice of exam skills

Staying in the Target Language  Language teachers try to use the target language (that is your language) as much as possible in their lessons and you should too.

Through The Keyhole  Do you know the TV programme ‘Through the keyhole’? It’s all about looking round a celebrity’s house, where clues are given in each room as to the identity of the person who lives there and then, finally, the identity is revealed. This is a great game to play in small groups.

Using Websites Well  The internet provides a fabulous resource for language teaching and many sites offer bite-size chunks that students can really get to grips with. Good use of websites keep students up to date, increases their vocabulary and gives you a real focus for your lessons.

Varying Starter Phrases  Starter phrases are phrases that might be useful when your students are visiting a foreign country, which will enable them to communicate as effectively as possible.

Video Pairwork  Here are some ways that you can exploit video or film if you have access to a TV and video or a DVD player.