5 Innovative Ways to Teach English

As a teacher, you’re probably always on the lookout for new and interesting ways to teach your English lessons, whilst inspiring your students too.

Here are five innovative ways you can teach English whilst targeting the four key areas of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Not only should these get your students’ motivation going but also maximise their progress too.

1. Use Tablet Technology and Gamification in Lessons

Nowadays, you’re pretty likely to see students bringing their iPads and mobiles into school. Well, you can use this to your advantage! A great way to engage your students is by using their tablets in lessons.

One way you can use tablets in your lessons is with EducationCity. The tablet-friendly English content lets you use gamification to teach concepts. Not only this, it lets you set tablet-friendly homework in advance too. This can help bring about a blended learning environment where traditional lesson methods are balanced with technology.

2. Which Famous Person Inspires You?

Do you know which celebrities your students admire? You can use this to your advantage too. Why not set the task of writing a biography about them and then finding the verbs or adjectives? Perhaps provide a biography about them yourself and ask your students to find certain words such as verbs and adjectives? You’ll have a great, engaging way of teaching your students elements of language.

3. Start Lessons with Engaging Activities

Get your students fully engaged and prepared to learn about poems, stories and other texts by igniting their imaginations, and setting a range of activities designed to excite them. Painting or even music composition such as rapping are all great ways of getting students to share vocabulary, ideas and concepts about texts, and make the learning experience fun!

4. Use Drama for Engagement

Drama is a creative and powerful tool to help teach English – it can be used to explore characters, situations and historical events. With drama, students’ imagination and motivation is enhanced and students who might not be keen on reading a book may be more interested to learn with a different teaching style.

Now it’s your turn… you could even dress up as certain characters too and do a little drama yourself. Is it time to introduce Penelope Pronoun perhaps, or Vince the Verb? Either way, your students will be really engaged and learning can take place.

5. Get Real Life Examples

When learning about the English language, real life examples are great to add meaningful context and help understanding. You could have images of sights to learn about adjectives (the Louvre is ‘spectacular’). For nouns, you could have objects that appeal to the senses like a scented candle for an ocean or a recording of a ‘meow’ for a cat. You could also play the part and add a sprinkle of acting for verbs. On this note… can anyone juggle? Okay, so maybe that one might be a bit hard to demonstrate, but why not run or jump on the spot to show verbs?

Hopefully these ideas will add uniqueness to your lessons, inspire students and maximise their progress. Want to try out the tablet-friendly English content? Sign up for a free trial.