Unit 1: Teaching with limited resources

There is nothing worse than arriving at your new school, all full of enthusiasm and ideas for great hand-outs, only to realise that your school does not have a photocopier!

This has happened to many an EFL teacher (including the writer of this module!). On completion of this course, some of you will be jetting off to schools in all five continents of the globe.

If you are planning on teaching in a developing country, or a very small school, it would be a good idea to consider the very practical notion of teaching with limited resources.

To follow, are a number of practical ideas and techniques to ensure that your students are still engaged and learning despite you only having perhaps some broken bits of chalk and a blackboard!

A – Z

A firm favourite with all my students, especially with large classes who are not used to getting up and moving around in the classroom.

Choose a lexical set like sports.

The student at the front of each line must run to the board and write a sport beginning with A, hand the chalk to the student behind them and then go to the back of the line.

The next student goes to the board and writes a sport beginning with B, hands the chalk to the next student and goes to the back of the line and this continues until students reach Z.

Other students in the team can help the person writing if they cannot think of a sport. If nobody can think of one, they go on to the next letter in the alphabet.

The winner is the team with the most sports written on the board by the end of the game.

Tip: use large lexical sets for this game: food & drink, jobs, things you can find in the house, countries, parts of the body NOT furniture or musical instruments which are limited and will frustrate all the players!

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a fun, creative strategy for teachers with limited textbook resources. It involves the entire class in a creative project. Able to input their own ideas, students become energized and enthusiastic. A typical brainstorming session would go something like this:

Decide upon a theme and write it on a dry erase or chalkboard for the entire class to see. For example, use the theme of a mountaintop camp-out.

Divide the class into two teams.

Instruct students to take turns making a quick dash to the board to write a word or phrase that could be used in a mountaintop camp-out story. Examples: backpack, climb, struggle, rope, echo, fire.

Create a time limit, such as 5 minutes. Whichever team has the most words or phrases at the end of the time limit wins.

For an additional exercise, use the students’ work in the brainstorming race, and have them craft their own versions of a mountaintop camp-out story.