Out of Class Activities

Using a text: Out of class activities
These are activities which involve the learners using English outside the English class after a lesson
based on a Premier skills text.
Here's an example of an out-of-class activity for the text
1. Watch a game on tv or read about one on the web or in a newspaper.
2. Tell a partner about the game you watched or read about.
Show students the text introduction to the video and ask them to predict what they think they
will see in the video.
2. Ask students watch all or part of the video with the sound off and see what people and
places they recognise. See if they can identify the genre of the video (is it news, documentary,
coverage of a game, etc.) See if they can tell you what the video is about.
3. Take screen shots of images from the video and ask students to predict what they think is
happening in each images.
4. Take screen shots of images from the video and ask students to arrange them in the order
they see them as they watch the video without the sound.
5. Play the video with the sound off and get students to make questions to ask someone about
what is happening in the video and what they would like to know about what they see.
6. Play the video with the sound off and pause it at intervals and ask students what they think
is happening and what they think the people in the video are talking about and how they are
feeling.
Procedure
Procedure for setting the activities
1. Make sure that all the students can see the video and that the sound is off before you start playing
the clips.
2. Make sure you emphasise that these activities are fun and stress to students that you aren’t
expecting ‘correct’ answers to these tasks and that they will have the opportunity to watch the videos
again with the sound on.
3. Be sure not to correct any of your students answers even if they are predicting things that are
wrong. At this stage the main thing is that their minds are open and enquiring.
Procedure for using the activities

1. You don’t always need to show the whole clip sometimes just a minute or so is enough to get
students thinking and curious.
2. Make sure you give the students the chance to discuss their predictions and share them.
3. You could put some of the predictions up on the board or get students to write them down so that
when they watch with the sound they will be able to check their predictions to see if they were
correct.
4. Try to avoid correcting the students and keep them curious about the content. This will make them
want to understand more and keep them focussing on working for themselves.
Here are some suggestions for possible video projects:
1. Learners could make a video clip about their local club and interview some of their friends to find
out what they think about the club.
2. You could get your students to make a video about their favourite Premier League club and what
people in your learners’ country do to support and follow them.
3. Try to interview a player from the club. Learners could produce their own interview questions for a
player and then other students could imagine being the player and be interviewed. They could even
do some research to answer the questions.
4. Make a video of a short section of a local match and write their own commentary to go with it.
Procedure
1. See if your learners can create a short storyboard of the video they have watched. The storyboard
should be a series of roughly drawn sketches showing the basic action of each scene of the model
video they watched. They can then use these sketches to provide the structure for their own video
production.
2. Ask your students to outline the main characteristics of the genre of the video they watched.

1. Make sure students work together in small groups or pairs on these projects. You might also want
to create a number of roles, such as cameraman, interviewer, director etc and get the students to
decide which ones they want to be within the group.
2. Students could use a webcam on a computer or a hand held video camera or digital camera (most
digital cameras can also make short video clips) if they have access to them or even the camera on
a mobile phone.
3. You could create your own free channel on a website like YouTube, Teacher Tube or Vimeo and
upload your students' videos to the channel so they could watch and share them online. Or if you
don’t have a good internet connection you could just collect them on your computer hard drive and
have a video show at the end of term or the end of the week.
Using video: Study Activities

These activities are focused more on the linguistic content of the video and help learners to
understand and take linguistic elements from the audio to enrich their vocabulary and enhance their
ability to understand spoken English.
Here are some activities you can use to help them study the text in more depth.
1. Using the controls on the video player, play your students a short sentence of one of the people
speaking on the video. Ask the students to listen and count the number of words they hear spoken.
You may need to play the segment two or three times to help students count the words. This is a
good activity to help students understand spoken English and hear how words are often joined
together and where the word boundaries are.
2. Using a small segment of the video (30 seconds to 1 minute at the most) ask students to listen
and write down every word they hear (as a dictation). You will need to let them listen at least two or
three times and give them time to compare their texts and help each other between listenings. If your
students have access to computers you could get them to work alone to do this as they will then be
able to work at their own speed.
3. You can use segments of the video transcripts and create ‘gap-fill’ activities by blanking out some
of the keywords, then get students to listen and try to hear what the missing word was. Don’t blank
out more than 10 words though.
4. You can cut up the transcripts into about ten segments. Jumble them up and then see if your
learners can put them back into the correct order. They can then watch the clip again and check the
order of the text.
5. You can ask students to watch segments of the video and use the text to act out their own version
of the clip.
Procedure
1. Where possible try to give the students control of the video clips so that they can play and listen
again at their own speed. Make sure they know how to operate the media player though and that
they know they can stop and pause it and listen to segments more times.

1. If your students have already watched the video clips a few times then it might be better to use
these activities as revision in a following lesson
Writing: Organizing ideas

After your students have completed their brainstorm, you can get them to organise their ideas.
There are different ways to do this, but the easiest is to get them to copy their ideas under a
selection of headings or topics. If you give students enough support at this stage, the writing will be a
lot easier as students will be able to focus on their writing and not the topic.
In the first part of these writing activities, your students brainstormed the topic: 'What I've learnt
from Cricket'
In this part, they are going to organize their ideas to make the topic easier to write about.
Procedure
Ask your students to reflect on the results of their brainstorms. Tell them to add their ideas to the
following table and ask them to fill in as many extra details as they can,
Where
When
Who
What
Why
Your feelings
Result
1. Empty your brain!

Tell your students the title of the piece that they will write. Tell them to put their pens and pencils
down and to focus on thinking. Tell them to think about the topic for two minutes. Tell them not to
write anything but think of as many ideas as they can. Reassure them - tell them not to worry about
whether they will use these ideas or not later.
2. Put it on paper!
Tell your students to write down their ideas. At this point, there are no bad ideas, anything goes! Tell
them to work silently - not to discuss their ideas with their partners. Tell them they have five minutes
(and tell them how long they have left at regular intervals). Tell them to try to continue writing until
the five minute time limit is up, but stop writing immediately when five minutes have passed.
Phonemic Penalties
This activity encourages students to work on their pronunciation and improves their knowledge of the
phonemic chart through a game. The game is similar to a penalty shoot out, but instead of kicking a
ball the students have to think of words with specific sounds and pronounce them correctly.
Preparation
Make copies and print up the phonemic charts from the Premier Skills website. Then cut up the
charts so that each sound and picture is an individual card.
Cut up the pictures so that you have a number of cards each with a word and image on. make sure
you have enough for each group to have five cards.
Procedure
Ask the students what happens at the end of an important game if the scores for both teams are the
same. They should be able to tell you about penalty shoot-outs.
Tell the students that they will play a similar game.
Put the students into two teams. If possible put each team in two lines facing you at the front of the
class.
Take a random card from your pack of phonemic symbol cards.
Ask the student at the front of the line for one team to give you another word that has that sound in
it.
If the word is correct give the team a point (or goal). If the word is wrong and doesn’t contain the
sound, give the other team a chance to steal an extra goal by giving you a word that contains that
sound.
After each student has their turn at the front of the team line, they go to the back and the next
student takes the next turn.
You can keep playing the game for as long as the students stay motivated. Be sure to insist on good
pronunciation when they say the words. The team with the most goals at the end wins.
Imagine what changes might take place in the Premier League between now and
2020 and then write a 250 word introduction to the Premier League for your
school magazine in 2020.
Football Hot Seat

This is a simple game to encourage students to explain vocabulary rather than using translation. It
can be used with any vocabulary, but for this activity we have supplied a list of suitable football
related vocabulary terms.
Red card Yellow card Send off Referee
Penalty Free kick Wall Off side
Tackle Kit Striker Goal keeper
Corner Goal kick Foul Throw in
Shoot Header Touchline Dive
Half time Volley Pitch Net
Procedure
Divide the students into 2 - 3 groups. Take one chair for each group and place it with its back
towards the board. Choose one player from each group to site in the chair with their back to the
board.
Now write one of the vocabulary words on the board. The students in the chair is unable to see the
word on the board, so the rest of the team have to explain the word without using any part of the
word or translating it (they have to define the word). The first student in the chair to guess the word
correctly gets a point for their team.
The person in the chair changes each time you write up a new word.
This activity can become very competitive, so make sure students don’t cheat and they are giving
good definitions or explanations of the word.
The Dream Team

This activity is a simple speaking activity and is best done with students who know quite a lot about
football. In the activity they can create their own dream football team using any players from history
or the present.
Procedure
1. Tell the students that they are going to create a 5 aside football team and that they can choose
any players from any team in the world.
2. Put the students in pairs to choose a team together,
3. Once they have chosen their favorite five players together they join with another group and
compare the five they chose and try to decide which of the two teams would win.
This is a good simple activity for practicing comparatives and superlatives.

Out of Class Activities

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Out of Class Activities

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Using a text: Out of class activities

Procedure for using the activities

Procedure for using the activities

Using video: Study Activities

Procedure for using the activities

Writing: Organizing ideas

1. Empty your brain!

Football Hot Seat

Red card Yellow card Send off Referee

Penalty Free kick Wall Off side

Tackle Kit Striker Goal keeper

Corner Goal kick Foul Throw in

Shoot Header Touchline Dive

Half time Volley Pitch Net

The Dream Team

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