TEFL World Wiki: Ice Breakers for New Students

Reflect on the first day of attending a new class. It can be any class and any grade – elementary, junior high, high school, even college. You’ll probably remember the new faces, new teacher, new everything. More likely than not, the teacher facilitated some kind of ice breaker to have all the students mingle and get to know each other better. By the end of the class, some students have already found their best friends for the academic season, and more importantly, teachers have a better idea of the students’ social and academic prowess.

Ice breakers used in an ESL classroom range in content, purpose, style, and creativity. Some activities are solely created to entertain the students, while others are already subtly teaching some linguistic aspects of English without the students’ knowledge. You may be thinking that ice breakers are all about having fun and will be a piece of cake to facilitate on the first day with little to no prior preparation. After all, how hard can it be to motivate students to meet each other and have fun while doing so? Well this is true to some extent. Ice breakers are meant to ease tensions among student-student and teacher-student interactions, so it should definitely be light hearted. But it should also be informative and goal-driven. You can only make a first impression once, so adequate preparation is crucial to have a smooth ice breaker that the students will remember for a long time. If there are any gaps or hiccups in the activity flow, students may feel like it is not useful or a waste of time. As a new teacher, there are many important factors to consider before choosing which ice breaker to use for the first day. How many students do you expect to show up? What is the fluency level of the students? What should the students learn from this activity: new vocabulary, forming complete sentences, asking questions? How much class time will the ice breaker take? Do I need any extra materials or props?

There are 3 specific steps that you can take to make sure the ice breaker goes as planned. First: Explain the rules in detail so that the students can easily perform the task. Remember to use simple language and speak clearly. Second: Demonstrate an example for the class. Choose a student to help you reenact the ice breaker rules. Third: Be the first person to start the ice breaker. Students will likely imitate what you do and feel less nervous. Encourage students to speak and participate by providing positive comments.

TEFL World Wiki offers several different kinds of ice breakers, including Brief Reminders, Guess Who, Sherlock Holmes, Trading Places, and Truth and Lies. Students must ask each other questions and guess about each other’s lives to find out more details to share with the class.

I would like to share a fun ice breaker that can be adapted to different levels and themes. This activity works best for smaller groups of students, since it involves a good deal of memory. The goal is to have every student add on to what the previous person says, and continue the chain until the last person repeats what everyone has shared. Let’s take the theme of favorite foods as an example. Teacher: My name is Sally, and my favorite food is pizza. How about you? Student 1: Your name is Sally, and your favorite food is pizza. My name is Tina, and my favorite food is sushi. Student 2: Your name is Sally, and your favorite food is pizza. Her name is Tina, and her favorite food is sushi. My name is Ben, and my favorite food is chicken. Student 3: Your name is Sally, and your favorite food is pizza. Her name is Tina, and her favorite food is sushi. His name is Ben, and his favorite food is chicken. My name is Paul, and my favorite food is steak. … and so on… By the end of the drill, everyone will know each other’s favorite food! Other themes relating to ‘favorites’ include: color, animals, movie/TV shows, books, ideal job, music, sports, hobby, author, biggest fear, etc. The more creative and wild the theme/content is for the ice breaker you choose, the more memorable the activity will be for everyone!

TEFL World Wiki: It all starts with Grammar

The other day, I was browsing the web for grammar teaching tips when I came across this website: TEFL World Wiki (TWW). As you may know, the original Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia which allows people from all over the world to edit and add information to the extensive articles on the site. Not only is it a great resource to enhance your teaching experience, but it is most importantly a useful learning tool.

Even though TWW is primarily directed towards language professionals who teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) in a variety of international countries, the abundance of interdisciplinary articles and adaptable language activities makes this Wiki page applicable to all language educators in the fields of TEFL, TESL, TESOL, and English teaching.

TWW provides a wealth of teaching resources that are categorized in different themes. The categories include:

Teaching (tips), Grammar Guide, Forum, Employment & Finding Work, Skills, Books & Materials, Linguistics, Glossary, and even TEFAL (Teaching English for a Laugh).

The TEFL World Wiki Grammar Guide emphasizes the importance of English grammar as the “glue” which holds words together and gives sentences contextual meaning. Grammar represents the set rules we use in any language to create and understand meaning through written or spoken modes of communication. Thus as teachers, we have an important responsibility to help our students build a strong foundation in grammar, not necessarily with tedious drills, but integrating grammar instruction into meaningful learning games and reading/writing activities.

If you don’t exactly remember how to explain determiners, the future perfect simple, gerunds, imperatives, modals, participles, subjunctives, or subordinate clauses, the Grammar Guide is the perfect place to brush up on your grammar knowledge!

Keep the Conversation Going: Communicative Themes

Being a teacher of an advanced ESL conversation course can be intimidating and thrilling at the same time. Before teaching any lesson, it is important to approach your teaching endeavors from the perspectives of the students. What do you hope for the students to achieve in each class? Heightened fluency in casual dialogue? New acquisition of vocabulary and idiomatic expressions? Expand their critical thinking skills?

Advanced students need a challenge in the classroom to consistently build on their current English knowledge. My teaching experience at the university allows me to create my own curriculum and decide the topics of each lesson. My first year of teaching this advanced conversation course allowed me to be creative and try new strategies to keep students engaged in their learning. To do this, I facilitated mini-projects based on weekly thematic topics. If you are a new teacher and need some ideas to structure your conversation course, here are a few themes that worked really well with my students:

- Business and Entrepreneurship: Pairs of students created a business proposal to build their own company, promote their product/service, and practice sales pitch strategy using business related idioms and vocabulary during the presentation.

- News Broadcast: Students research a news article from a given news category and present The 5 W's (who, what, when, where, why, sometimes how) to the audience. This allows students to be creative with presentation style - deliver a newscast, reporter interview, etc.

- Stereotypes: Students learn about words related to stereotypes and read articles about current events that display stereotypes in American culture. During my teaching, I used the success of Jeremy Lin (as an American Born Chinese) in the predominantly non-Asian sport of basketball to display what kinds of stereotypes people may have in the sports realm.

- Travel: Early in the week, students learn about travel-related vocabulary and idioms. In groups, students perform research on a country of interest and create a travel brochure. For advanced students, each person will represent a different role to present unique details during the final project (i.e. tour guide, travel agent, recreation director). Students can present their findings using a poster and/or PowerPoint.

- Jobs and Careers: Students learn job-related vocabulary and idioms. After building this foundation, they participate in a mock "Job Fair" in the classroom that helps students practice asking relevant questions to employers.


The following themes can be adapted (in terms of content and level) to fit your students' needs:

- Technology: Lessons using Twitter, Facebook, Blog sites.

- Charts and Graphs: Analyzing current trends. Use trends-related terminology (rise, increase, fall, decline, slightly, moderately, rocket, etc).

- Environment: Conservation Project.

- Lifestyle: Daily habits, food idioms, etc.


I hope you find this information helpful. Strive to implement engaging and hands-on academic content to keep the conversation going!