Florea Ruxandra
What is the role of a holiday? Should students play and spend time with family and friends without being involved in any academic activity? I believe there should be a balance between these two ideas and teachers should adapt or even change the task so that students would not feel they are at school. According to Cambridge Dictionary “holiday is an extended period of leisure and recreation especially one spent away from home or in travelling”. Recently, a new term has been coined which is staycation or “the holiday that someone spends at home in their own country rather than travelling.” In the following part I am going to list holiday or staycation idea tasks that teachers can use in class.
- Cambridge Dictionary Plus App
Besides the traditional tool for searching new words, students can learn new words by checking the Words of the Day, by creating their own word lists or by looking for specific word lists. Moreover, they can also play different grammar and vocabulary quizzes.
- Cambridge English Thesaurus
This is such a practical toolkit with ideas for teachers. The activity that I liked most is called “Meme It” which is an activity where students can be assigned tasks to create memes from articles as holiday homework. After the holidays, students can share their memes with the rest of the class.
- Linguistic Landscape
“Languages thatappear in flashy advertisements and commercials, names of buildings, streets and shops, instructions and warning signs, graffiti and cyber shape.” (www.jbe-platform.com)
Travel signs are such fantastic linguistic tools and that is why we can take advantage of them. One activity that can be assigned to students is to tell them to take photos of three signs they see in English during their holiday and then to create a collage.
- Make a Video Interview
With this task, we can encourage our students to explore their creativity. They can come up with their own questions, considering the holiday theme, and then ask their friends the questions which they created themselves. After that, they have to create video interviews which they are going to present to their class.
- Holiday Projects
Using Padlet, students can collect ideas throughout their holiday break.
- Practise English with the News
On www.breakingnewsenglish.com there are different worldwide updated news articles at different levels. What teachers can do is to tell students to read a number of authentic materials or pieces of news and to write in their journals what they chose the articles and what they learnt while reading them.
Bibliography:
Scrievener, Jim. Learning Teaching. 3rd ed., Macmillan Books for Teachers, 2013.
“Cambridge Thesaurus | Synonyms, Antonyms and Examples.” @CambridgeWords, 19 July 2023, dictionary.cambridge.org/thesaurus.
“Cambridge Dictionary Plus.” Cambridge.org, 2019, dictionary.cambridge.org/plus/.
“LinguisticLandscape.” www.jbe-Platform.com,www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/22149961
Banville, Sean. “Breaking News English – Easier News Lessons.” Www.breakingnewsenglish.com, 2019, breakingnewsenglish.com/.