I do feel like my students today on their last day in class. When I first started writing these posts, it was a dark and cold January in Belfast. I’m writing my last post on a sunny Sunday in May, days are longer and summer, the busiest period of the year at IH Belfast, is coming fast. It’s been a journey that I shared with all of you who were kind enough to read my posts.

Using Global in class has surely made my students journey and mine more varied, more interesting, more up-to-date with today’s world. My students and I will continue our journey with Global, even if we won’t share it with all of you anymore.

I’ll be forever thankful for this incredible opportunity and all the support I received from the staff at Macmillan, the authors of Global and all of you who read and commented.

So here’s to Global and to my last post, happy summer everyone!

To start our lesson we revised body parts and basic health issues, using some flashcards. Once we revised body parts, we played a game. Students had to point the body part they heard me saying. I then asked each student to play my part, and tell us three body parts that we all had to point to. I then asked them to look at the pictures on the top of the page. In pairs, they had to describe the pictures, with the aid of the ‘Useful Language’ box in the page.

We then moved on to the listening task. They had to listen to two conversations and match them to two of the pictures they had just looked at. After checking answer, we listened to the conversations again and completed exercise 2 (true or false task).

After the listening task we focused on the language. In the ‘Language focus’ section there’s a conversation between patient and doctor. I rewrote the conversation and cut it up into strips of paper. I paired students up and asked them to build the conversation again, paying attention to who was the speaker, either the doctor or the patient. After checking their answers we looked at the second task in the section. Here they had an example of common health problems. Using the words given into brackets, they had to build similar sentences to the ones given. This helped them to recognise a common pattern in health related expressions (e.g. toothache, earache, backache). We then listened to the track on the CD to check their answers.

We then moved on to the ‘Speaking’ section. Students had to make up a conversation at the doctor, similar to the ones we listened to and read earlier on. They could use the example given in the section as an example as well, and health problems we revised. Students worked in pairs and I monitored them and helped when needed. Once their dialogues were ready, they had to act them out for the rest of the class.

First I wrote a few years on the board: 1984, 2001, 1998, 2006. I told my students that each year represented an important event in my life. In pairs they had to guess what the event was.* After briefly discussing about it and checking if they guessed it right or wrong, I asked them to do the same about themselves. I asked them to move around the class and try to guess about each other’s important events.

We then looked at exercise 1 under Vocabulary and Speaking. They had to match the two columns together and we then checked the answers. I asked them if each sentence was true or false for their country: e.g. Do people leave home at 18 in your country? We found out about each country’s similarities and differences.

We then moved to the Reading section and I asked my students if, for each event we had just looked at, there was any special celebration – if it was a rite of passage. Once the concept of rite of passage was clear to them, I asked them to read the text in the unit and answer the questions in exercise 2 under the Reading section. Students found the text very interesting and they shared a few more unusual rites of passage from their own countries.

We then looked at some sentences taken from the text, as in the Grammar section in the unit. We focused on the use of the superlative, meaning and form. To practise the superlative, students completed exercise one and two in the Grammar section.

I then asked my students to choose an important event in their country. I told them to prepare a brief presentation on the event, following the outline given in the unit in the Speaking section. In class they only had to look at the outline and write down some notes about each section. The outline on the book really helped them to organise their text, and I walked around monitoring their work and helping them. The preparation of the presentation was their homework, and the following day we all learned something new about each country’s traditions.

*1984: the year I was born; 2001: the first time I visited Ireland; 1998: the year I started high school; 2006: the year I graduated from university.

First of all we start with the Reading section. I usually enlarge the job advertisement on the page and give it to the students. I ask them what kind of text do they think it is. We look at its specific features and we all agree that is a job advertisement. I then ask them what they would expect to find in a job application letter in response to the advertisement. We brainstorm different ideas before reading the letter featured in the unit. We then discuss whether this letter fulfills all that is requested in the advertisement, what is good, what can be improved, etc.

We then pay attention to the style of the letter. In the ‘Writing skills’ section, Global focuses on the use of formal language. We look at these features and we look back at the job application letter, to see if these elements are present or not. I then ask them to correct the letter to make it more formal and appropriate in style.

After that we work on the vocabulary in ‘Language focus’. This section deals with describing personal skills and personal qualities. We look at the use of prepositions in collocations and the use of the infinitive or the gerund in specific constructions.

All these activities help students to prepare to write their own job application letter. We focus on a few jobs as suggested in the ‘Preparing to write’ section. We brainstorm skills and qualities, and I specifically ask them to use some of the expression we’ve just looked at.

Finally students write a job application letter. I ask them to follow the guideline in the Writing section, which helps them to structure their letter clearly and effectively.

Before the lesson I usually collect a few job advertisements from the newspaper. At the end of the class I ask them to choose an advertisement they find interesting and they would like to apply for. Their homework consists in writing the job application letter for the job advertisement they chose. The following class I collect all letters and correct them. In this way, students have a model letter to use when applying for jobs once they are done with their English course.

First of all, I brainstormed with them some of the expressions they already knew. I then split them in pairs, and gave them an enlarged copy of exercise 1 (in the Warm up section), cut into strips of paper. I then asked them to put all expression in order to build up the phone conversation. Once we checked they were all correct, they had to act it out with their partner.

We then moved to the listening section. In exercise 1 they listened to four conversations and matched each to the correct situation. We then listened again and they had to complete a True or False exercise. These two exercises help students to practise listening in a phone conversation-like context, and therefore help them to strength their confidence. They often complain that such a task is impossible to practise in class, and they are left alone to deal with it. With these activities they had the chance to get the practice they were looking for, but mainly to get acquainted with new specific functions and vocabulary. This will help them to feel more prepared, and therefore more confident, on the phone.

We then moved on to the Language Focus section. Students had to fill in the table in exercise 1. This grid summarises the main expressions they might need in a phone conversation. Once they completed the table, and compared their answers in pairs, they listened to the solution. This also gave them the opportunity to practice the pronunciation all the expressions.

Finally, I split them in pairs and asked them to create their own conversation. Combining all new functions and vocabulary we’ve just focused on, students managed to create new interesting dialogues that they later act out for all of us.

First of all, I started off with a quick brainstorm of movie-related vocabulary, genres, actors, etc. I then asked  my students to look at the pictures at the top of page 57. I asked them which type of film they thought those people were watching. Students worked in pairs and then they shared their answers with the rest of the class. Then, we looked at exercise 2 in the Vocabulary section of the unit. I asked them to complete the definitions of each genre with the missing adjective. Students worked on their own, they checked their answers in pairs and we then looked at them together.

I brought in some movie posters. All together, we decided what genre they were. I asked them if they knew any of those movies and ask them to give me a brief summary of the plot. I then explained to them that the quick summary they just gave us is called a pitch.

I wrote on a few strips of paper each movie pitch as in the Reading section of the unit, and posted them around the room. In pairs students had to go around the classroom, read the pitch and match it to one of the movie posters we had just looked at.  We then looked at exercise 3 in the Reading section, and we focused on characters and the main problem in each movie. We focused on vocabulary in the text and I made sure they knew all the words and we looked at new vocabulary together.

We moved onto the writing section of the unit and focused on task A. I put students in pairs and asked them to think of three famous movies. For each movie they had to write a small pitch as the ones we had seen earlier on. Each pitch was written on a strip of paper, folded, and put in a box. In turns students picked a strip of paper from the box, read it, and tried to guess the movie. A fun game to finish this lesson!

And as homework, of course, they had to attempt watching a movie in English!

The following day, Pancake Tuesday, I started the lesson showing them some pictures of breakfast food and they had to remember what they were called in English. All the pictures were enlarged copies of the pictures in Global Elementary ‘Bed & Breakfast’ Part 3. I split students into teams and asked them to categorise all the food we had just seen into fruit, drinks, dairy products and ‘other things’ as suggested in Global. At the end of this game, I asked students to present to us some traditional breakfast food from their countries. We shared similarities and differences, and they were curious to know what is traditional breakfast food in Northern Ireland. Traditional Northern Irish breakfast, the ‘Ulster fry’, consists of bacon, eggs, sausages, soda bread, potato bread and fried tomatoes. They were surely surprised by such variety of food for breakfast! We continued on the subject of breakfast as I moved on to the listening in ‘Bed & Breakfast’ Part 3, where students listened to the description of different types of dishes.

Once we completed all the listening exercises I asked them about their opinion on these different types of food. We focused on pancakes, and looked at a recipe to make perfect pancakes! This involves learning new specific vocabulary (e.g. stir, add, pour, batter)and sequencing (e.g. first, then, at the end). I then gave them the recipe, but the sequences were not in the correct order, and some words were missing. They had to reconstruct the recipe filling in the gaps and putting it back together. As homework they had to research a recipe to share with us the following day!

We then quickly recapped countable and uncountable nouns and completed the exercise that follows the Grammar section of Global ‘Bed & Breakfast’ Part 3. This exercise allowed us to review some functional language on how to order food at a café as what followed was … a field trip! Off we went to a local café to enjoy some fresh pancakes! Happy Pancake Tuesday!

After revising adjectives, as suggested at the beginning of the unit, I asked each student to describe their city to a partner. At this stage students only had to listen to their partner without asking questions. They really enjoyed sharing differences and similarities between their cities!

After reading ‘The created capital’ I asked my students to prepare a few questions for our Kazakh students about Astana. This activity gave me the chance to elicit the use of question words and help them to correct their mistakes. It also gave students the chance to practise speaking without any intrusion from my side. Our Kazakh students were delighted to answer questions about their capital city! All students were very excited about the possibility of learning about Astana from people originally from there.

They further practised question words with the exercise after the grammar section.

I then grouped students coming from the same city or country and asked them to prepare a short presentation about it, based on the text they had just read in Global. At the same time students prepared three questions each to ask at the end of the presentation. Students were able, not only to learn something new about the English language, but they also learned something new about different cultures and cities.

This activity gave us, teacher and students, the chance to make the most out of our multicultural environment, where different traditions and experiences come together thanks to English and Global.

That’s why the Function globally section ‘Making suggestions’ in Global Elementary Unit 10 comes in handy. ‘Why don’t we go to see the murals?’, ‘Let’s walk on the river Lagan’, ‘We can go shopping in Victoria Square’. In my experience students really enjoy practising functional language, especially when they are learning English abroad. It helps students to get to know the city  they live in, and also to get to know each other a little bit better.

When you ask students how they usually make suggestions, the most commonly used is ‘Would you like to go to / visit …?’. Thanks to Global, students have the opportunity to learn new ways to make suggestions.

‘Why don’t we go to see the Titanic quarter?’ This construction is initially quite troublesome for the students, as they see the use of the negative auxiliary. Once you practise it with a few examples of questions and answers, they actually seem to enjoy using it! You can often hear them outside school inviting each other using ‘Why don’t we …?’. Did you know that the Titanic was built in Belfast? In April next year, Belfast will commemorate the 100^th anniversary since its sinking, by opening a brand new museum.

‘Let’s go to a concert!’ ‘Let’s’ quickly becomes everyone’s favourite expression! They like the emphasis you put on ‘Let’s’ and therefore they think it makes it quite impossible to say no! Music is an intrinsic element of Belfast life. Wherever you go there will always be music to accompany you, either traditional Irish songs played in a pub or buskers on the street.

‘We can go and see the Ulster museum.’ At this stage, students are familiar with the use of ‘can’ to express ability. They still are not confident enough to use it with the meaning of ‘possibility’. That’s why this expression is one more example that helps to clarify the concept of ‘possibility’ and strengthen their confidence in using it. See the treasures of the Spanish Armada and learn more about the Troubles period at the Ulster Museum.

After practising making suggestions in the safety and comfort of the classroom, students are ready to go and explore the city with a little more confidence and new friends.