Top Tools for Language Teachers is a resource book that provides a wide range of interesting, enjoyable activities to assist language teachers to engage with and stimulate their students, whether they are learning English, Māori, Japanese, French, Spanish, Samoan or any other second language.
- For teachers who are new to the profession, this book will be both a guidebook to the types of activities they will encounter in textbooks and a survival pack of instantly useable ideas.
- For experienced teachers, it will provide a range of basic tools that can be used as templates for writing their own materials.
- For all teachers, this book will help with that: ‘I’m stuck for what to do – I gave them a gap- fill last lesson – what shall I do today?’ feeling that we all recognise!
This resource is designed to be flexible, with the contents organised according to:
- activity structure (match, guess, etc), and
- language point or skill practised.
About the tools
Each activity or tool is described in three stages:
- Steps gives instructions on how to do the activity,
- Example shows how the steps can be used to create one particular instantly useable classroom activity, and
- Variation suggests other ways you can use the steps to create activities of your own.
To give a comprehensive survey of tools, the book contains a mixture of well-known activity types and specially written activities.
Wayne Dyer, Jill Hadfi eld and Nick Marsden run courses for both pre-service and experienced teachers as part of the Language Teacher Education team at The School of Language Studies, Unitec, New Zealand.
Wayne Dyer has worked in English language teaching in various countries for more than 20 years, as a teacher, teacher trainer and curriculum developer, as well as in various academic management positions. He has co-authored several course books, including Headway Australasia.
Jill Hadfield has worked as a teacher and teacher trainer in many countries including Britain, France, China, and Madagascar. She is the author of more than 20 resource books for teachers, including the Pearson Communication Games series, several books in the Oxford Basics series, Classroom Dynamics; An Introduction to Teaching English (with Charles Hadfield), and Role Play (2 ed).
Nick Marsden has 27 years’ experience of teaching and training teachers of English as a second language in various countries including Morocco, Turkey, Argentina and Poland. He is the author of Newspapers (OUP 1997), and Shedding Skin, a novel (Penguin, 2005).