The Lighter Side of TEFL is a collection of activities taken from the English Teaching Forum 1976 to the present. They have been regrouped and arranged into new categories to facilitate teacher use.
The Lighter Side of TEFL. A Teacher’s Resource Book of Fun Activities for Students of English as a Foreign Language
The guide provides teachers of English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) with classroom instructional activities that reinforce vocabulary or teach specific language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) while demonstrating that communicating in English can be fun.
The activities are brief and self-contained, and an audiotape cassette (not included) is designed for use with the last four sections of the book.
Each section focuses on a different type of activity: word games; crossword puzzles; idioms; limericks; jokes and riddles; puzzle stories; shaggy dog stories; and folk wisdom. An answer key is also included.
As the title of the text implies, The Lighter Side of TEFL exposes students to humorous aspects of American English to create a cheerful classroom atmosphere and a positive orientation to the language. Many of the activities reinforce vocabulary or give students practice in listening, thinking, speaking and writing, but the underlying goal of all activities is to produce a smile and an awareness that communicating in English has a lighter side and a potential for fun.
The activities are short and self-contained, and they may be good for starting off or ending a class hour. Because humor is something to be shared, the activities should be done in pairs or small groups and then discussed with the class as a whole. An answer key to the exercises is found at the end of the book.
The book is a resource for teachers. They may choose to reproduce individual pages for occasional use in their classes such as for warm-up games, individual work, or as a group exercise. The book is not meant as a textbook for EFL/ESL students to be completed from cover to cover during a term of study, but rather as a resource from which to draw supplemental material.
