Preply Tutors Academy

Please consider the students' age and proficiency level with these suggested activities and adapt as appropriate. 

Fluency

💡 Lesson idea

Quick Picture Descriptions. In this activity, you'll show the student a picture and set a 30-second timer. Their task is to describe the picture quickly, aiming to speak fluently without pauses. After each round, switch to a new picture to encourage continuous speaking practice.

💡 Lesson idea

Storytelling Relay. Engage in a cooperative storytelling game with the student. Start the story, and then let the student add to it. Take turns building a fluent narrative while fostering creativity in the target language. This activity promotes fluency and interactive language use.

Confidence

💡 Lesson idea

Show and tell: Ask the student to choose an object or a picture from around them and describe it. Support with sentence stems or do an example first. For example, "This is a ______, it is (colour, size, shape, material), I use it (to draw pictures) " etc.  Adapt the topic to the student's age and interests. 

💡 Lesson idea

Role-play: Create simple role-play scenarios (e.g., ordering an ice cream, inviting a friend to a birthday party, asking a friend about their plans for weekend). Swap roles to repeat the role-play, helping them gain confidence.

Accuracy

💡 Lesson idea

Sentence scramble: Write a sentence on the whiteboard but with the words scrambled. Challenge your student to unscramble the sentence.

💡 Lesson idea

Error correction game: Turn error correction into a game. The tutor reads a text with intentional errors, and the student's task is to interrupt the tutor, saying ‘Stop’!, and correct the errors. 

Vocabulary

💡 Lesson idea

Flashcard challenge: Use flashcards or images of objects. Student must say the correct vocabulary word. Extend the activity by having the student use the vocabulary word in a sentence to put the language into context. 

Pronunciation and intonation

⚙️ Technique

Lip reading: The tutor says words from vocabulary recently learned, and the student watches their lip movement to guess the word. Swap and let the students take on the teacher's role turning this into a game. 

Listening 

What do they need their listening skills for? 

Are they interacting with native speakers, teachers or watching TV programs/videos or movies? Do they need to listen to native speakers (whose pronunciation is difficult), or speakers from a specific other language (whose pronunciation is very specific)? Find out from the student or their parent, so the listening practice you bring to class is relevant to the student. 

Also, what do they struggle with? 

They can’t understand because they don’t know the words (i.e. even when they read a text whilst listening to it, they don’t understand). In this case it’s more about expanding vocabulary than practising listening. But they can do both, by watching videos, films or TV shows with subtitles. 

⚙️ Technique

Listening with pauses: One way to make a listening activity very successful for students is to do it bit by bit, setting the students simple questions about the listening and pausing after the answer to the question set is given, you can also pause and rewind to listen again to a small section. The preparation is simple; you read through the tape script beforehand and plan questions that can be asked through the text. 

Reading

What do they need to read in real life? 

Knowing this will help you focus on practising different reading micro-skills. Do they read comics or novels in the target language? Do they study the target language in school and read texts from course books? Select reading materials that align with the student's age and interests. 

⚙️ Technique

In a reading lesson, after the student reads the text for gist (quickly, for the main idea), ask the student to underline five words they don’t know (not all of them, or the lesson will lose momentum). Look at those words: could the student guess the meaning from context? If so, guide them to do it. Example: “The football match was utterly boring: nothing happened, nobody scored, nobody even tried”. Ask the student: was the match boring? - yes. How boring, do you think? - very boring. Yes: utterly -> very. 

Writing

What do they need to write in real life? Whether it’s event invitations, book reports, creative stories, classroom assignments, writing is not just about spelling, vocabulary and grammar: it’s about genre, register and conventions. With writing activities, support students by examining a model of a task before the student is asked to do the task.

💡 Lesson idea

Text conversation: Start or finish each class with 5 minutes where you and the student interact in the chat instead of speaking.