The Teaching Tapestry TEFL

Sometimes lesson openers fall flat, leaving students passive and disengaged. By blending engaging warm-up activities with traditional lead-ins, we can motivate learners and lower their barriers to learning. In this article we discuss how.

Many lessons start with words. We’re all familiar with lead-in questions, quotes,  opening statements, and so on. More recently, a number of popular books that utilize the lexical approach often include vocabulary activities as the first activity in the unit. The one thing I have always found ineffective when it comes to these types of lead-ins is the fact that they are quite passive, so to speak. Students often have to look at the board or read some questions on the book,  placing them in a situation where they are at the receiving end of the language and not actively engaged with it—the effort to focus on these language chunks is on their end. 

What this does is adding a degree of unpredictability to the effectiveness of these lead-ins.  Arguably, the two main purposes of lead-in activities are to turn down the so-called affective filter and to activate learners’ schemata. In simple terms, this means having students engage with the content of the lesson and getting them interested. However,  anyone who has taught a low motivation class will definitely be familiar with the lack of engagement that many students might bring into the classroom. For a number of different reasons, which we will not go into in this article, it might be extremely difficult for students to just “ flip”  that switch and suddenly become engaged and interested. With this in mind, how can we change this model and make students active participants in their relationship with the text? 

Interestingly enough, a number of warm up activities which are often used at the beginning of a class to “ wake up”  students and increase their motivation can be combined with lead in tasks themselves,  so that students are engaging with the content of these tasks while focusing on the more ludic aspect of these warmers. 

As far as I know,  there is no scientific classification of warm-up activities in language classrooms.  This will actually be the focus of a future article,  so stay tuned for that. Today, however,  I want to focus specifically on the category I call text-focused warmers. In these warmers,  learners engage with words, phrases, sentences or different types of language chunks. The goal is usually to copy, dictate, or report strings of text in a fun and engaging way.  some activities are static, i.e. all participants stay still, whereas other activities are dynamic, i.e. one or more participants need to move as part of the warm-up activity itself. Regardless, these warmers require cooperation within pairs and teams in order for the target language to be relayed successfully. Some examples of these activities are running dictations, back-to-back dictations, back to the board (in all of its variants), and Chinese whispers. I’m sure many of you will already have guessed where I’m going with this. 

The trick here is to use these warmers as a way of presenting the language that’s contained in the lead-in tasks. This way, rather than an extra activity in of itself, the warmer can be used to present questions or texts in an engaging way. Learners will be forced, so to speak, to focus on the language being presented, as well as its pronunciation and spelling, with an extra focus on accuracy. As a result, students will therefore be already engaged with the text. Much of their energy and attention will have been devoted to “winning” the game,  and the communicative purpose of the activity will in fact be to be successful at the task itself as opposed to complying with top-down instructions given by the textbook and/or the teacher. In other words, students will be so focused on winning the game that they will put in extra effort into their reading, grammatical accuracy, pronunciation, listening and spelling skills without even knowing it.  By the end of the activity,  their affective filter will have been turned down and their schemata — the scaffolding our brain utilizes to acquire new knowledge — will have been activated without explicit instructions to do so. There’ll be engaged, active, and already focused on the lesson topic—exactly what a lead in activity is supposed to achieve. 

This works particularly well with so-called lexical approach “noticing” activities. These activities are quite popular in books that adopt the lexical approach, such as NGL’s Outcomes series. In these activities learners are presented with a number of lexical items and are asked to complete meaningful sentences that use these lexical items as soon as they jump into the lesson.  While this is great for guided discovery, mediation and negotiation, it can feel quite overwhelming since it often happens at the very beginning of the class and students are often presented with a large number of lexical items they are not familiar with. This is why having learners relay these items as part of one of these text-focused warmers means that they will focus on the fun aspect of the activity while at the same time doing their best to identify and categorize these new lexical items— not just on their own but in a mediated effort with their partner or partners.  Once these words are presented, we can often add an extra stage where learners are asked to discuss their meaning, form and pronunciation before they even open their books. The result of this is that once students finally move on to the actual gap fill activity they will have already acquired familiarity with the target language. This will not just make the activity less overwhelming,  but it will encourage and facilitate active retention and acquisition of the lexical items— which, is worth remembering, is in the end the ultimate goal of learning. 

As an added bonus, using warmers this way will also ensure that students have a written record of the target language on their notebooks or tablets. This will in turn encourage them to be more creative with how they go about using these items. Printed textbooks often provide only limited space for “playing around”  with new words, whereas having these words or phrases on your own device— be it pen-and-paper or digital— creates an extremely learner-centred environment where students are free to explore and manipulate the target language in whichever way suits them best. Once again, the focus here is maximizing engagement and schemat activation in order to promote active retention as opposed to what can feel like a textbook activity—“doing the book”.

Let’s now look at an example of how this can be done. Let’s consider a very typical lead in activity—questions introducing the topic for the lesson. Take the example below.

(Speakout Intermediate 2nd Edition unit 1.1 page 8)  

This activity has a twofold goal. The first goal is to introduce the topic of language learning by discussing the questions. The second goal is to consolidate and/or acquire new vocabulary connected to the class topic. With this in mind, there are a number of ways we can go about doing this.

1. We can focus on the target language (words in bold). Here’s a list of quick steps that can be followed to set up a running dictation for an active presentation of this target language:

1. Copy the words in a text file. You can do this manually, or take a screenshot and use AI to do it, which saves precious time.
2. Print out the file. A few minutes before class, hang it outside the door or leave it on a windowsill. Always keep an eye out for health and safety – you don’t want anyone to get hurt!
3. Explain to the students the rules for a running dictation. You can play around with the details, but the core idea is that one student will sit and write down the words, and another student will run to the printout and relay the words to their partner. 
4. Set a timer for the activity and have students do it.
5. When the time is up, display the words on the board. Ask students to work in pairs and discuss the meaning and pronunciation of the words. If you want to put extra focus on the language aspect, you can also ask to identify the word class (adjective, noun, etc.) and write down the base form of the word (e.g. singular for nouns, infinitive for verbs etc).
6. Discuss in plenary.
7. At this stage, ask students to open their book and discuss the questions in ex. 1. 

This is only one possible example of how these warmers can turn an otherwise potentially overwhelming activity into a fun one, shifting the focus of the task, turning down the affective filter, and therefore promoting learning.

Based on your setting, you might want to pick and choose the most appropriate activities. In some setting, kinaesthetics might be hard to implement or frowned upon. In that case, you can opt for a more standard dictation, where a student comes to the board and reads out words, or where students work in pairs and read the words to one another. There is potentially no limit to the type of variations and adjustments you can make to these warmers, so don’t be afraid to change things in a way that works for you. In teaching, no one group and no one setting is the same—it’s the blessing and the curse of our job. 

Let’s recap what we discussed in the article:

• Standard lead-ins are often passive and fail to engage students.
• Text-focused warmers (e.g. running dictations, back-to-the-board) can double as lead-ins, making learners active and lowering the affective filter.
• These activities promote focus on meaning, pronunciation, and accuracy while keeping motivation high.
• Integrating warmers with lexical noticing tasks makes new vocabulary less overwhelming and supports retention.
• Don’t be afraid to adapt and be creative with these activities, adapting them to your context and your learners’ needs.

I look forward to hearing your ideas on this topic. Do you already do this? What activities are the most successful when presenting a lead-in?