HAVE YOU EVER SEEN "PERFECT" POST-IT-POSERS?

"I love teaching the Present Perfect," exclaimed the EFL-teacher.  You know that only an ESL-EFL educator could ever come out with such a statement, don't you?  Well, I am that teacher, and what's more, so is my colleague, Brentson.  We love the structure primarily because it is a huge challenge to teach it to Turkish students, young and old.  The reason: Turkish does not have this tense in its framework for communication; therefore, it takes more effort to make it stick in students' minds.  

So, SCAFFOLDING is essential, with various activities from presenting with examples and the structure, to the more engaging:

Photographic: 

"What do you think he HAS BEEN DOING?

Video Prompts: 

FLIGHT - "What HAS JUST HAPPENED to the plane?"

JAWS - "What SHOULD the woman HAVE DONE before she entered the sea?"

The MATRIX - "Who HAS BEEN CHASING Trinity over the rooftops?" 

Music: 

Rihanna's "Where HAVE you BEEN all my life? 

Clearance Clear Water's classic, "HAVE you EVER SEEN the rain?"

TEACHER-MADE-QUESTIONS

The reason for this post has finally arrived: Posed Questions on Post-Its.

First write some sentences, ONE for each student.  The question prompts all started with,

"Have you ever..."

Once the questions have been written down, the post-its are folded then placed inside a utensil for selection in class.

SOME OF THE QUESTIONS I CAME UP WITH WERE:

HAVE YOU EVER...

"Said thank you to your mum, simply because she has that role in your life?"

"Been on holiday to England?"

"Lied to your best friend?"

"Betrayed your best friend?"

"Cheated on an exam?"

"Plagiarised an assignment and sworn that you did it to your teacher?"

"Eaten something strange?"

"Ever regretted doing something so bad, that you couldn't sleep?"

There are millions of course, and these are just some ideas for you to build upon.

This was thought of at 7.35 a.m. by Brentson and Myself

The NEXT STAGE is having the students pick a question.

THEN in their groups they ask a group member their question.

FINALLY, a discussion is encouraged with students sharing the information with each other.

The students really liked the quirky nature of choosing their question at random from the pickle container.  However, they did seem to get bored of my questions pretty quickly, and they simply stopped talking.  I guess everyone at that age prefers to do their own thing, and I totally get that.  So, in the afternoon, we repeated the activity, but this time they made their own questions, which were then redistributed to the others and a much more enthused discussion ensued. Thus, we can totally support the idea that force-feeding material that loses any autonomy for content, can seriously hamper the students' interest, engagement and understanding of the lesson.

After we did these scaffolded activities on the Present Perfect, we put the students into pairs and asked them to create their own story with verb-cards that showed the Past Participle /Verb 3.  This was then posted on our PLN, EDMODO.

HERE is a BLENDSPACE TUTORIAL that Brentson made while I prepared the questions.  We have both said how great it was to do some creative lesson material building for the students appeared really grateful.  CLICK ON, HAVE YOU EVER

HAVE YOU EVER?