English Mode

Let´s do Something Fun...

said the COOLEST Teacher ever!

Learn how to get Students in "English mode"...

Why are warm-ups so important?

The warm up of a lesson often receives less attention than it should. Teachers spend a lot of time preparing explanations and worksheets to introduce and practice the target language, for example. They then enter the classroom unprepared for the first five or ten minutes. "Let's do something fun" usually constitutes all the planning that goes into this stage of the lesson. Planning then gets done on the way to the classroom, with the teacher pulling a game out of his bag of tricks.

Every teacher with more than one month's experience is guilty, including myself. But a well-planned, effective warm up offers more towards the lesson than just a bit of fun.

Because it's the first activity of the lesson, the warm up sets the tone for the next hour. An activity that students find too difficult, or even confusing, results in a class of disinterested zombies. Similarly, a writing-based activity won't get the students communicating. This then translates into a quiet class session in which you have to prod and push the students to volunteer examples or simple answers.

A fun warm up, on the other hand, raises energy levels. Fun activities also produce relaxed, less inhibited students. With the right warm up, you'll have created a positive atmosphere to practice and experiment with the language.

The lesson's warm up gets students into "English mode." If you teach EFL in China or Japan, the lesson may represent the only chance for students to use the language. In other words, they might not have spoken English since the last session, be that two days, one week, or one month ago. Even if your students encounter and use English every day, it still takes some time to prepare for the intensive ninety minutes of classroom time.

To fully get into "English mode," as I like to call it, a warm up should last about ten minutes. I'm assuming your lessons meet for ninety minutes, so a sixty minute session can shave a few minutes from this figure. Without enough time to get warmed up, though, students will continue to make mistakes during the early stages of the lesson - important time needed to present and drill the new material. Students may be slow to understand, too, again because those wheels aren't turning yet. As a final comment, if the warm up takes too long, say fifteen minutes, then valuable time gets lost from the main focus of the lesson. Students have less time to acquire the new material.