I like using pictures for activities in lessons and this is an example of the kind of thing I have done. You find a picture which students can use as a prompt to completing a text. The text itself has a multiple choice at various points and the students use the picture as a prompt to select the correct option. It can be a written or spoken activity. Some of the multiple choice answers have to be based on some logic – in the example below I would hope that the students would assume that travel to NYC would be by plane and also that in February it is cold there. When you ask for the answers students read out their version of the text, but if they give an incorrect answer out of A. B or C, they then have to go back to the beginning and start reading out the text again. The idea is simple, but works quite well. This can be extended by showing a second picture upon which the students base a text which they write themselves.

The example given here is not directly based in the target language culture, but I went on to point out to the students the strength of the Spanish language in the USA and how the racial mix in NYC is different to my school’s community which is heavily Bangladeshi. Not all Spanish speakers live in a country where their language is the major one spoken – much the same as the situation of many of the Sylethi speakers in my school. 

POWERPOINT     photo STARTER     TEXT     photo STARTER text     TEXT (pdf version)     photo STARTER text