*FOR TEACHERS* A SERIES OF "TO" LESSONS - WE'RE GOING ON A ROAD TRIP

This post contains a PowerPoint presentation lesson - true story! But it's also the story of how I got my students to start using the preposition TO when appropriate.

First, I noticed many of my students didn't use the preposition at all in their speech. They tried to use verb tenses and auxiliaries appropriately, but it was as if they didn't even know this little word existed. I also noticed that some advanced students and foreigners who used English to communicate around the streets of Dublin were leaving this tiny word out.

Now, think about it, of course they would do that! And for two main reasons:
1. The word doesn't add much meaning to what they have to say
2. Native speakers barely pronounce this word as they speak

Well, the thing is, people may be able to communicate without using prepositions correctly, but if they want to sound educated when speaking English, never using TO is a bit of a problem. And that's the case of my student, who really want to gain some respect around here. So I decided to approach the matter by bringing their attention to it every time they didn't use TO. We had to stop very often to talk about it, so that wasn't going very well. To make matter worse, they started to get confused about TO and FOR.

So I calmed everyone down with this simple yet loved lesson, which I'm glad to announce was a huge success:

 

Then I made a clear point about how often we use TO with this next lesson. My major goal was to have my students notice that the word TO exists, is used very often in spite of the fact it doesn't add much meaning to anything, and must be used if they want to speak good English. I think they got the point.

I then thought it was a good time to focus on practicing a basic structure, which is "verb + TO + verb", so I came up with a lesson on it. It focused specially on the verbs I noticed they used the most to talk to me.

Next, I came up with a musical lesson to help them figure out there were specific occasions and reasons to use TO. I think everyone liked this lesson, after all Irish are the only people I know who despise U2...

Finally, I came up with a lesson that aimed at forcing my students to speak using TO. And this is the PowerPoint presentation of this post:

This lesson goes around a scene of How I Met Your Mother - hope you got all my jokes about it through the post. First, students are prompted to answer some comprehension questions using TO, then they must fill in the gaps of a short part of the video with different words including TO. There's a little bit of focus on pronunciation here, and that's how I let them know why they hadn't noticed the word TO being spoken by native speakers. Finally, there are some discussion questions that must be asked and answered using TO and its "correct" pronunciation.

Just to clear up, I don't want my students to sound like they're Americans or any other native speakers. I believe that raising their awareness in terms of pronunciation can help them pick up on what native speakers say, which is a good path for improving English on their own.

To finish this post, I'd like to brag about the fact that my students are now using TO a lot more often and naturally in their speech. I've had feedback from them saying other people noticed they're speaking better English. So yes, the sequence of lessons above has been effective. Challenge accepted and completed!

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