Integrate listening and reading exercises. Have your students read a passage such as a short story, news report or mini-biography. Play a recording of true or false statements about the passage. Allow your students to take notes and skim the written passage as they listen to the statements. Your students will be challenged to use both their listening and reading skills. Review the answers together as a class.
Use "false friends." False friends are words or phrases in different languages that sound similar to one another. Language learners who speak a language with vocabulary similar to English will encounter problems with such vocabulary. For example, a Spanish speaker may refer to "soup" as "soap." "Sopa" is the Spanish word for "soup," but sounds more like the English word "soap." Use false friends in a listening or reading exercise and make some true or false statements about the content of the passage. Your students will need to identify the statements as either true or false and will need to know the definitions of the words.
Homonyms in either reading or listening materials help students understand the differences between words that sound similar. Homonyms are words in the same language that sound similar to one another but have different meanings. Use a recorded passage or provide students with written material using vocabulary words that have common homonyms. Provide a true or false quiz about the passage using homonyms so your students will understand through context the different meanings of the words. Discuss the answers as a class.
Show a short commercial, short film, music video or clip from a movie or television show. After playing the video once, make statements about the video regarding the actions or the physical descriptions of the people in it. Some statements will be true and some will be false. Ask your students to identify the false statements and form their own sentences to make the statements true. Correct the statements in class as a group and the play the video again to allow your students to check their work.