Teaching Secondary
Aged Students

Help Yourself List

What and Why?

The Help yourself list is a list of types of exercises at the back of the Student's Book at most levels of CEWw. It is called Ideas list in Student's Book 1. The list is intended to help the students design their own practice exercises for themselves, for the Exercise Box or when they are doing decide exercises. Designing exercises increases the amount of student involvement with the course and their own learning, supports a general movement towards autonomy and promotes deeper levels of understanding. From CEWw 3 onwards, the Help yourself list is divided into two sections: closed exercises, which only have one correct answer, and open-ended exercises, which do not have a single correct answer.

Practical ideas

• Students can also use the Help yourself list (or Ideas list) if they have time to spare.
• You can encourage the students to bring in their own examples of English. They can then use the Help yourself list (or Ideas list) to make some exercises for themselves and other students.
• Students may be able to add more examples to the list. (These can perhaps be put on the wall.) For example, students may be able to think of ideas to use with pictures, objects, listening passages or writing.
• If stronger students are placed with weaker students, they can help the weaker ones.