How to teach Anagrams - challenge your students!

The definition of "anagram" is: "A word or phrase formed by reordering the letters of another word or phrase".

As it is commonly known amongst teachers, one good technique to have students memorising a word and its pronunciation is by making them repeat this word backwards, divided in chunks.

Using anagrams can be even better for this purpose, since you are using the language in its different angles, and proving to students that they can play around with words since they know those words in English. Anagramsite.com is an excellent source of anagrams - you can generate an anagram from the website, or even use some examples they offer there.

Of course that the fun factor is also involved - playing with the meaning of the words (or its non sense)make students really stop to think about the language, and instantly access their background experiences of those words. For this, I suggest dividing the class in groups, and, while you write the words/expressions, on the board, they have to shout what those words/expressions are in "real" English. The group that gets more correct answers wins the game. (Don't forget to say to students that they will have x expressions/words before the game begins, and to tell them "one!"or "two left!" so they have the chance to recover their results).