Writing Skills

A nice and easy recipe for a simple lesson.

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I’ve always liked this lesson. It’s simple and there are no frills or anything. It just works every time and students seem to enjoy it. I decided to do it after I asked a Thai student to explain how to cook a Pad Thai. Basically, he started a game of charades interspersed with odd instructions and food I’d never heard of…he was an upper intermediate student.

This lesson can be done with any level from Elementary upwards but I would expect it to be revision for your average upper int or advanced student. My favourite thing about it is that there’s very little teacher talking time other than giving instructions, most of it is students working away and chatting…whoop whoop!!!

Materials:

  1. Yummy chicken in my belly – Recipe (You can use any recipe really and just change the pics)
  2. cooking vocab pictures – Photos (if you don’t like them, feel free to choose your own)

Procedure:

(1)

Test

Ask your students to think of a traditional dish from their country and to explain how they make it to their partners. Let them have a few minutes of this while you sit back and enjoy as the charades unfolds, then stop them and say OK OK OK, let’s come back to this later on guys.

(2)

Teach

  • Display the cooking pictures on the board and in pairs ask the students to think of the verb.
  • After a few minutes, hand out the recipe. Get them to check their verbs and add/correct any they didn’t know.
  • Don’t let them use their dictionaries. They should be able to work most of it out based on context and their knowledge of the genre (are recipes a genre? hmmm…today they are).
  • Meanwhile, write up all of the phonemics on the board for the verbs and any other pieces of vocab they are having difficulty with.
  • When they’re ready you can check they’ve got the verbs and pictures correct and then get them to match the phonemics on the board to the words in the recipe. A nice bit of drilling never goes astray either.

(3)

Test

Bring them back to their first activity and ask them now with their new-found verbs to explain how their dish is made to their partner. Choose one from each group to share with the class and do any error correction you so desire.

(4) 

Follow Up

What I find is that even though by the end of the lesson the students have been staring at the recipe for ages, they very often ignore the imperative nature of recipes. This is not something that needs much teaching but it’s good to draw their attention to it. Just ask them what grammar is used in the recipe and in what other situations can we use it.

After that I like to get the students to write up their recipes and make a class recipe book for the noticeboard in the class. It’s nice to have something at the end that they have produced and can look back on.

These recipes can be used to encourage peer-correction, collaboration, independent research skills or planning and editing skills.

If you’d like any more detail on any of this just leave a comment and I’d be happy to reply.

A bit of appropriacy please!

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So, I’ve had a little obsession with using text messages / whats-app style messages in class over the past few weeks, hence this is the second lesson I’m putting up about texting. Soz!

The main reason for this is that we tend to focus on language in classes and very often miss out on appropriacy. Trust me, as someone who spends a lot of their time in correspondence with students, appropriacy is something we need to be looking at. What I’m talking about here is both style (levels of formality) as well as register (the right words for the right context).

Just the other day a student started a spoken conversation with my by saying: “Dear David,”

This cannot continue. Something must be done. It starts here. Actually that’s probably a little bit too extreme but it’s definitely something to think about.

 

Procedure:

I think the procedure for this one is pretty self-explanatory as you just follow the worksheet but the really interesting thing is focusing on the features of a text message. Think about examining the following:

  1. Informal vocabulary
  2. Lack of punctuation (but not in all instances e.g. we’re could look like were)
  3. Omitted words (e.g. You free on Tuesday?)
  4. Shortened words (e.g. Tue / Fri)

A lovely follow up for this exercise for this is, once they have got the appropriate text message language down and have practised with one of their one, give each student a pile of post-it notes and tell them they are going to have a whatsapp group chat, making plans for the weekend. One person starts off the conversation by writing a message and placing it on the wall in front of the group. From then on the conversation happens in real time. Each student can reply to the message(s) that came before but they have to keep an eye on the thread as their partners may send the message they had planned to send. It’s quite fun but also ties the lesson together and makes error correction quite easy at the end as you have all of the physical messages.

Let us know how it goes, if you’d like a more detailed procedure, leave a comment and I’ll put something together.

Material:

A) Making plans Text messages worksheet

 

Writing lesson based on a song

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Sat listening to my ipod one day, this song came on and I started thinking as I heard the opening, hmmm, this could be a lesson on letter writing, it has taken a bit of time to properly come to fruition, but now here it is, ready to go.

Like some of our other lessons, this was born out of a frustration with teachers doing wonderful things with songs, gap-fills, questions on feelings, what the song meant,  but then moving onto a completely different thing.  Leaving language left untouched and with no real follow up exercise.  I have tried to do that a little here.

  • Time: 90 minutes
  • Level: High Int +
  • Aim: To raise your students’ awareness of register
  • Sub aim: highlight conditionals

Materials:

  1. Paperback writer lyrics by the beatles – easy to find online
  2. Worksheet register
  3. Worksheet Language focus
  4. Answers

Procedure:

1. Listening: Cut up the song lyrics before the class and then do it as a listening exercise to order the lyrics, a lighthearted bit of fun and a good way to practice listening.  (Feel free here to change this exercise and if you have good ideas let us know!)

You can do either stage two or three next depending on your main focus and also pre-existing knowledge of register in your class

2. Introducing the main aim: Ask students to think about the lyrics of the song and ask them if they notice anything about them, put them in pairs for this.  Then if they haven’t found it, highlight “Dear Sir or Madam”.  Ask the students where they would normally find this.  Ask students in what situations they may have to write letters / emails.

3. Register: Ask them if they know the word “formal”.  if they do, ask for examples of formal language.  Ask them to look at worksheet 1 and complete gaps 1-9.  Check in pairs and then as a class Then ask them to complete the missing two sentences.

4. Language focus: Go through worksheet two.  Feel free to change the order.

5. Homework: Ask students to write a reply to the letter either agreeing to publish the novel or turning it down.

A Day in the Life – Elementary / Pre-Intermediate

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This lesson came after I started learning Spanish and the immense sense of achievement I got from reading and actually understanding a short story. I was fully aware that it was written entirely in the present simple and was probably the worst written story of all time and that the ending did not make sense in any language…but that didn’t matter, I’d read a story a I felt great.

This is a simple story for lower level students, hopefully giving them a similar feeling. There are a number of activities that go along with it but I particularly like the last one, in which the students write a text message from one character in the story to another. Students tend not to think about the different language you might put in a note/text as opposed to a story or a formal email. It’s important to draw attention to these differences and to practise different types of writing.

A) Material: A Day in the Life A Day in the Life

Procedure:

(1) Intro (Get the students thinking/predicting)

Get the students to give you a list of famous people. Choose one that they all know and ask them what they think they do on a normal day. Get some student suggestions up on the board and work through any present simple errors that come up.  I’ve always found Tiger Woods works well for this…I can’t imagine why.

tiger

(2) Reading (Checking predictions) 

Tell the students they are about to read a story about a new movie star. Ask them to give you a few ideas about what his average day is like. Board their ideas.

Give the students a limited time to read through the story. Negotiate this time with them but really highlight that you don’t want them to focus on every detail, you don’t want them worrying about vocab or grammar, you ONLY want them to check their predictions.

Let them discuss in pairs before feeding back as a class.

(3) Language focus 1: Vocab

(Giving the students access to the text / encouraging sts to move away from dictionaries)

Ask students what if they don’t understand a word. Have a discussion about how dictionaries have a time and a place but that there are other ways to understand a work (e.g. the context / the type of word / the surrounding words). Direct their attention to the vocab section.

When you’ve finished correcting this exercise, take a moment to ask the students how they found the answers. Reflect on it for a moment and ask them if they could have found the meanings without the help of the exercise.

(4) Detailed reading

Ask students to reread the story, negotiate the time again. Direct their attention to the true/false questions afterwards.

(5) Engage with the text (Encourage sts to have a real response to a text)

Let the students have a real reaction to the text. It’s not important that they loved the story, they could hate it with every fiber of their being but at least they have the chance to express that. Try a few of the following questions but feel free to add more:

Did you enjoy the story? / Did you like the characters? / Were you surprised by his answer? / Do you think any celebrities have similar lives? / Do you think he will have the same life in one year? / How much of the story do/did you understand? / How did you feel when you read the story?

(6) Language focus 2: Chunks of English

It’s nice, even from such a low level, to introduce sts to lexical chunks and different ways of using words they “know”. Draw their attention to walk in the story, ask them to underline  all the examples and then to do the activity.

(7) Follow-up (Encourage students to use appropriate levels of formality)

Hand out a post-it note to each student and ask them to write the text message at the end of the worksheet. Give them 5 minutes and then take in the post-its. Don’t just look for mistakes, focus on unnatural language, get it up on the board and naturalise it with the students. As a class, build one perfect text message, highlighting the type of language as you go.

As a further follow-up or for homework, ask the students to write another text message in the space at the bottom of the page. This can be a reply to the one above or something more personal.