(This posting includes a handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)

You can see my video discussing Part 1 & Part 2 here: VIDEO Getting The Most Out of ESL Information-Gap Activities: Six Recommendations

I have found these information-gap chart pair-activities to be a great go-to interactive activity when I’d like to review and reinforce vocabulary words and conversation strategies. And best of all, they are quite easy to make and customize.

In my previous posting, PART 1, I shared a chart in which the categories were:

Relationship         Personality         Birth Year

See • Getting The Most Out of Information-Gap Chart Activities PART 1

I had made that one because I wanted to review vocabulary for relationships like cousin, nephew, niece, and aunt, and for personalities like serious, cool, and funny.  Later in the course after students had developed more vocabulary, I revised the chart to so that they could review:

I’ve also made charts that included some of these categories:

Here are two sites that have been helpful for the vocabulary in these categories:

• 20+ Categories for Speech Therapy Practice
• 133+ Categories List for Speech Therapy

Example 1. In this exercise, I wanted students to work with countries, weather, transportation, buildings and continue to practice using conversational strategies like giving understanding responses and asking for repeats. Here are the directions and a SHORTEN version of the charts:

(You can download an expanded version of this activity here. I put it in Word in case you’d like to use it as a template to customize and/or expand it more.) Info gap Activity Country Weather Transport Building

Example 2. In this exercise, I wanted students to work with animal names, emotions and money.

The “Directions” and “Try to use expressions like these” are the same as in the Example 1 above. Here are the Possible question starts

Also, as I mentioned in PART 1, I always include a Step 2 that pairs who finish before their classmates can do in order to stay productively active:

I’d also recommend that you either model using complete sentences to the whole class or show them a short dialog using complete sentences. It’s also helpful to include expressions like “I got it” and “Could you repeat that?” in these models.

David Kehe