Author Archives: commonsenseesl

Conversation Activity: Stimulating Students to Listen and Respond to Each Other

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conversation listen respond

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

Students are going to make the most progress in their conversation skills if they get into the habit of doing two things:
(1) Listen carefully to what the other person is saying and
(2) Respond to what was said.

This information-gap activity is great practice for a couple of reasons.  First, students will immediately know if they hadn’t understood clearly what their partner had said.  And second, it provides an example of  how to respond to what the partner had said.

There are three exercises in this activity.

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“Finally I now Understand What Nouns, Subjects and Verbs are.” (And it took only 30 minutes to learn inductively.)

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Is beautiful today.

We the soccer match on TV.

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

Ellie immigrated to the U.S. with limited English skills after she had graduated from college in her country.  As with many ear-learners, she gradually picked up English from talking, listening to the media and reading.  In other words, she had no formal training in English.

Here in the U.S., she has a good job in family counseling, but in order to be promoted, she needs to improve her writing skills, so she enrolled in an adult education class.  Unfortunately, the “direct” approach the instructors took of presenting rules and assigning exercises was not effective for her.  After months of studying, she became frustrated and embarrassed when she couldn’t even identify mistakes with subjects and verbs.

When she entered my academic ESL class, she demonstrated an advanced style of writing and vocabulary but had some breakdowns with basic grammar and struggled to fix these.  For example, she once started a paragraph with this sentence:

            People are social beings who has a need to be connected to other beings.

To help her edit her paragraph, I told her that there was a verb mistake in the first sentence.  She looked embarrassed and uncomfortable and after about 20 seconds of starring at the paper asked me to remind her of what a verb was.  In her next two sentences, she wrote:

            Individuals cannot be isolated for too long.  Through our brains, have the ability to connect with other’s emotions and develop empathy.

I pointed out that in the last sentence, she was missing a subject.  Again, with a pained look on her face she said she couldn’t remember was subjects were.

I realized that for me to be able to lead her to her mistakes and not just tell her what they were and how to change them, she needed to first be able to identify subjects and verbs.  So I gave her these three worksheets : Inductive exercises for nouns ; Inductive exercises for subjects ;  Inductive exercises for verbs . I should point out that I didn’t spend any time talking to her about subject and verbs or about how to do the worksheet.  (Feel free to download and use those exercises with your students.)

The results

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Teaching Gerunds (a discussion from LINCS)

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                                  SOME COMMON PROBLEMS

                                              Run is good exercise.
                                          I finished read that book.
                               He made some money by work hard
                                Eating in restaurants are expensive.
                                      They enjoyed to do their work

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

I was invited to participate in a discussion about how to teach gerunds.  You can read the discussion at this link: LINCS discussion of gerunds

I’ll summarize here some exercises that I’ve used to help students at all levels and include a links to handouts that you can use with your students.  Also, below you’ll find brief samples of those exercises.

First handout: Inductive exercises to introduce gerunds to students.
See brief samples of these below.
Here is the link to the complete exercises. Gerunds inductive intro
For more inductive grammar exercises like these, see The Grammar Review Book

Second handout: Listening and writing exercises to help students learn when to use a gerund and when to use an infinitive.   One purpose of the listening exercise is to internalize what sounds right.
See brief samples of these below.
Here is the link to the complete exercises. Gerunds vs Infinitives listening and writing exercise
For more listening/writing exercises like these, see Write after Input

Third handout: Exercises for more advanced students who know what gerunds are.  These will help them understand how to use them as subjects of sentences and to contrast gerunds and participles.
See brief samples of these below.
Here is the link to the complete exercises. Gerunds vs Participles Exercises
For more advanced grammar exercises like these, see Writing Strategies Book 2

Brief sample exercises

Inductive exercises to introduce the concept of gerunds, especially good for ear-learners.

Exercise 1: Circle the nouns. Ignore pronouns such as he. (There are 8 nouns, including candy.)

  1. He likes candy.
  2. He likes eating.
  3. We enjoy music.
  4. We enjoy singing.

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The Huge Advantage International Student Writers Have Over Their American Classmates

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Corn flakes

Include information from your country or culture.

An American student writes in his essay, “Every morning, I eat corn flakes for breakfast.”

His English Comp instructor thinks, “Boring.  Many Americans eat corn flakes.”

An ESL student from China writes on her essay, “Every morning, I eat corn flakes for breakfast.”

Her English Comp instructor thinks, “Wow! That’s interesting!   They eat corn flakes for breakfast in China too. as we do!”

(This posting includes this handout which you are welcome to use with your students.)  Giving information about your country.

It can be liberating to ESL students to realize that almost anything that they can include in their essays/papers about their culture and country will probably be interesting to their American instructors.  This is a great advantage that they have over their American classmates.

However, just encouraging them to include this kind of information in their essays often results in paragraphs like this one from an essay about raising children:

     Sometimes even the most obedient child will misbehave and will need to be disciplined. Some people will spank their children in order to get their attention and redirect them.  However, in my country, parents very rarely do this.

The writer of the above paragraph did include information from his country, but he missed an opportunity to dig deeper in this cultural custom and describe something more specific.  After being challenged to include an example or some details, the writer continued the paragraph:

… However, in my country, parents very rarely do this.  Instead, if a child refuses to listen to his mother or throws a tantrum, his mother will tell him to stand outside the house. The worse thing that can happen to someone in my culture is to be excluded from the group, so this type of punishment can be very effective.

An Inductive Approach to Teaching this Technique

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Taking TPR to Another Level of Engagement: Two Fun Lower-Level Activities (Part 2: Movie Directors)

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Excerpt from directors’ script:

Movie Director script

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

This activity is not only great for skill building, but also offers an opportunity for students to be creative.  It’s also very entertaining and a complete change from other activities that students usually do in class.

After students have done the TPR (Total Physical Response) activity which I had describe in Part 1 , Taking TPR to Another Level of Involvement: Two Fun Lower-Level Activities (Part 1: Triads) they’ll be prepared for this one, “Movie Directors.”

In brief, these are the steps and the handout.

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Taking TPR to Another Level of Involvement: Two Fun Lower-Level Activities (Part 1: Triads)

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Excerpt from Student A’s paper:

Image St A soup

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

This activity will show how TPR (Total Physical Response) can be more student-centered than the traditional teacher-directed approach.  Also, it is a pre-step to the TPR activity “Movie Directors,” which I’ll share in the next posting .

In this activity, students are put in groups of three (Students A, B, C).  Each member is given a paper with different “commands.”  They read their commands to their partners, who listen and do the actions.

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Most Stimulating and Engaging but Often Over-Looked Essay Mode

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Definition Essay Korean

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

A frequent type comment by teachers, “I always look forward to reading these essays.  They often give me new insights into my students and their cultures.”

A frequent type comment by students, “When I heard that we would write a complete essay about one word, I thought it would be impossible.  But after I chose a good word, I really enjoyed writing this.”

Another frequent type comment by students, “This was the most challenging essay for me, but in the end, it was the most rewarding.”

Many ESL Writing books and instructors overlook this essay mode because they don’t realize its secret potential.  It’s the Definition Essay.  The potential lies in the type of words that the students write about.

Traditional Definition essays can be very unstimulating for the students to write and for the teachers to read.  There are two major reasons for this:

(1) The category of topics from which to choose provides little opportunity for ESL students to feel truly invested in it.
(2) The students are given few specific or poorly designed techniques which they can use.

The Dynamic Definition Essay: Category of Topics and Specific Techniques

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