Tag Archives: activities

• Fluency Writing: Reading, Speaking In Triads, And Listening Culminating In A Writing Task (REVISITED)

Integrating the four skills

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

This is the perfect activity for integrating four skills into one activity. And it culminates in a writing task in which students focus on controlling their grammar and on their sentence style. It’s also one in which students can practice those two aspects of writing without having to spend time thinking about what to write.

These fluency activities can be used throughout a term when instructors would like to have students work on their grammar in a writing context and/or when they would like to add some group work in their writing classes. Also, it’s a good lead-in to teaching paraphrasing skills.

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• Most Confusing ESL Pronunciation Mistake (Includes Interactive Exercises)

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Cover pron shot

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

There has been a consensus among the many professionals that I have asked that dropping the final consonants on words causes the most communication breakdowns. I’ve had to decipher things like:

“I cou-n do my homewo cu I fe si.” (I couldn’T do my homeworK because I felT sicK.)

“Do you wan ah to chew a new topi?” (Do you wanT uS to chooSE a new topiC?)

If we just respond by asking, “What did you say?”, the speaker will merely repeat what s/he had said, perhaps a bit louder.

I developed a set of exercises that have proven to be effective in developing students’ self-awareness in the cause of some of their communication breakdowns. So now, if we ask “What did you say?”, the speaker will have a sense of the cause of the breakdown and of a way to adjust what they had said.