(This posting includes handouts which you are welcome to use with your students.)
See • Reading Units: Reading for Insights (Introduction) for an introduction to these reading units.
Article & Study Guide for Proximity: The Most Important Factor in Making a Friendship is How Close You Are Physically (and excerpts)
(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:
(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
At first glance, these activities can appear to be just a fun way for students to interact with each other. However, the more I’ve worked with and developed them, the more I realize what an effective skill-building tool they can be.
For this PART 1 posting, I’ll…
1) briefly review what an information gap activity is.
2) describe three important ways to make these most effective for students and the mistakes that teachers sometimes make with these.
In my next posting, PART 2, I’LL …
3) explain ways to customize them to review and reinforce vocabulary words and conversation strategies.
4) include more samples of these types of information-gap activities.
While working at my computer, I heard my officemate, Nadya, sigh. She had a stack of homework papers that she was in the midst of marking, counting points and recording. She told me that she was starting to feel burned out from all the paper work and wondered if I felt the same.
She showed me how she was evaluating her students’ homework. They had written 10 items, and next to each one, she had written points. For example, a 2/2 meant that the student did that item correctly, a ½ meant it wasn’t completely correct, and 0/2 meant it was completely incorrect.
That morning she was in the process of (1) totaling the points, (2) writing a score at the top, and (3) recording the scores in her grade book. She said that she didn’t have time to write anything more specifically about the reason for the points on the students’ papers.
I then showed her a set of papers that I had recently marked. I don’t write points next to each item, but instead, I marked each with green or blue. Then I explained that by doing that, I’m able to specifically reinforce what they did correctly or point out what was incorrect. At the same time, I don’t need to write and record points, which saves me a tremendous amount of time.
Common Sense Teaching ESL 