Tag Archives: handouts

• Another Conversation Activity: Listen to Partner and Ask Questions to Complete Information-Gap Chart (REVISITED)

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image schedule chart

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

At first, this pair-work activity looks like it’s about getting students to talk a lot by filling information in a chart.  But that’s not the most important value of it.

Yes, students will talk a lot during this.  But by including a short pre-exercise, they will see how they should ask clarification questions when they need more information or if they didn’t understand.  Asking clarification questions is the strategy that they can use in future conversation situations in and outside the classroom.

In this activity, the students will be filling in information about a class schedule.  They’ll need to listen to their partners tell them the name of courses, days, times and room numbers.  They’ll have many chances to ask questions, especially if they don’t understand.

There are three steps in this activity:

  • Step 1: Brief work with a model showing how to do Step 2.
  • Step 2: Pair activity (Student A/ Student B)
  • Step 3:  Exercise to do if they finish before other pairs have finished.

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

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Cover fluency shot

                                          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.

What you’ll find in the downloadable exercises

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• Short, High-Interest Readings: # 2 “Animals Understand Fairness”

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Cover fairness shot

(This posting includes a handout LINK AT THE END OF THIS POST which you are welcome to use with your students.) *

1 Imagine that you and your friends have just arrived at a popular restaurant.  Unfortunately, you are told by the hostess that you’ll need to wait in line for about 30 minutes to get a table because there are many other customers who had arrived before you.  After about 10 minutes, a man and woman arrive and talk to the hostess.  You notice that he secretly hands her some money.  Immediately, she takes them to a table.  Most of us would feel that this was unfair and would feel resentful toward the hostess.

2 Some researchers have recently become interested in finding out if the idea of unfairness is a unique emotion only felt by people or is it also experienced by animals.  A study looked at how dogs react when a second dog is rewarded in an unequal way for doing the same trick.  The researchers shook hands with two dogs, and the dogs were happy to do that whether they got a reward or not.

3 Next, they asked the dogs to “shake hands” and gave one a reward of a tasty sausage, and the other one a boring piece of bread when they did. Interestingly, the dogs didn’t seem to notice the difference and continued to follow the command and shook hands even though one got a tastier reward than the other.  (See complete article below.)

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