>>WCC INFINITIVE OF PURPOSE VISUALS<< (edit as necessary, the pictures moved a little in posting this!) >>WCC INFINITIVE OF PURPOSE<< This is an activity I use to introduce the Infinitive of Purpose, i.e. “I went to the ocean to relax“. The first attachment is visual, with pictures to elicit a story about a WCC student who is taking ESL classes to improve her English. She also wants to take a computer class […]
Category: Intermediate
Money Lesson Beginners “How much / How many “
During my practicum years ago I came up with the idea of printing out “play money” to deal with the grammar points “How much” and “How many.” In the lesson I begin by explaining what each bill is called: 1 dollar bill, 5 dollar bill, etc. Then I go into the different between “money” and “bills.” I hand out the money randomly to students. They count up their money and then I ask them individually […]
Present Perfect Indefinite Past
Unit 10 in Focus on Grammar 3 deals with “Have you ever_____?” and how to answer those questions. I created a fun activity that forces students to get out of their seats and communicate with each other. With this handout, students run around the room and try to find students who have done one of these activities before. For example, “Have you ever been to the Golden Gate Bridge?” If the student asked responds yes, […]
The Cultural Iceberg
This always seems to make it into my intermediate/advanced classes at some point! It is helpful for students to have a little understanding of cross-cultural communication since they are studying another language/culture. I will add this activity into a unit that covers food, festivals or fashion. It has been most successful with my advanced classes. The idea is that what is visible in a culture (food, fashion, festivals, games, and music) has deeper roots to […]
Role Play and Word Emphasis
I picked this up from one of my colleagues at UCD (sorry, I don’t remember who) and have often used these “scenarios” with different activities. In this activity, I have had advanced students change the stress in the sentence to change the meaning of the dialogue – asking them to perform the skit twice. In my lower levels, I may simply have students write out a skit and then the class tries to guess the […]
Classmate Bingo with mixed verb tenses
<<Classmate Bingo with mixed verb tense >> I use this lesson towards the end of the semester in an intermediate integrated skills class (although I did it in an advanced class and they found it a good review at the start of the semester). First we started by labeling the verb tenses in the boxes, and then students have to write their own questions using the appropriate tense (numbered boxes to numbered lines) on the back. […]