ESL Resources

Topol sings If I were a rich man from the film Fiddler on the Roof.

A cheep and cheerful example of the phrase “How do you do?” as seen in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger.

This exercise requires very little preparation and can be adjusted to the students’ level. They need to be familiar with the passive form, how it is formed and used.

• Give each student an even number of small cards or scraps of paper (or have them tear up a clean sheet of paper into 6-8 pieces).
• Have the students take three of the pieces of paper, and write down a person, an object and an animal, for example: Brad Pitt, My car, and An alligator.
• On the board, write down the selection of passive forms you wish them to practice, e.g. is being…, was being…, can be…, should be…, was…, will be…, has been… etc.
• Have the students choose any of these forms to go on the spare pieces of paper.
• Split the students into groups, and collect up the nouns and passives separately, mixing them up (or alternatively passing one group’s cards to the next group).
• The students should now take one card from each pile and form a logical sentence using a passive. If they manage to do that, they keep the cards, otherwise they replace them, and the next person takes a pair.
• Be sure to give the students a couple of examples, e.g. given the cards My car and is being suggest something like “My car is being serviced at the garage today.”
• Whilst the groups are working, circle and help where necessary, and particularly with less advanced groups ensure that they are using passive forms in their sentences.

Optional: If these have already been covered, you can also add some verb forms demanding gerunds or infinitives, e.g. hates (being + past participle), wants (to be + past participle), might (be + past participle).

[Photo by left-hand]

Most planned courses and course books leave space in the first lesson for a little ‘getting to know you’ session. It’s important both for you and the students to break the ice and get to know one another a little better, and is also a perfect way to find out a little more about the language level of the students.

The basic set up is extremely simple. Prepare enough question sheets, one for each person in the class. The questions need not be entirely individual, but this adds a bit of flavour to the lesson when the students don’t already know what questions they should expect. Give each of the students a blank form, and tell them that their task is to interview the person sitting next to them. Allow enough time for the students to run through their questions, then have each person introduce their neighbour to the class. In larger classes you could do the latter part in groups to save time.

Included below is a sample of twelve question sheets each with some basic bits of information and some individual questions, designed for a group of upper intermediate adults.

  Twelve Interview Handouts (.odt) (16.9 KiB, 3 hits)

In time I may post up some alternative versions, but you could easily modify this idea, for example:

• For beginners restrict the questions to familiar topics and simpler constructions.
• Use the questions as the basis for a vocabulary area covered in the lesson, e.g. include questions about pets and animals if going on to look at that topic later in the lesson.
• Tailor the questions to cover an area of grammar to be studied in the lesson, e.g. focus on questions in the present perfect (“Have you ever…?”)

Overall a great little icebreaker which generally gets students in the mood for talking, sometimes produces some very interesting answers and topics for discussion, and can reveal general areas of strengths and weaknesses in the students’ ability with the language, which you can return to in later lessons.

[Photo by eggman]

This activity is an ideal way for intermediate level students or higher to practise the second conditional in a fun environment. The form should already have been covered and be familiar to the students. This activity could be adapted to focus on particular areas of vocabulary, and is reasonably scalable.

For the activity, you will need one or more volunteers. Have these volunteers leave the room and go out of earshot, whilst the others decide on a situation to place this person in. This could be a positive situation, such as winning the lottery, getting a promotion at work or getting married, or it could be something negative, such as having something stolen, breaking a bone, finding out a partner has been cheating etc. Obviously these ideas can be tailored to the group.

Once the situation has been decided upon, have the volunteer(s) return. Their task is to find out in which situation they have been placed, using the second conditional. You could write some sentence openers on the board to help them, such as:

• If you were in this position, would you…
• If this happened to you, would you…
• What/Who/How/Where would you…

To make sure the activity takes some time, forbid the students from using direct questions such as “If you were in my situation, what would you do?” and instead try to find the answer using a more indirect route (“If this happened to you, would you tell your friends/call a doctor/be happy?” etc.)

You could do this exercise together as one class with multiple people being thrown into the situation to make sure no one is put under pressure in the hotseat, or in larger classes form smaller groups and allow each to come up with their own situations.

[Photo by chris17nz]

This little activity is adapted from the television quiz show Blockbusters, and has also been described elsewhere on the web. It’s a great way to get students to look at the written language critically, test their knowledge of recently covered structures, and encourage them to read over and correct their own mistakes.

The idea is very simple. Take a collection of sentences containing mistakes from a section of recent homework assignments. Concentrate on mistakes which have previously been covered in class, or focus on a specific area of language, such as tenses, spelling, punctuation, word order etc. The task gives you the opportunity to highlight common mistakes impersonally, and gives students the chance to look at the language critically, and develop their ability to correct themselves and each other.

• Produce a list of 25 sentences each featuring at least one mistake, and put these on a handout.
• Split the class into two groups and explain that they have a few minutes to look through the list and find the mistakes in each sentence.
• Whilst they are doing that, draw up the game board on the blackboard or OHP. Randomly assign the numbers to the hexes.
• Explain that one team is aiming to create a chain of corrected sentences from top to bottom, whilst the other team is attempting to do the same from left to right.
• Ask a person from the first team to pick a number. They should then read out the sentence correctly, pointing out/explaining the mistake(s) where necessary. Depending on the students’ level, you may give them more than one chance, otherwise pass the sentence over to the opposite team.
• The second team then gets to pick a number, and so on, until one team has created a chain of correct answers.
• After the game is over, go through the remaining sentences and resolve any issues that came up during the exercise.

TIP! I find it easiest to draw the horizontal lines of the hexagons first (i.e. six lines in five staggered columns), and then join them up afterwards.

Below you can find a sample handout prepared for a beginners’ class in Germany.

  Blockbusters Example A1 (.odt) (16.8 KiB, 3 hits)

The Internet is sadly filled with sites filled with promise; promises they all too often fail to live up to. In the realms of English language teaching, there is unfortunately a real wealth of sites out there, offering hints, tips, ideas and sundry to the would be teacher, but the diamonds in the rough are very difficult to uncover without a lot of time and effort spent.

As someone who deeply believes in the phrase “share and share alike,” this site is being set up for now as a purely personal avenue for publishing ideas, resources, texts, worksheets and lesson plans for the ESL classroom. Trying to find lesson plans and activities on the web is unfortunately all too much like trying to navigate a minefield. Very occasionally you hit gold, and find that site full of great ideas and excellent materials, but all too often you end up being asked to register just to click on a link, upload some of your own material in order to have the right to view others’, or sign up for a monthly subscription to gain access.

As a result, this site will stick to some basic principles: that everything here will be free to download, use, photocopy and redistribute; that access to files and pages will never require unnecessary registration; and that financial donations or material contributions will always be welcome, but by no means obligatory.

[Photo by shapeshift]