ESL Resources

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]

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)