Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Qinella]

There has been some discussion lately of working with English newbies, so I thought I would start a thread to discuss some activities. I'll write up what I currently do, or have done in the past, and hopefully someone will find it helpful. Feel free to add your own stuff if you'd like.

These activities assume the students can read at a basic level. Also, these probably work best in smaller classroom environments (i.e. hagwons).

1. Print up about five lines of text that is at their level. Make the letters big. Give one to each kid. Practice reading the first line together a few times until they get it. Then, see how quickly they can read it five times with no mistakes. Based on that, give them a time limit, and they can take turns reading alone to see if they can beat the time. Get the other kids to count the mistakes, and add one second to the total time for each mistake. If you have a student who is worse than all the others, change it so that instead of showing their total time, you just give them a (generous) time limit, and a yes or no answer as to whether or not they beat it.

2. Similar to above, just choose a paragraph from the text they have. Get them to read it at a normal speed, and have the other students count the mistakes. Talk about the mistakes you heard, and what the students counting mistakes misheard. (The whole thing about counting mistakes engages all the students, and prevents boredom.)

3. Your turn to read. Read somewhat slowly, and make sure that you mispronounce a few words. Try to make the mispronunciations things your students may do (but don't make it seem like you are picking on them). For example, funny becomes punny, the becoems da/duh, and so on.

4. When you are going over new vocabulary words, just mouth the words, so they have to read your lips. This one is fun, but I'm not sure how helpful it is. Kids love it, though.

5. Word description. Print out about 30 or so basic words they know. Take one and describe it. The students have to guess. Then let the students take turns at it. When they get better at it, you can give them a time limit, like 2 minutes, to see how many they can get their peers to guess.

6. Choose a passage from their text, and you read it aloud at a very fast speed. Not TOO fast, unless they are really keen at listening, but fast enough that it's a challenge. Stop randomly and they have to tell you the next word.

7. Pass the buck dictation. Do some dictation with words and grammar they are familiar with. After one sentence, they pass their paper to the person next to them. Then, they underline, but not fix, mistakes they see. Dictate another sentence, and pass again. This time, they should fix the errors that the person who passed them the paper underlined. And then have them underline the errors in the sentence that was just dictated.

8. Select a reading passage the students have never seen. Write some words from it on the board (one word for each student). Let them pick a word. Then, everyone stands up. You read the passage, and when they hear their word, they have to sit. You can alter the game so that if they hear the word again, they have to stand up again. Whoever is left standing loses, or whoever sat first wins.. however you want to do it.

9. Where am I? Good way to review places. Describe where you are. What do you see, what do you do, who is there, etc. They guess the place. Then, of course, it's their turn after you demonstrate.

I'll try to write some more later if I have time.

Bwt, I did not come up with all these on my own. Number 8 is from Jeremy Harmer, and some of the others I found from scouring the Internet, or my director showed me.

Q.

[Starr31]

This is an Activity I recently turned in as part of my TESOL course and it got a good reaction.

I don't know what age group you are dealing with but take a seemingly easy fairy tale like the three pigs for instance. Tell the story to the class. then..
Have the kids make hand puppets.
then...
Tell the story again but this time, have a few students act out the first scene, as you are reading the story aloud. a second group of students for the next scene etc...

This is just an idea, you can add or change as you see fit.

Hope that helps.