A panoply of teaching resources.
Rob Whyte ESL speaking and writing class lessons, activities and worksheets for English students who want to learn and improve their English communication skills.
Need a lesson to build up your vocabulary quickly? Try this video lesson.
In English, there are groups of words that have a natural partner. We use these groups of words in literal situations.
We also use these words as idioms. In linguistics, I think these kinds of natural groupings of words are called collocations. Here is an example: salt and pepper.
In previous classes, students finished several writing exercises about a person’s daily life experience and neighbourhoods. These writing exercises use real life experience to help shape and guide the student’s descriptive writing.
This assignment asks students to blend their daily life experience with a creative surprise.
Watch the video called Tomorrow (GPS). It’s a story about a man and woman. Their lives follow a n0rmal routine. Then one day, there is a surprise.
Use the ideas from this video to help to think about how a surprise might change your life. Write a short story, maybe two paragraphs, that describes a normal daily life and a big change.
Expansion: Write a one paragraph summary of this story.
Learning how to organize a paragraph is a difficult skill to learn for ESL students. This PowerPoint presentation provides a simple but clear picture of how to write an eight sentence paragraph.
This writing activity is also a short grammar lesson in how to use determiners like some and any in questions and sentences.
This presentation shows students the basic structure of a paragraph. The topic of this lesson is snack food.
Download the presentation here: paragraph-writing-ppt.
In today’s class, ESL students will review the answers for the Writing mid-term exam which we completed near the end of April.
Most students did quite well. Generally, the class continued to show uncertainty about:
Don’t be discouraged. Learning how to write is a long-term process. Keep working at it.
Download the mid-term exam worksheet here: PUFS-writing-exam.