Here’s a delightfully simple mingling activity. It fosters students interaction, language exchange, vocabulary development and story writing.
ESL Writing Activities
Overview
Purpose: ease new class jitters, writing warmer, ice breaker, get students into a writing mindset, review and learn vocabulary, compose a short story
Level: high beginner +
Time: 20-50 minutes
Instructions
Step 1
Ask students to get out a piece of paper. Draw a line down the centre to create two columns. From top to bottom on the left side, write the letters A to M. In the second column, write the letters N to Z also from top to bottom.
Step 2 Explain Task
Put students in pairs. Each pair brainstorms ideas and writes one word for each letter. Each word must somehow be related to a topic. Students work collaboratively in pairs, but each person must have his/her own paper and word list.
There is a 2 minute time limit.
Choose a broad topic related to student interests, like food, school or hobbies.
Students work feverishly to compile a list. In most cases, the lists will not be finished. That’s good.
Step 3 Mingle
Allow 5 to 10 minutes for this step.
Now students meet other classmates. They great each other, do small talk introduction stuff and ask for one missing word suggestion for a given letter.
Each student gets one word from a new partner then moves on to another person. Sometimes, a student might need to explain and spell a word if it is not known by the partner.
After finishing the list of 26 words, each student will likely have met all the other students at least one time. Once the list has been completed, students return to their seats.
Step 4 Quick Review
Ask a few students to name a word they learned during the exercise.
Step 5 Compose
Now students have a long list of words. What can we do with that? Brainstorm and then write a story.
First, ask students to skim the list and look for groups. Probably, most of the words will be nouns, verbs and adjectives. If students are unfamiliar with the eight parts of speech, you might want to do a quick lesson with this activity, or just jump to the parts of speech worksheet.
Second, brainstorm story ideas by looking at the word list and mentally asking the key questions – who, what, where, when, why and of course how.
Third, write a creative story, about 2 to 4 paragraphs. The story should use all (or most) of the 26 words on the list.
Step 6 Writing Tips to Get Started
If students aren’t sure how to start writing a creative story, provide a few suggestions.
- choose a story idea that you like
- include a character who wants something
- use sensory words to create good descriptions of things, people and places
- it’s the first draft – put down the eraser and don’t use a dictionary (too much)
- it’s a story, so there should be a beginning, middle and end
- enjoy the process of creating something
Acknowledgement
Part of this activity is based on an ice breaker from the Florida State University English Department.
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