Level: All
Materials: A set of blue, black, green and red coloured-pens / pencils for each pair / for each group of four students (you may use different colours instead; but whichever four colours you use, make sure you give the same four colours to students)
Preparation: Make copies of the reading text for all students
Interaction Patterns: Individual work, group work
Time: 50 minutes
Procedure:
- Hand out the reading text.
- Students silently read the text to underline the main idea (s) using the BLUE pen.
- Next, students highlight the supporting ideas with the BLACK pen.
- Then, using the GREEN pen, they mark the areas they found interesting or surprising.
- Finally, with the RED pen, students circle the unknown words or phrases / sentences they have found confusing.
- After colour coding the text (their texts will look like the one below), students work in groups of four.
- They compare their texts with those of the other students.
o They check if they all have underlined the same main idea (s).
o They compare the supporting ideas they have identified.
o They discuss which idea (s) they have found interesting and why.
o Students compare the parts in red: they ask each other the meaning of the unknown words they have underlined.
- Closely monitor the groups and visit each one to listen to their discussion and provide help when necessary.
Variation:
• After reading the text on their own, students might decide on the parts to be underlined together in groups. They may then post their colour coded reading text on the walls of the classroom and compare their text with the other groups’. They may ask questions to the other groups or discuss their opinions.
• If you cannot obtain an adequate number of coloured pens for your students, you may ask students to share the same pens. They may first read and select the parts they plan to highlight with a different coloured pen. Then, they may share the pens with others.
Personal Comment:
- Colour coding a text aids especially visual learners’ comprehension of a text. It helps them to practice identifying main and supporting ideas, reflecting on these ideas and dealing with unknown words in a cooperative task, which makes it easier for them to deal with challenging texts.
- Colour coding makes monitoring and checking students’ work teacher-friendly.
For more reading activities, you may read the chapter on Reading Activities in my activity book, The Activist.
The following is an activity from my activity book, The Activist, again (in the future, I will be sharing with you some activities other than the ones in my book). This game-like activity aims to raise students' awareness of the mistakes they commonly make in writing. I have benefited a lot from this activity whenever I conducted it in my classes. I hope you'll enjoy it...
Level: Pre-intermediate and above
Materials Needed: None
Preparation:
a. Find two sample student paragraphs, which have both strong and weak points.Make sure these points are relevant to your students’ writing; for example, the mistakes in these paragraphs must be similar to those your students keep on making.
b. Give feedback on these paragraphs with numbers instead of words; each number will signify a different point (see the sample paragraph in the attached worksheet below).
c. Photocopy these paragraphs for each group before class.
Interaction Patterns: Group work, whole-class activity, individual work
Time: 50 minutes
Procedure:
- Students work in groups of four.
- Give each group a copy of the paragraphs.
- Students read the paragraphs and try to figure out what each number signifies in terms of feedback.
- After the groups decipher the coded feedback, elicit what each number signifies from the groups.
- Ask students to select one of the paragraphs and improve it in the light of the numbered feedback.
Variation:
• For weaker students, you may give the list in the answer key in a jumbled order and ask students to match the answers with the numbers.
Personal Comment:
- Numbered feedback was something I was introduced to when I first started teaching at Bilkent University, School of English Language. I then adapted this useful feedback style into such a classroom activity and noticed that students enjoy decoding such feedback and learn a lot from giving feedback to these sample student paragraphs.
Interested in a vocabulary activity to help students improve their use of collocations?
Level: All
Materials Needed: Paper
Preparation: Prepare 28 domino cards for each group (see sample domino cards template below). Write a part of the collocation on one card and the other half on another so that students form meaningful and accurate collocations when they put the domino cards together.
Interaction Patterns: Group work
Time: 30 min.s
Procedure:
- Students work in groups of four.
- Give a set of domino cards to each group. Each student draws four domino cards.
- The student with the domino card on which “START” is written starts the activity by laying that card on the table.
- The student who has the domino card which completes the word combination on the table puts it next to that domino card.
- Students take turns laying their dominoes when they find the correct matches.
- The student who gets rid of all the dominoes first wins the game.
Variation:
• You may give the instructions of the activity in written form to make it more understandable.
• Students may work in pairs.
• You may design various domino cards. If you want, you may have word-definition combinations on the dominoes. Or, you may write word-word combinations on the domino cards, which will be a nice practice activity for collocations.
• You may want to conduct this as an activity rather than a game. If done as an activity, there will be no winners or losers, which will enable students to work on all the dominoes and thus all the vocabulary items.
• You may give students domino templates and they may prepare their own dominoes in groups. Then, they may swap the sets of domino cards they prepare with the other groups and play the game.
Personal Comment: This is a fun activity designed to attract students’ attention to word combinations, while they are learning new words.
To find more vocabulary activities, you may refer to my activity book, The Activist.
Materials: A set of blue, black, green and red coloured-pens / pencils for each pair / for each group of four students (you may use different colours instead; but whichever four colours you use, make sure you give the same four colours to students)
