ESL Speaker Series: Paul Kei Matsuda (Oct 4, 2-3pm)

Technology: 12 mobile apps for grammar

Chris here again. Today we have a guest article on grammar apps brought to us via onlinecollegecourses.com. These are all great apps which focus on English grammar. English teachers should definitely peruse these and consider ways to incorporate app use into their lessons. These are also a worthwhile tool to share with your students.

12 mobile apps for grammar

Exercises at Grammar Bytes!

Here is a nice collection of grammar exercises for your English students.

http://chompchomp.com/exercises.htm

Japanese: Look for a roomate!

This is a good interviewing activity to do after learning basic verbs (get up, eat, go to school, play tennis, sleep, etc). Students will ask each other about their daily activities and find out who has a similar life style with them.

Directions:
1. Fill out their own life style first.
2. Interview three classmates and fill out.
3. Ask them who they chose and why.

The following link provides a handout to supplement the activity:


Look for a roommate!

Grammar Activities: Conjunctions

Hello everyone, Chris here again. Today I would like to share a few ideas and activities for helping students practice conjunctions. These activities work for both coordinating and subordinating conjunctions.

Group Activities: Never have I ever with 10 fingers

Hello everyone! Becky here. :)

We played 10 fingers in my class today to review the present perfect and had a BLAST!

Here is the way it works: Everyone writes 2 sentences (depending on the size of your class) that are true about things they have NOT done. Then, each person reads a sentence and if the rest of the people in the class have done this, they put one finger down. The person who gets all their fingers down first loses. The person who has fingers remaining the longest wins (if you get that far).

My sentences were true about me but aimed at getting some of my students out:

—No he estudiado comunicaciones. (I have not studied communication.)

—No he vivido en D.C. (I have not lived in D.C.)

—No he estudiado en India. (I have not studied in India.)

—No he vivido en una ciudad grande en EEUU. (I have not lived in a big city in the U.S.)

Enjoy!

Marketplace Speed Date Shopping

Hello from Danielle!

The activity I'm using in my inaugural post is designed to practice the subjunctive in Spanish adjectival clauses. These instructions might look complicated, but really, this is a fairly easy game with minimal preparation necessary.

Basically, the way the activity works is that half the students are designated as "vendors" and the other half as "customers." Customers create shopping lists of specific items and go searching for them in the market. The challenge is to use the subjunctive or the indicative in adjectival clauses when asking for the items on their lists depending on whether the customers know an item to be available or not.

I chose flowers as the commodity in my market, but you could use just about any object you might buy in a marketplace or shopping center: clothes, food, pets, artesanía... The only stipulation is that all members of the chosen category must describable with the same adjectives. Clothes, for example, might be divided by type: shirts, pants, skirts, and hats, and the corresponding adjectives that might apply to each item could include: colorful, big, small, fashionable, cheap, purple, striped, cotton, and so forth.

PREPARATION

I have used a PowerPoint slide to present the basics of the information outlined in this section. The table below indicates the variety of items (in this case flowers) available for sale or purchase. I have filled it out to indicate the choices a vendor might make.



Before the activity begins, vendors and customers must make the following preparations:

Vendors choose 5 of the possible varieties of flowers that they will have in stock, and ONE (indicated by the star in the table) "special." I give each vendor a half-sheet of scrap paper, which they can fold in half into a table-tent. On the side that faces the customers, they write the name of the flower that’s on sale (they can be creative with their tablero and advertising). On the side facing themselves, they write the names of all the flowers they have chosen (as a memory aid more than anything).

Customers make a shopping list of three types/colors of flowers that they want to put into a bouquet. They write their choices on another bit of scrap paper (keeping them honest and from changing their bouquet choices when and if they can’t immediately find the flowers they need).

PHYSICAL SET-UP

The speed-dating set up is really versatile and you can use it for any situation/conversation set up where you want to get students to talk one-on-one with a variety of their classmates. For this game, the set-up is modified as follows:

The vendors (in blue) are set up in a row (simulating flower kiosks/stalls in a market), and the customers (green) each sit facing one of the vendors (sort of like the set up for pirámide). If there is an uneven number of students in the class, there may end up being two customers to a vendor or two vendors to a customer. After a minute-ish of talking to the first vendor, (you can decide how much time is enough) stop the transactions and have all the customers get up and move on to the next vendor (the vendors stay put, the customers all move one desk to the right or left).

BUYING AND SELLING: GRAMMAR PRACTICE

The customers can see on the "tablero" of the vendor which flower is "a la venta". If that is one of the flowers s/he needs, the customer can ask for it by saying something like:

Necesito los claveles que SON azules.
INDICATIVE IN ADJECTIVAL CLAUSES REQUIRED (SUCH AN OBJECT IS KNOWN TO EXIST)
(A bit stilted sounding, perhaps, but it IS a grammar practice activity, so sometimes awkwardness is par for the course.)

If they are looking for a flower that is not mentioned on the tablero, they can request it with a sentence like:

Busco unas margaritas que SEAN rojas. ¿Las tiene?
SUBJUNCTIVE IN ADJECTIVAL CLAUSES REQUIRED (SUCH AN OBJECT IS NOT KNOWN TO EXIST)

I often model the sentences or put up an example sentence or phrase on the board that they can follow along with until they are comfortable making up their own (and hopefully they eventually will be).

Each customer can ask an individual vendor for as many of their desired flowers as they have time to request. They are limited only by the amount of time in each segment of the speed dating.

WINNING, ENDING THE GAME, AND REVERSING ROLES

After it seems that one or two (or however many, on your discretion) customers have collected their desired bouquets, you can declare the successful clients winners and call an end to the first round of the game. I usually base this off of whether or not there has been sufficient time for each customer to get practice making requests. If a student finishes after talking to only one or two vendors, I might give him or her an extra bonus flower to look for while the others have more time to practice and gather their bouquets.

At this point, the vendors get rid of their tableros and become customers, and the customers pick up a sheet of paper to make a tablero and take over a kiosk space. The students all prepare again, choosing flowers to sell or collect according to their new position.

Done!

Games: Verb Battleship Template

Hello all, Chris here.

Today I am adding the blank template for Verb Battleship. Check it out below. You can save the picture and print off as many copies as you need! For a description of how to use this game in your classes click here.

This game is for purely educational purposes and no infringement of any kind is intended of Milton Bradley's rights to Battleship.

German: Verb Battleship

Hello all, Chris here. Today I would like to share a fun activity I created back in 2003 to help my students with conjugation. Almost everyone has heard of and/or played the strategy game of Battleship. Originally, Battleship was actually a pen and paper guessing game. I decided to take that approach when I adapted it for verb conjugation. The pronouns go across the top of the grid while either the teacher or the class chooses a set of nine verbs which will be used. The game is flexible in that you can target specific groups of verbs, such as separable prefix verbs in German, irregular verbs, or even different tenses, depending on where the current focus in your courses.

Each student receives a copy of this sheet (to save time) or you can draw this example on the board and have students copy it on their own if time is not an issue. As it would be impractical to have your students use the little plastic ships and hit markers of the board game, students will mark the location of their ships with Xs as is indicated at the bottom of the template. Each X represents one square on the grid. The number indicates how many of each ship a student has. Students should place their ships in the bottom grid and ships may only be placed either vertically or horizontally. Students will guess where their opponent's ships are in the upper grid.

In order to make a guess a student must pick a verb and then conjugate it by choosing one of the pronouns. If the guess is correctly conjugate the opposing student will either say hit (Treffer! in German) or miss (Daneben!) or sunk (Versunken!). If the guess is incorrect the opposing student should provide the correct answer and may then take their turn. Students should alternate after each guess. The teacher should circulate among the students to make sure students are only providing information for correct conjugations and to help students with any questions that may arise. Students should keep track of their guesses as well as their opponent's guesses in some reliable manner (generally just drawing a small circle works).

As an added challenge teachers could require students to form an entire sentence with the conjugate verb.

The game can be a bit time consuming the first few times you use it in class. It definitely saves time to print of the sheets for the students beforehand. The game will also easily work for most other languages and I will add a blank template for others to use as well. Feel free to download the picture and print it off for your own use.

This game is for purely educational purposes and no infringement of any kind is intended of Milton Bradley's rights to Battleship.

German: Grammar Puzzle

Hello all, Chris here,

today I have a short activity that I like to give students sometimes. This can be used alone or as a question on a quiz or test. Students are given a list of various grammatical topics which lists items such as Modal Verbs, Passive Voice, Future Tense, etc. The students will be asked to write a sentence using a certain number of these categories. This is just to see if they can combine the various features they learn into a single sentence and can be quite challenging depending on which categories they choose and how many you assign. Below is a quick example I would use in a German course:

Schreiben Sie einen Satz, der 5 der folgenden grammatischen Strukturen verwendet:



Modal verb, Dative verb, Subjunctive mood, Passive voice, Relative clause


Present tense, Coordinating conjunction, Present perfect tense, Infinitive clause, Subordinating conjunction

Questions and comments welcome!