Written Role Play

Purpose: To improve writing fluency and to practice language specific to the chosen role play situation. An interesting problem can get students writing without being too concerned about making mistakes.

Preparation Time: The time it takes to choose a scenario for the role play.

Materials: Paper and pens

Preparation: Choose a role play situation in which there is a problem to discuss. For example: Two roommates have different preferences for cleanliness with one that is quite messy and the other who likes things to be neat, or an employee is stuck in traffic and late for a meeting and a manager that has been waiting for twenty minutes.

Procedure:

1. Describe the role play situation from the point of view of one person in the role play. For example: You have a very messy roommate. You prefer to keep your house clean, but your roommate hasn’t cleaned up for weeks. You notice a strange smell when you walk into the house and decide that it is time to talk to your roommate about the problem.
2. Students get out pens and paper and write their names on their papers. Then they start writing what the person in the role play would say. Instruct students to write legibly so that someone else can read their writing.

3. After a few minutes ask students to finish writing their last sentence and then pass their papers to the right. Give students a minute or two to read.

4. Now all the students write the other role in the role play. They write whatever they want to in response to the original complaint. After a few minutes, students pass their papers back to the original writers who then get to write another response.

5. Continue trading papers and writing as long as there is interest.

Possible Follow up Activities: Students can read their dialogs out loud for other students to hear, they can edit their dialogs and then share them, or they can do the role play again as a conversation activity.

Variation: In a one-to-one tutoring situation, the teacher can write and then trade papers with the student.

Texting to Teach Reading and Writing

Purpose: To incorporate text messaging into reading and writing instruction for ESL or general literacy/ABE learners.

Tips for using texting with students:

· Ask students to read a text and then summarize it for you in one to three text messages. Compile the summaries, if working with a group, and ask the students to choose the best summary.

· Send out a word of the day. If you are studying workplace skills, send out words related to those lessons. Ask student s to respond by sending you a definition of the word. For more information on how to do this, visit http://www.ehow.com/how_4995209_use-text-messaging-teach-esl.html

· Share grammar tips. The article above will tell you how to do this. Ask students to write back incorporating the grammar in context.

· Ask students to text you their opinions related to a discussion or an article covered in a lesson recently, or ask them to text you and tell you something that they learned in a recent lesson.

· Create a glossary to help “translate” text message abbreviations and acronyms. Sites such as Sharpened Glossary (www.sharpened.net/glossary/acronyms.php) allow users to type in an acronym and find out what it means. Try sending out a message with various abbreviations or acronyms and encourage students to use a site like Sharpened Glossary to decode the meaning.

· Share announcements. If class is canceled due to a blizzard, students may be more likely to respond to a text message than an e-mail or phone call.

Note: Be aware that keyboards can be very different and someone with a normal keypad (non-blackberry or qwerty) will be much slower than someone with a specialized keyboard.

Making a Bar Graph with Post-It Notes

Purpose: To help students create and interpret a simple bar graph

Preparation Time: none

Materials: white board or flip chart, markers, post-it notes, pens or pencils

Preparation: Choose a question related to the unit or theme you are working on. This will be the basis of a survey that the students will conduct in class.

For a housing unit, the question might be:
Do you live in an apartment, duplex, townhouse, mobile home, or house?

For a transportation unit, ask:
Do you come to school by bus, by car, by bike, on foot, or by train?

Procedure:

I do it:

1) Write columns across the top of the whiteboard. For example, make 5 columns, one each for apartment, duplex, townhouse, mobile home, and house.

2) Model the activity by asking 2-3 students the question regarding housing. As each student answers, write the response on a post-it note and place it in the correct column.

We do it:

1) Ask a student to take your place and ask the question of several more students.

2) Ask another student to write the responses on post-it notes.

3) Ask the group in which column you should place the post-it note.

You do it:

1) Ask the students to find a partner, preferably someone who speaks a different first language.

2) Students take turns asking each other the question and recording the partner’s response on a post-it.

3) Each pair then goes to the whiteboard and places the post-its in the correct columns.

Note: The teacher/tutor may need to assist learners to make sure columns are clearly separated, so that the final result looks like a bar graph.

Wrap-Up:

1) Ask questions about the bar graph to practice “reading” the information. How many people live in apartments? Do more people live in apartments or houses?

2) Ask students to write sentences about the information on the bar graph.

3) Practice summarizing the information on the graph. For example: Four people live in houses, one lives in a townhouse, and six live in apartments.

Using the Board to Practice Capitalization

Select a series of phrases or sentences that contain a number of different examples of capitalization.

Examples: Paris, France
the month of June
on Park Avenue
the United Nations
Rainbow Foods
Pierre’s wife, Marie
Rosita is from Colombia.
We went to Seattle, Washington, in July.
Why was Henry absent on Thursday?
Have you read the novel Pride and Prejudice?
May I help you?
George and Carla were married in December.
Have you been to the Mall of America in Bloomington?
Laurence was born in France but lives in Minnesota and speaks French and Italian.
Is the new Target store located on Cedar Avenue or Cedar Street?

1) Write the list of phrases and sentences on the board.
2) Ask students to find examples within the phrases in which similar words are capitalized and to formulate rules to cover those situations.
3) If students are literate in a first language that uses the Roman alphabet, ask them to compare capitalization rules in the two languages and note the differences.
4) The next day, write the same phrases and sentences on the board, but without capitalizations. Have students go to the board and make corrections.

Using Model Texts

Purpose: To help learners better understand features and language of a writing task they will be attempting

Some activities using model texts

• Label the different parts of the model. For example, if you are working with business letters, learners would label the addresses of the sender and receiver, the date, the greeting, the closing, the signature, the name typed out and any abbreviations used at the bottom.
• Match standard phrases used in the letter to their meanings, which you have written below the model text. An example of a standard phrase is “Please do not hesitate to contact me …”, for which you might write, “It is ok to write or phone the person who sent the letter.”
• Compare a successful version of that writing task to an unsuccessful version. For example, you might choose a good business letter and compare it to one that is too informal or poorly organized.
• Fill-in-the-blanks
• Learners put paragraphs or sentences from the text in the correct order.
• Learners discuss the purpose of paragraphs or sentences.
• Learners highlight sentences or paragraphs with different colors to denote their function.
• Learners copy the model (shorter text) into their notebooks, substituting their personal information for the given information in the text.