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1Minimal resources: DIY grammar

Author: Lindsay Clandfield and Adrian Tennant


Level: starter/beginner, advanced, elementary, pre-intermediate, intermediate, upper-intermediate Type:
teaching notes
Tips and ideas for teaching grammar
Each of the following ideas can be used in class with minimal or no preparation. They are ideal activities
to review or extend grammar structures and require no special materials. Many of the ideas can be used
with different grammar points, suggestions for the grammar follow each activity.

Personalized gap fill


Write six to eight sentences on the board which contain the target structure with gaps for the
students to fill in. Write the words they must use at the top of the board.
Use students names and details about them in your sentences.
Students copy down the sentences, fill in the gaps with the words and then decide if they are true
or false.
e.g. Susanas parents ______ in Madrid.
GOOD FOR: tenses, adjectives or adverbs, comparatives, modal verbs

Error correction
Similar to 1 above, but write sentences with incorrect grammar. Again, use your students names,
or perhaps your own.
Ss must first correct the grammar, and then make the sentences true if the facts are incorrect.
GOOD FOR: tenses, adjectives or adverbs, articles, comparatives, modal verbs.

Find the other half


Tell students they need two small pieces of paper.
Ask students to write a two line dialogue using the target structure.
They can take something from the coursebook if they like, or invent it themselves.
They must write one part of the dialogue on one bit of paper and the other part of the dialogue
on the other.
Circulate and check a few to make sure that they are correct.
Collect all the papers and redistribute them.
Ss must find the other half of their dialogue. You can do this with longer sentences too.
GOOD FOR: almost any grammar (for dialogues, this in fact is more about coherence), longer
structures like conditionals for sentences.
What we did today

Ask students to work in groups of three. They must write a summary of the grammar that they have
learnt for a student who is absent. They can include examples from the book or the teacher, or their
own. If the students are a very low level, they could do this in their own language.
GOOD FOR: any grammar point in fact anything at all that arose in the particular class!

Quiz
Write a few general knowledge questions including the grammar. You could make all the
questions based on the same theme (history, music etc) or a mixture.
Divide the class into teams and give them the quiz, either on a piece of paper or written on the
board. Students then make similar quizzes for each other.
GOOD FOR: passive voice, comparative and superlative, past tense, there is/are, question forms

Find someone who...


Divide the class into As and Bs. Ask all the Bs to write down a true sentence about themselves
using the target grammar (you could provide a sentence stem for them to complete see
example below).
Collect all of these. Mix them up and distribute them to the As. Review how to make a question
using the grammar.
Tell the As they must find the B who wrote the sentence and sit down next to them. This is
particularly good for large classes with screwed down furniture.
Example:
B writes: After class I am going to go to the cinema. A goes around the class asking: What are you
going to do after class?
GOOD FOR: question forms, different tenses

Answers answers
Send a student out of the room. Write a question on the board using the target grammar. Ask
remaining students to think of an answer to the question.
Example: Teacher writes on the board: What did you do last night? Possible answers: I watched
TV. I went to the disco. I stayed at home. I did nothing.
Rub the question off the board. Tell the student to come back into the room. He or she must call
on a minimum of five other students in the class to give their answers.
He or she then guesses the question. If the question is correct, the student can sit down and
another student leaves the room. If the question is incorrect, the student must ask five other
people for their answers before trying again.
GOOD FOR: question forms, past and present simple, present perfect, present and past continuous

DIY jumbled sentence


Ask students to choose a nice long sentence from one of their grammar exercises in the
coursebook or workbook.
Tell them to take a piece of paper and rip it up into as many pieces as there are words in the
sentence.
They then write one word on each piece of paper. Tell them to mix up the pieces of paper on
their desk.
They then move over one place so that they are sitting in another students chair in front of a
new jumbled sentence.
Tell them they have a time limit (30 seconds or 1 minute) to put the pieces of paper in the correct
order and make the sentence.
When they finish, they can check with the student who made the sentence if they are correct.
Variation: To make it extra difficult, ask each student when making the sentence to add another
piece of paper with an extra word that doesnt fit into the sentence. The other student has to
reorder the sentence and spot the 'intruder' word.
GOOD FOR: structures with several elements (e.g. going to, perfect continuous tenses, conditionals),
questions and negatives, adjective and adverb placement in sentences.

Its your turn


Choose three students (volunteers) to sit at the front of the class. The rest of the students think
of questions to ask the three (these can be based on the theme of the lesson).
One student asks a question to the three volunteers. The first volunteer starts the answer to the
question by saying on word. Then the second volunteer adds the next word, the third the next
and then back to the first volunteer to add the next word in the sentence/answer.
This continues until they finish the sentence. The teacher (or another student) can record the
answer to look at later.
Note: It is important that the volunteers only say one word per turn. At low levels they may wish
to help each other, at higher levels the fun is when you make the next volunteer add more (i.e. by
using link words like and, but, however etc).
GOOD FOR: word order, linking devices, verb agreements.

All the words


Ask the students to write down three English words (these can be their favourite words, words
they recently learnt, words they think are useful, words from todays lesson etc).
Now ask the students to put their pens down and to stand up. They should then walk around the
room (if this is not possible ask them to work in small seated groups) and exchange their
words.
They must not say any other words than their three + the ones they hear from other students (i.e.
The first person they speak to tells them three words, they now have six. The second person
tells them six they now have12 etc).
After a few minutes ask the students to sit down and write down all the words they have
collected.
On the board add a few grammatical words such as and, the, a, he, she, have, has, do, does,
am, are, is, etc. Tell the students they must now write as many sentences as they can but only
using the words they have written down + the words on the board.
GOOD FOR: word order and sentence structure. Can be adapted to be good for any area f grammar by
focussing the choice of words in the initial stage.

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