Freelance English teacher, Mike Astbury, enjoys making effective teaching materials with a focus on learners’ needs. In this article, he demonstrates a multiple-stage activity to help students become familiar with the language structure of future time clauses.
This is a simple game that’s adaptable for any language point. It encourages students to be creative while ensuring they have the support they need. In the example we’re looking at future time clauses with a strong intermediate (B1+) class.
Preparation
First you need to find some funny pictures; either find them online, cut out adverts from magazines or ask your students to bring some to the lesson. You need at least enough for one picture for every two students in your class. Number the pictures and make sure that the numbers are clearly visible.
You’ll also need lots of small pieces of paper that are big enough for a single sentence. I use these in quite a few of my games so I always have some prepared. Taking some scrap paper from the staff room I use the guillotine to quickly cut dozens at a time (shown below). You should have at least ten for each pair, but I always have more than enough in case students write more than I expected.
How to play
Write some sentences on the board in your target language with blanks to fill in and ask students to discuss possible answers in pairs.
- I usually _______ when I get home from work/school.
- I’m going to _______ as soon as the lesson is finished.
- I won’t be able to _______ until next week.
- I _______ whenever I have to take an exam.
- I’ll _______ before I go to bed tonight.
Monitor and assist, then students share their sentences in open feedback. This stage is useful to spot any gaps in knowledge before you start the game. Next, show a picture on the board and ask students to work in pairs and think of a funny sentence to add as a caption. Get some ideas from students and have some prepared answers (hopefully teachers in your staffroom can help you out if you can’t think of any yourself). Tell students that in the game they’ll be voting on whose captions are the funniest.
Spread the pictures out on a desk and ask students, working in pairs, to choose a picture. Hand out the small pieces of paper you cut up before the lesson. Write eight to ten prompts on the board that cover your target language. How much support you give students here depends on the level of the class and their familiarity with the language. For revising future time clauses I might only write short prompts: as soon as, until, while, before, after.
However, if it’s relatively new I would give larger chunks:
- I’ll _______ as soon as I _______.
- I’m not going to _______ until he/she _______.
- He/She won’t _______ before he/she _______.
Students work in pairs writing funny sentences for their picture, making sure that they put the number of the picture at the start of their sentence. After a few minutes they pass their picture to the next pair so that the pictures move around the room clockwise.
They keep working until the pictures have made their way around the room or every group has written eight or more sentences. Ask students to stand up with their sentences, leaving the pictures on their desks. They now need to walk around the room placing the sentences next to the pictures they were written for (this is why the number labels are important).
Next, students take their notebooks and walk around the room talking about which sentences are the funniest, cleverest and silliest, while writing down their favourite sentence for each picture. When they’re done, collect the pictures and sentences. Students sit in their pairs, close their workbooks, and try to remember as many sentences from the game as they can. Then, they open their notebooks and compare the sentences that they chose for each picture.
Finally, students decide in their pairs which sentence was the funniest and write it on the board (obviously students can’t pick their own sentence). The pair with the most sentences on the board wins.
This game is excellent fun and really brings out the best in students as they try to amuse and impress their classmates. Each stage helps students become more familiar with the language structure and as well as producing their own sentences, students read and recall the sentences produced by every student in the class. The sentences you collected on the small pieces of paper can feed into your error correction next lesson. You can also quickly see which of the prompts students avoided; if no one in your class used ‘unless’ it’s a clear indication they’re not very confident with its use.
See Mike’s recent Phrasal Verbs activity idea or find more teaching games.