This is an activity I did with my pre-intermediate learners today, to give them extra opportunity to use the verb patterns that we had looked at in their previous lesson, in a more personalised way. It doesn’t require much preparation, as it mostly draws on learner-generated content – as well as their natural curiosity! What it does require is lots of use of the verb patterns in question, including questions and, potentially, third-person structures.
+- 40 minutes (could have run for longer but 40 minutes was sufficient)
One teacher-made model:
One learner handout:
Here is the power point that I made with both (so that the teacher one can be adapted and projected/printed, while the learner one can be printed…)
Verb patterns – specifically:
- I want to – infinitive
- I’d love to – infinitive
- I enjoy – verb-ing
- I’m fed up with – verb-ing
- I hope to – infinitive
- I’m thinking of – verb-ing
- I’m looking forward to -verb-ing.
[although adaptable to whichever verb patterns you’ve been looking at which can be personalised…]
- Elicit the target verb patterns (that you have looked at in the previous lesson) and board them (if using projection, then in an area of the the board that is not used by the projector screen!) in categories according to pattern.
- Either project, or hand out printouts of, your teacher model.
- Put the learners in pairs and get them to look at the model.
- Tell them these are your answers to the sentence stems given by the verb patterns.
- Get them to ask you questions in order to guess which stem/pattern each answer/thought cloud corresponds with. (The answers are bare infinitives so there are no linguistic clues and learners have to put the answers into the correct form according to the verb pattern).
- Encourage them to find out more about the answer once they have guessed correctly:
Learners: Do you enjoy speaking Italian?
Teacher: Yes but there’s something I enjoy more! Guess again!
Learners: Do you enjoy going horse-riding?
Teacher: Yes, I do! Very much!
Learners: Do you do it here? Where do you go? etc
- Once they have finished guessing and quizzing you, hand out the blank student handout for learners to complete with their own ideas.
- Put them in pairs (get them to work with a new partner)
- Ask them to take turns asking questions (and finding out more about their partner’s thought clouds once they have guessed correctly) until they have correctly guessed all of the clouds.
- Monitor and collect feedback for a delayed feedback slot.
- Regroup the learners so that each new group consists of either person A or person B of each of the AB pairs from the previous activity.
- Ask learners to tell their new group what they’ve learnt about their partner, using the verb patterns.
(I did this with one of my pre-int classes today – the one that had already had progress test feedback because they’d done their tests promptly, and therefore didn’t need class time allocating to that today – following the delayed feedback slot from part one of the activity, and it gave them a chance to act on the feedback I’d given.)