Disappearing Sentence (II)
This is an add-on from Steve O’s blogpost about an activity for his classes preparing for the FCE Part 2. I do a similar activity with younger learners to get them used to using different structures which can sometimes cause problems.
Write some sentences on the board and then ask students to read them out. Once they’ve read them out, rub off a word from each and ask students to read the sentences again, filling in the gaps. You can continue doing this and taking away more words, each time replacing the word with a dash so they know how many words are missing.
These are some of the sentences I usually use:
I’m 8 years old.
I’ve got two sisters.
I like playing football.
I can swim.
My eyes are blue.
My hair is brown.
You can also do this activity to introduce structures before asking students to do a piece of writing. I put the following sentences on the board last week during our topic of countries around the world:
China is a very big country.
It’s hot in summer.
It snows in the mountains.
There are lots of forests and rivers.
Rice is from China.
Pandas are from China
The Chinese flag is red and yellow.
It’s been a great week of disappearing wordsssss.
And an abundance of esses!
This sounds like a great activity for learners with very low language levels. I like the idea, but I don’t understand exactly how it works (as far as the purpose, etc.) Can you explain a little what it does? Thank you!
It helps learners focus on the grammar and structure without really realising it. For example, the equivalent in Spanish of I’m ten years old uses the verb “have got”, so by writing up the sentence and taking away the ´m, it encourages students to remember the correct structure as they have to correctly complete the gap – I usually do this activity for points!
I see…I think I will use this for my beginning-level adult learners tomorrow. They “hate grammar,” but unfortunately, they really need it!