Illustrated Story & Questions

Age: Any

Level: Beginner-Low Intermediate; Intermediate-Advanced

Time: 15+ minutes

Language Skills: Listening with frequent, brief Q&A

Participation: Whole Class

Materials: Story with pictures

Procedures:

Preparation: 1. Find a story with illustrations and limited amount of text.

2. Examine the pictures for key and extra vocabulary. I also like to see what verbs (especially action verbs) I can use --- and verb tenses that fit the student-level.

You can also often come up with other useful grammatical points to highlight - such as prepositions of location.

In Class:

1. Read the story out loud. Highlight key words and phrases.

2. As you read, be sure to repeat and rephrase it.

3. Periodically ask comprehension questions and other questions that might generate verbal output from the students. (This is a good time to make the material more authentic by asking students to connect the story/images to their own lives.)

4. Highlight key words, phrases, and 1 or 2 grammatical points you want to emphasize:

For example, you can write a key sentence on the board and have students change the verb tenses. This is easy for the present, present progressive, simple past, simple future, and past progressive.

It is also not difficult to have intermediate and advanced students practice the more difficult verb tenses (past perfect and so on) by having them add elements to the story - by asking leading questions: For example, "Why was the boy tired here?......Because......He had played basketball all day. Or, He had been playing basket ball all day.

5. (Optional) When finished going over the story in detail as above, you can have individual students or the class retell the story to you.

Assessment: Informal observation; Comprehension test; Vocabulary & grammar test.

 

(This activity comes from the book: Using Folktales by Eric K. Taylor which is part of the useful Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers)