Good afternoon from a sweltering London (words that don’t often appear together). As some of you may have seen there is a lesson written months ago on Inversion that feature in quotes. link below for those who haven’t seen it.
So it will come as no shock that we are going to return to some quotes. I love them as they are little nuggets of text, great for prediction activities, great for grammar, and often chock full of interesting lexis. Frankly, what is not to love.
This time rather than focusing on quotes for a particular grammar point, we are going to look at a collection of quotes and take what we can from them. All sitting comfortably, then I will begin.
Obviously, you can use whichever quotes you want and use the same activities i have just picked out 4 that i felt i could make a lesson from and ones which might engage my students.
The ideas below are a sort of pick and mix of different activities, select the ones that you think would work with your students, the worksheet has some of these activities for the quotes i selected. But really they should all transfer across.
Level: Int +
1. Word Jumble – broken sentences need fixing (see worksheet)
2. Independent research – prediction and a reason for reading. Give the students the quotes and ask them to predict what type of film they came from, get them to chat in groups and explain why they think that and then ask them to try to find out which film they did come from using smart phones or computers. (I am sure that your students will have no problems doing this, but if they are remind them of quote marks.) When they have found which film they come from ask them to find a summary and does the summary match their prediction?
Obviously, at this point it would be good to get the students to think about what they mean.
3. Grammar hunt – This is pretty easy as it is aimed at Ints, the conditional though may need some scaffolding, such as try to find a phrase that could be replaced by ‘if’.
4. rewriting – The most obvious thing to do with all quotes is to turn them to reported speech. When I do this I prefer to give them a choice of reporting verbs so that they are reporting the meaning a little and not just relying on said/told. I always find that students are ok with the backshift, it is the pronouns they tend to forget, so maybe remind them of that. To raise the level of challenge I have put in extra tests like linkers.
5. Follow up – Encourage the students to watch one of the films. Or you could watch one, or clips of one in class together – obviously giving the opportunity for work on vocab and pronunciation
Materials: Quotes – the sequel