CATESOL Roundup, Part 2

Using Students' Life Stories

Lynn Walker from Coastline Community College shared how she used her the low-intermediate students' life stories as the content for teaching. For example, to teach and practice past tense, a student first tells his or her story and she writes it on the board in the correct way. Then, she erases the verbs in order for the students to figure them out again. A list of the verbs mixed up can be provided for this activity. For more advanced students, the teacher can erase every other clause/sentence and have the students supply what is missing.

To teach and practice the infinitive used to express a purpose, Lynn devised a sentence-combining exercise for students to do either individually or in pairs. But the twist here is to use students' own stories about home improvement projects. For example, she elicits two sentences such as: I bought some wood and some shingles. I wanted to make a patio. She then leads students into producing the target sentence with the infinitive: I bought some wood and some shingles to make a patio.

Other topics to draw out students' "enchanted stories" include:

• Describe  something you find in your house
• Describe a time you made something from scratch

Lynn models with a real story for her students, helps them with their language needs, and even provides them with the first sentence frames such as

•  I made ______(or My wife made ______)
• A strange thing happened ______

She then collects the students' stories and puts them together on one sheet for groups of her students to read, discuss, and vote for the top three winners. Students are also asked to think of three oral comprehension questions for each of the winning stories, expand on the stories, and come up with an interesting title for each.  More advanced, inference-type questions can also be asked.

(To be continued.)