Ping-Pong Writing & Introducing Genres in a B1 class
November 2020 – Students at B1 level are required to be able to write emails, compositions, short stories; furthermore, simple essays, reviews and articles. In this interactive B1 writing exercise, you see an example how you can introduce the first three genres to your intermediate students.
ONLINE WORKSHEET
The form is an INTERACTIVE EXERCISE and it consists of three tasks:
1) recognizing genre (ordering sentences to one or the other)
2) reconstructing the three texts
3) answering one question to each text.
The material is suitable for online lessons.
PROCEDURE
After completing the text reconstruction and checking the students’ reading comprehension, you can move onto the final task: Writing.
If you are teaching online, try out PING-PONG writing, which means, you decide on a genre and you write the first sentence into the chat box. Your student needs to write the second sentence. You continue with the third, etc.
You can also do it in the classroom, asking your students to continue your story starter with one sentence (possibly on recycling paper) and move the sheet to the next student on their right, who is asked to write the next sentence, and so on. The final stories can be read to the class at the end.
STORY STARTERS
Try out one of the story starters from CREATIVE WRITING NOW; here are the first five ideas:
1. He should have never let her into the apartment…
2. It sounded like violin music, and it was coming from the basement…
3. “It’s not what you think,” he said.
4. I crouched behind the car, trying not to make a sound…
5. There’s only one thing in the world I’m afraid of…
In the online format, the exercise is even more exciting, since you can feed in language and ask your student to use one particular word/expression or grammar form.
AN EXAMPLE
FIND HERE ON EXAMPLE OF A STORY teaching verbs with gerund to an advanced student. He was also instructed to use three elements (an American woman, a bank manager and a castle) and was given a list of verbs to be used.
You can adapt the exercise also to intermediate level and practise narrative tenses, reported speech or if you use the ‘What if’ starters from the Creative Writing Now website, conditionals.
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