Hey, guys today I have an all-time favorite of mine to get my students speaking or writing. This is a great activity to practice storytelling, 3rd person verb tenses, conjunctions, sequencing, verb tenses in general, and much more.
Storytelling is an amazing way to test your students speaking abilities. I’ve had many students that were great at responding to simple questions but when you forced them to speak for more than 30 seconds they started to fall apart. Telling a story requires a lot of language skills and is a proven form of language acquisition.
You can use these ideas with any short videos, but I like commercials as they are short, entertaining, and abundant. I have over a hundred on my site (coolenglish.net) in the video section, or you can just go to google or YouTube and search for best commercials. I like using the super bowl ads as they are normally well made and popular. I sometimes give the students key vocab words first depending on their level. You can assign them as homework and have the students send you recorded audio of them speaking or a written summary.
Storytelling - Simply watch the video and have the students retell the story. They can speak or write, if speaking in a large group maybe have each student tell a part of it. For more basic groups after watching one time, I play it again and pause every few seconds asking what happened to make it easier.
Verb Tense Practice - Pause the video during an action or verb and ask the students what is happening. You can change between present continuous or past simple to mix it up.
Ad Reviews - Ask the students what they thought about the ad and discuss if the commercial would make them buy the product and why or why not.
Verb Race – have the students watch the video and try to write down as many of the verbs as they can see. So, if someone is swimming, they would write swim.
Prediction Practice – Pause the video at key moments and ask the students to predict what they think will happen next. Great way to work on future tenses and hypotheticals.
Well, that’s it, I hope some of you find this useful and please let me know if you have any doubts.
John
