Esol essayist

A developed writing ability is essential for scoring well on standardized tests that include essay sections and a well-chosen ESL writing activity can increase the ability to express increasingly complex ideas succinctly and fully, thus improving communication skills across all four proficiencies.

Although beginning ESL students don’t put pen to paper in this activity, it is nonetheless a writing activity in that it instills proper spelling and a basic grasp on phonetics that are critical at this stage of language development. Students also enjoy and may benefit from the social, team-building aspect of this writing activity.

If single words are too easy, you can up the difficulty level by printing entire words on separate pages that form complete sentences. Western ESL teachers might remember Mad Libs from their youth, a game in which a handful of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are extracted from a prewritten story and left up to the participants to fill in.

Print a series of words with one giant letter on each page. For example, if the word is HOUSE, then print an H, O, U, S, and E, each on its own respective page. Scramble the papers up, then call an equal number of students to pages to the front – in this example, five.