Some useful ideas to get your students to practise their grammar.

Photo of students practising something together or doing an activity together.

Source: Peter Muller, Getty Images/Cultura RF

To aid memory and make the language real for students they need to practise the target language in contexts that are appropriate to them (consider their age). Practice can be speaking, listening, reading or writing.

Writing practice 

They can choose a few classmates and write sentences about them:

e.g. Carlos can swim, can’t speak French, can play tennis and can’t cook.

Questionnaires

Produce a worksheet like this (using vocabulary students are familiar with):

NameSwimSpeak FrenchPlay tennisCook
1        
2        
3        

 

Students go round the class and ask their classmates the questions:

Can you swim?
Can you speak French?
Can you play tennis?
Can you cook?

They write the name of the classmate they are interviewing. If the answer is yes, they tick the box, if it’s no, they put a cross.

Talking about famous people

  • Ask students to bring in pictures of their favourite pop, film or sports stars.

  • In groups students tell their classmates about their stars:

    e.g. Jennifer Lopez can sing, dance and act. She can’t cook.
  • Students write sentences under their pictures and display them on the class notice board.
  • Make it a game. Have students write their can / can’t sentences on cards without the names of the stars.
  • Put them all up on the class wall and get students to read all of them and try to match them to the correct stars.
  • Students can be encouraged to find out some interesting facts about what the stars can or can’t do for homework. Teenagers won’t mind doing this if it is about stars they like!

Topics