View Content #25282

By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director, and Stephanie Knight, CASLS Assistant Director 

1. Get creative! Ask learners to produce a creative piece using what they learn in the chapter you are working on. This could be an art piece, a poem, a photography collection, or anything else that sparks learners’ creative juices.
2. Promote a deeper understanding of context: Use outside resources so that students can explore target language functions in a variety of settings. For example, have them learn to introduce themselves with peers, service providers, and at job interviews instead of with peers alone.
3. Use project-based approaches in lieu of chapter tests: Have your students prove their knowledge by participating in a communicative project instead of taking a traditional paper and pen assessment. Allow them to be as creative as possible!
4. Create simulations that require the students to use what they learned in the textbook in interesting ways: Are you teaching about the conditional tense? Have students create a plan for a time capsule with certain dimensions and justify what objects they should put in it.
5. Change up the order: As you work through a chapter, you can go from start to finish or you can mix it up. Sometimes moving the reading to the end or the speaking task to the beginning makes more sense in your context and can be a lot of fun.
6. Create activities that involve multiple modes of communication at once: Oftentimes, textbooks separate each communicative mode. However, multimodal communication is really common in life! See if you can combine the textbook activities to create language practice that involves more than one mode at a time.
7. Compare with other genres: Have learners compare their text book resources to other genres, like YouTube Videos. Doing so adds depth to their language experience and helps build skills for language analysis and adaptation.
8. Have the students teach: As part of the course, select a part of the chapter to have a group of students teach to their peers. Encourage them to use what’s there and to find outside materials to supplement their instruction.
9. Test at the beginning: Use what might be a typical chapter test at the beginning of the chapter as a diagnostic tool and have learners map their needs to the content in the chapter. This will help them focus on the content they most need.
10. Make connections beyond the textbook: As you work through the chapter, feel free to mix up the domain. For example, instead of sticking to textbook exercises that involve adjectives for descriptive language functions, you could use optical illusions to connect the use of adjectives to the exploration of larger concepts such as perception versus reality.