TeachingEnglish
      Expanding sentences
      With small groups, a useful exercise is to write down a simple, basic sentence and ask the students to add as many adverbs and adjectives to make the sentence more "colourful".

       

      For example- "The man entered the room" becomes "The large, fat and sweating man came very slowly and silently into the dark and silent room".

      This transforms a statement of fact into more of an "atmospheric story".

      Thanks to Dr Howard Peak for this tip which comes from his blog on Teaching English.

      Average: 3.6 (122 votes)

      Comments

      sweet1428's picture
      sweet1428
      Submitted on 27 June, 2008 - 21:35
      Thank you dr Howard peak
      matra's picture
      matra
      Submitted on 4 July, 2008 - 11:17
      Thanks to DR Howard - GBU
      amazinanian's picture
      amazinanian
      Submitted on 6 July, 2008 - 19:56

      Hello all my friends

      A similar roll-play exercise we have done in this category which will expand student's vocabularies is that we ask a student to say a name or a word in English E.g. David. The second student has to say a word which begins with the last letter of what has been said, for instance door after David. By getting 10 words in this way, now the students have to make some sensible sentences (Of course some new words can be added to make good sentences and students have been in different groups):

      David, door, radio, orange, egg, goat, terrible, evening, Germany, yellow

      Students will have a lot of fun by making different sentences but finally we got this one:

      The terrible yellow goat was eating the orange in the evening when David came back from Germany to listen the radio or having an egg.

      This sentence was chosen as the best answerer and the related group got a prize. The important fact to be considered is that the teacher leads the sentences according to the subject of teaching.

      In above example we were practicing past and past continuous tenses.

      Best wishes

      Ali asghar Mazinanian, Shahrood, Iran

      Rania Jabr's picture
      Rania Jabr
      Submitted on 26 November, 2008 - 09:53
      I have tried this, and it works. I come up with complex sentences, split them, and scramble them. I them put them in a table. Students need to match each beginning with the appropriate end grammatically and lexically. An easy stage is at the beginning when the sentences deal with different ideas, but at a later stage, I make it a bit harder by making up sentences dealing with the same ideas/themes. Then, knowledge of grammar would be the deciding factor in putting the two ends of the sentence together. As a final step, I have students come up with their own sentences by mirroring the sample statements I gave them. Hope this works for you, too. Rania
      dada's picture
      dada
      Submitted on 2 March, 2009 - 12:10

      Thank you all for those wonderful ideas.I have some idea regarding the same.I tell the students to tell some words and then write them down on board.Then the students are informed to write a story with the words written on the board.

      Thank you

      Sandeep

      NikPeachey's picture
      NikPeachey
      Submitted on 2 March, 2009 - 14:20
      There;s a marvelous website that demonstrates this at: http://www.telescopictext.com/ just try clicking on the shaded parts and see it expand.   I wrote an activity for students based around this site at:  http://daily-english-activities.blogspot.com/2008/10/extending-sentence.html   Hope you find these useful.   Best
       

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      marialetodiani's picture
      marialetodiani
      Submitted on 6 May, 2009 - 19:53
      Thank you for this tip I did it in class and my students were very joyful.