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Expanding sentences

Submitted by peak on 25 June, 2008 - 13:37

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.

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Comments

sweet1428

Thank you dr Howard peak

Submitted on 27 June, 2008 - 21:35

Thank you dr Howard peak

matra

Yupeee...It's Work!!

Submitted on 4 July, 2008 - 11:17

Thanks to DR Howard - GBU

amazinanian

Expanding sentences

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

Expanding sentences

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

sentences

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

Nik Peachey
TE Team

Expanding sentences website

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

Nik Peachey | Learning Technology Consultant, Writer, Trainer
Teacher Development: http://nikpeachey.blogspot.com/
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marialetodiani

Thank you

Submitted on 6 May, 2009 - 19:53

Thank you for this tip I did it in class and my students were very joyful.