To what extent do you use realia and real-world tasks to develop reading and writing skills? How does this help motivate your students?

Let’s understand realia within this context as: real-world articles from the internet, taken from websites.

Even though the availability of articles is huge, the main challenge to most students is the motivation to get started and go through a serie of tasks that usually follow the reading.

In order to try a creative approach to the typical questions which follow any text, I created a mix of card & board game with questions and answers. The activity I propose below can be used with teenagers or adults and the attempt is to blend the use of tech (mobile device or computer to access the article) and the traditional board game.

The starting point is the biography of Sundai Pichar,Google CEO, shown in this article:

mashable.com/2015/08/10/sundar-pichai-google-ceo/

One way of playing is to have the questions in a board and the answers in separate cards. Another possibility is to share the urls below with the students so that one would have the set of questions and the other the set of possible answers.

Questions (student A)  goo.gl/w10vFm

Answers (student B)    goo.gl/vUhgWU

Answer Key (Teacher)  goo.gl/yS6XLh

After playing the game, the follow up conversational activity can be an exchange of most surprising facts from the article or to use the questions from the board game to interview each other.

This idea can certainly be used with other articles, this is only a starting point.

Please share this article so other teachers can get to know about it!

@Rach_Gonzaga

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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