Strategies and Activities for Language Learner Levels
Compiled by
Jill Kerper Mora
San Diego State University
Level 4
Listening/Speaking Activities:
- Debating
- Creating and performing skits and role-plays
- Short speech making to persuade based on format or template
- Oral reports
- Impromptu characterizations and role playing
- Storytelling and re-telling
Reading/Writing Activities:
Level 3
SENSORY DESCRIPTIVE WRITING
- Advertising copy
- Character sketches
- Poems such as haiku or limerick
- Eyewitness memoir
- Biographical sketch of self or other familiar person or literary character
IMAGINATIVE-NARRATIVE WRITING
- Scripts
- Folk tales
- Vignettes based on a photograph or a "story starter"
- Short stories based on a format or template
- Myths based on familiar story or literature
- Autobiographical incidents
Listening/Speaking Activities:
INFORMATIVE-PRACTICAL WRITING
- News reports
- Advertisements
- Report of information based on research of a topic
- Business letters (complaint, order, information, etc.)
- Interviews
- Summaries
- Editorials using a template or format
- Reviews of a familiar movie or play using a template or format
- Library research papers
- Poems to persuade, analyze, or make analogies
- Single or multi-paragraph assignments to describe, narrate, analyze, compare or contrast based on an outline or graphic organizer
- Jokes, riddles and word games such as Who Am I?
- Analysis of charts, graphs, tables
- Speech making to describe, narrate or inform
Reading/Writing Activities:
Level 2
Listening/Speaking Activities:
SENSORY DESCRIPTIVE WRITING
- Journal entries based on personal experiences
- Short descriptions of objects, scenes from photographs
- News telling using formats or templates: who, what, where, when and why
IMAGINATIVE NARRATIVE WRITING
- Anecdotes
- Diary entries
- Captions
- Journal entry
- Personal letters
- Dialogues/monologues
INFORMATIVE-PRACTICAL WRITING
- Telephone messages
- Postcards
- Friendly notes
- Class notes
- Memos
- Directions or steps in a process
- Role playing
- Reader's Theater
- Labeling a picture, scene, or event with short sentences
- Who, what, where question responses: Naming the subject or location
- Describing a picture, scene, story, or event
- Find-the-differences pictures
- Story telling based on familiar events or personal experiences and routines
- Retelling stories
ANALYTICAL-EXPOSITORY WRITING
- Letters to the editor
- Letters of inquiry to a business or organization
- Speeches based on a communicative function or purpose
- Advertisements and commercials
Level 1
Reading/Writing Activities:
Listening/Speaking Activities:
- Writing sentences based on a graphic organizer
- Writing descriptions based on guide questions or template
- Sentence building
- Chain writing
- What am I? Guessing games based on descriptions
- Writing recipes or short series of directions
- Creating a paragraph based on a sequence of pictures
- Completing a story using substitutions for characters, objects, adjectives, antonyms or synonyms
- Total Physical Response (TPR) with basic commands
- Read stories aloud with picture clues
- Complete cartoon strip dialogues
- Listening to a story in English and retell a partner in LI
- Reading aloud to complete a task, recipe, or art project
- Sequencing of events based on pictures or familiar short narrative
Reading/Writing Activities:
- Picture labeling
- Modified cloze procedures using familiar paragraphs or narratives
- Language experience stories using omissions, identifications or associations
- Sentence completion and transformation