An activity that involves speaking, writing, grammar review, and reading is the classic Mad Libs, which you can buy in most bookstores. You can also find some online versions that are devised specifically for English learners, such as this lesson plan from Kenneth Beare at about.com. These are fun to do in class for parts-of-speech review. There are many examples of mad libs for children, but here's a site that has mad libs for adults. You can also create your own from a paragraph of your choice.
Topics Magazine is an online journal written by and for English learners. The list of contents includes international themes, writing, travel, food, speaking out on controversial issues, learning English, idioms and expressions, and more. Reading of a selected article could be used as a stimulus for discussion, role play, or writing in the classroom. Oh! There's also a Teacher's Corner with teaching ideas and projects.
Want to give your students a showcase for their writing? Try the pbs.org Destination America site. Students can put in their own stories about their immigration experience. For example, here's Jesus's story, posted by one of my beginning-level students from several years ago.
Coming back to Krashen, he has extended his support of Free Voluntary Reading to include Free Voluntary Surfing of the Web as a source of comprehensible input for intermediate and advanced English language learners. For those who doubt, he suggests this test: try it with a language of which you have an intermediate level of knowledge. Search for topics in which you have a compelling personal interest—not professional development, not academic—"something genuinely interesting, but not essential." When you become sufficiently involved in what you are reading, you will eventually lose your compulsion to look up the meaning of unknown words. As in Free Voluntary Reading (aka Narrow Reading), you will forget you are reading in another language.
Want to give your students a showcase for their writing? Try the pbs.org Destination America site. Students can put in their own stories about their immigration experience. For example, here's Jesus's story, posted by one of my beginning-level students from several years ago.
Coming back to Krashen, he has extended his support of Free Voluntary Reading to include Free Voluntary Surfing of the Web as a source of comprehensible input for intermediate and advanced English language learners. For those who doubt, he suggests this test: try it with a language of which you have an intermediate level of knowledge. Search for topics in which you have a compelling personal interest—not professional development, not academic—"something genuinely interesting, but not essential." When you become sufficiently involved in what you are reading, you will eventually lose your compulsion to look up the meaning of unknown words. As in Free Voluntary Reading (aka Narrow Reading), you will forget you are reading in another language.