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| Grammar tips | Reading tips |
In this post, we will address two challenging issues. First, how can we teach and test grammar, in this case the second conditional, in communicative contexts, as the new curriculum demands? Second, how can we meaningfully and ethically use AI tools to help students learn this more effectively?
Many of your students are probably using ChatGPT and other AI tools to write their assignments, but are they using these tools in meaningful and ethical ways, or are they handing in AI-generated work instead of their own, wasting their time as well as yours?
Here are some tips for teaching the second conditional. Use them to help your students write about hypothetical situations in coherent, well-structured paragraphs. Laura Bergmann used this approach with third graders in Mittelschule. The students were preparing for a test (Schularbeit) where they would have to write clearly structured paragraphs about fictitious what-if scenarios using the second conditional. This is quite a tricky assignment for this age group – since they have to find meaningful arguments and use the second conditional correctly.
The students were asked to work with an AI assistant that would guide them through the process of finding a topic, collecting arguments, writing a paragraph and revising it for grammatical errors.
The students were engaged and seemed to enjoy the activity. Weaker students said that following the AI assistant’s step-by-step instructions and receiving immediate feedback after each step was helpful. Many students also said that the language revision tips were helpful and improved their understanding of the second conditional.
From the teacher’s point of view, the activity was also very successful leading to much better results than regular writing sessions in the classroom. The immediate feedback and guidance that the students received from the AI assistant, helped them find more meaningful arguments, kept the students engaged for a longer period of time, and led to better and more accurate use of language.
Below, you’ll find all the necessary materials for this unit.
As always, we are starting with the relevant pages in our grammar book, where the students explore the new meanings and corresponding forms. Click on the image to download the pages.
In this step the students discuss some What-if scenarios and collect ideas. Click on the image to open the collection of what-if scenarios for this purpose.
Ideally, this is done in the Think-Pair-Share manner, where students first think about the issue on their own, then discuss it with a partner, and finally share their views with the class.
All you need to do is share the AI assistant prompt (printed in blue below) with your students and ask them to paste the whole prompt into ChatGPT. Then they just follow the AI assistant’s instructions. If you are planning to use the prompt with more advanced students, just edit the prompt and adapt the language level to your needs.
If you are using Fobizz at your school, you can also use this assistant and share it with your students directly in the Fobizz shared space. Just log in to your Fobizz account and paste in the following link: https://app.fobizz.com/ai/chats/assistants/067ffdac-7edf-46b9-8931-aff43f3d5904
If you are using this tool within Fobizz, you will also be able to see the full history of interactions for each student. If your students are using ChatGPT, you might want to ask them to save their history of interactions and share it with you at the end.
Find the prompt below (or use this link to share it with your students).
Goal: This is a tutoring scenario in which the user (student) should be guided through writing a pargraph that follows the structure of
The expected language level is A2 with elements of B1.
The student should come up with an interesting claim and support it with good arguments.
Persona: In this scenario you play an AI-Mentor, a friendly and practical mentor.
Narrative: The student is introduced to the AI Mentor. First, the student is asked initial questions to define the topic. Then, the student is guided to find good reasons and supporting arguments. The student should always be encouraged to express their ideas in full sentences. The mentor should insist that they explain their thoughts in full sentences so that their meaning is clear. Only after the student has tried to express their thoughts in full sentences, should they be provided with a better way to express the idea at the A2 or B1 level.
English is the only acceptable language. If the student uses another language, pretend you don’t understand. The students are at B1 level, so use language at that level.
You should not do this:
Follow these steps in order:
Step 1: Introduction
You should do this:
You should do the following:
Step 2: Define Topic and Claim
Check if they are using the second conditional correctly. If not, explain the structure again using the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1OmLNCdmP8.
You should do the following:
Next step: Move on to the next step once you have the necessary information.
Step 3: Write the paragraph
– Linking words of reason: because, as, since, because of + noun
– Linking words of purpose: in order to/to + infinitive
– Linking words of result: so, therefore
Then, ask them to rewrite their argument sentence using a meaningful linking word. If they cannot complete the task, suggest an option to them.
Step 4: Language Reflection
Show the students their original sentences and the corrected versions. Ask them to explain why their original sentence structure was incorrect. If they cannot explain the grammar, provide a simple explanation.
Then, create three sentences with a gap-fill task where they must demonstrate their understanding of the topic.
Step 5: Product
After they have worked through the language issues in Step 4, switch back to English at the B1 level. Provide the student with a Word document containing their paragraph.
In the text, write good reasoning structures in bold.
Switch back to German and ask the student if they found the scenario helpful. Continue asking questions to determine what was helpful and what was not. Summarize their feedback in two to three sentences, and then ask them to check if the summary reflects their thoughts accurately. Then, ask them to send the feedback to their teachers via email.
Switch back to English and ask the student if they would like to try writing another paragraph.
The best time to teach or review and practice a grammatical structure is always when the current situation requires or calls for that particular meaning and form.
April 1st is the ideal day to talk about fake news. We tell jokes, and many newspapers and media channels spread fun fake news on this day. Check out the BBC videos for April 1st.
I cannot share this year’s BBC prank yet, but I would like to share an old one that is ideal for practicing reported speech.
Here is the video about flying penguins that I have used many times to practice reporting fake news. Unlike many reporting exercises in textbooks and workbooks, shifting tenses is necessary and natural here because we want to distance ourselves from the fake information.
Check out the activity pages for this video. Students will find that little Maxi believes every word of this video and therefore uses the present tense to talk about these cool creatures. His older brother Robert, who has a better understanding of penguins, understands that the information in the video cannot be true. He will use the past tense to distance himself from the fake news.
Open the worksheets by clicking on the image below. The pages are from our GRAMMAR BOOK. Also check out the teaching tips for these pages in the Lehrerhandbuch.
For more ideas on how to teach reporting, see the chapter in the grammar book and my page on reporting.
Click on the image to download the worksheets.
Fake news are an interesting topic for all ages — use April Fool’s Day for a little grammar boost on reported speech. Add a clearly defined puzzle piece to your students’ grammatical competence.
Remember: Teach ONE Meaning at a time.
Our grammar book Grammar Detectives has become very popular and is being used in many schools all over Austria. For teachers who have followed a traditional approach to teaching grammar the switch to a Meaning into Form approach can often be quite challenging.
To help teachers make this change and avoid falling into all the pitfalls along the way, we have now produced a teacher’s commentary (Lehrerkommentar) which explains our rationale behind each activity and gives useful tips on how to use the tasks in class.
We have also created an answer booklet for the student book (Grammar Detectives). Although students should produce individual answers to all the activities, the sample answers can be a valuable resource for teachers. They show typical answers that can be expected for each task.
Both files are available for download. Click on the images to download the pdf files.
We hope our tips will make your grammar teaching even more successful.
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Teachers who order a class set of our Grammar Detectives will also receive a free printed copy of the teacher’s comment booklet.
If you are planning to use the Grammar Detectives booklets in one of your classes, you might want to use up the remaining money in your school’s UeW (Unterrichtsmittel eigener Wahl) budget. This money must be used by mid of March — then unused money has to be returned. Your school’s Schulbuchreferent/in can tell you what is left in the UeW pot.
You have certainly noticed that reading plays a very important role in the new curriculum for lower secondary school. The curriculum states that by year 3-4 students should be able to read simple, clearly structured young adult literature or non-fiction with satisfactory comprehension. To achieve this goal, we’ll need to start in year 1. Don’t forget to organize some interesting reading projects for your students. Now is the time to do it.
Let me give you some practical tips on how to infect your students with the reading bug.
I would like to remind you that the school library budget must be spent by December 31. If your school does not use all the money, it will be returned. Therefore, December is a good time to order interesting English books for your school library and use up all the money. In January your school library budget will be replenished, and you will be able to order more English books for your reading projects.
Take a look around the reading pages of my website and write a wishlist for your school library. Make sure you order lots of different books to cater for different interests and reading levels. Don’t buy sets of class readers and force every student to read the same book. Choice will make reading soooo much more interesting for the kids.
If you are looking for some helpful reading tasks for year 1 and 2 students, check out our Reading Diaries. If there is still some money left in your school’s budget for Unterrichtsmittel eigener Wahl (UeW), you can order class sets of these booklets any time between September and March. Check with your Schulbuchreferent/in to see if there is still some money left for UeW.
One of the most popular book projects for year 3-4 students is the I Survived series.
In each book of this series a young hero gets into serious trouble and just barely survives one of the famous historical disasters of our times. These stories are so riveting that they will turn any non-reader into a reader — books like these are called “home run books” — you cannot put them down.
Go to my I Survived project page to learn more about this series. This series is also perfect for groups that need differentiated materials. Struggling students can read the graphic novel adaptations of the stories while the rest of the class reads the full books.
To make the time leading up to Christmas special for your students, you may want to read them a short Advent story at the beginning of each lesson. The 24 stories in the Advent Calendar Book for Kids are appropriate for students in years 2- 3-4. Since you will not have 24 English lessons before Christmas, you will have to choose the stories that seem most relevant for your students. These stories will also work well in classes with many non-Christian students. They all focus on the spirit of Christmas, rather than on the biblical story.
Click on the image to find the book.
After the holidays it is time to review important language structures. The most obvious grammar that students need now, is the past tense. They all want to talk about their summer holidays and share exciting adventures.
Grammar structures are learned best in authentic situations. The following games and activities are all communicative drills that orally practice correct and TRUE sentences. They engage many areas of the brain and build large neural networks in the learners’ brains.
Game 1: Holiday Dominoes
In this communicative drill students practice all the tricky forms of the past tense:
Activity 2: Holiday Raps:
Holiday Raps is another fun activity to practice irregular verbs.
Students need a list of all the irregular verbs that they have learned so far. If your textbook does not provide such a list, you can use the list in our grammar book (page 35).
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Click on the images to open the files. |
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Instructions for the students
Work with a partner
Step 1: Read the verbs on the list carefully and mark all the activities that you did in the holidays. Find as many verbs as possible.
Step 2: Write a true sentence about your holidays with each of the verbs.
Step 3: Now write a question for each of your sentences:
Example: take- took – taken: I took a ferry to Greece.
Question: Did you take a ferry?
Step 4: Work with your parter and make a rap out of your sentences. Try to find a rhythm for your questions and answers.
Example: Student A: Did you take a ferryboat?
Student B: Yes, I took a ferryboat. I took a ferryboat to Greece.
Student B: Did you eat some ice-cream?
Student A: Yes, I age some ice-cream. Vanilla was the best.
Do this for at least 10 questions and answers. Practice your rap. Clap the rhythm with your hands or find a simple beat online. Then perform your rap in front of the class (or record it on your phone and upload it to the space provided by your teacher).
Activity 3: Find Someone Who
A third activity that works well to practice past simple questions and answers is the popular game Find Someone Who.
Click on the image to open the worksheet
Game 4: 30 Seconds
In this boardgame the students have to roll a dice and answer the questions that they land on. They have to speak for 30 seconds and give lots of details. If they cannot speak for 30 seconds, they must go back to where they just came from.
Click on the image to open the gameboard.
Activity 5: Magic Camera
In this activity students recall a beautiful or interesting moment from their holidays and then draw a quick sketch (holiday snapshot) of the scene. They should only spend a few minutes on this drawing — it does not have to be a masterpiece.
The students then meet in small groups and share their “snapshots” explaining in detail where they were at the time, what was going on around them, what the atmosphere was like…
In this activity students will practice using the past simple and the past progressive form to describe the atmosphere of the moment.
Tip: It is often helpful to give the students some time to prepare their presentations. They should be able to talk about their snapshot for about 2 minutes. This is quite long and requires some preparation. Allow them to take some notes (key words only) on a small piece of paper.
I often do a practice round with the class where I turn on a countdown timer on the screen and ask the class to practice all at the same time, mumbling their little presentations. If they cannot fill the 2 minutes, I give them another few minutes to add details to their notes and we do another trial round. After these “mumbling rounds”, the students are well prepared to share their special holiday moments in their groups.
Variation: Instead of small groups, you could also do the sharing rounds in concentric circles with students talking to a new partner a few times.
These basic activities all follow the principles of effective communicative grammar teaching. They are fully contextualized, based on the students’ real experiences, and they drill the structures and forms of the past tense, allowing students to form unconscious patterns in their brains that will later lead to automatic production of the correct forms.
Have your students done enough reading this year? Do you want to encourage them to read some books during the summer? This is the ideal time to plan a short but very effective end-of-year reading project for your learners.
My tip for this season: Choose Your Own Adventure books
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The official commentary to the new curriculum tells us the following:
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Die Fertigkeit Lesen spielt im neuen Lehrplan eine besonders wichtige Rolle. Es ist aus vielen Forschungsprojekten bekannt, dass extensives Lesen natürlichen Spracherwerb im Sinne von “Acquisition”[1] begünstigt. Im neuen Lehrplan wurde deshalb neben den bisher geläufigen Leseaufgaben zu Kurztexten auch explizit das extensive Lesen von Büchern (Ganztexten) aufgenommen. Ab der Schulstufe 7 sollten die Schülerinnen und Schüler in der Lage sein, authentische Kinderbücher und Jugendbücher mit zufriedenstellendem Globalverständnis zu lesen. Um die Lernenden Schritt für Schritt auf die Lektüre von authentischen Kinder- und Jugendbüchern vorzubereiten, ist es wichtig, möglichst früh (schon im ersten Lernjahr) mit dem selbstständigen Lesen von Bilderbüchern zu beginnen. Dadurch werden “top-down reading strategies” entwickelt, die den Schülerinnen und Schüler helfen, unbekannte Worte und Wendungen aus dem Kontext zu erschließen. Gerade auf niedrigen Sprachniveaus (A1, A2) ist diese Fähigkeit, aus einzelnen verstandenen Teilen ein sinnvolles Ganzes zu erschließen, extrem wichtig. Da davon auszugehen ist, dass nicht alle Schülerinnen und Schüler einer Klasse dasselbe Leseniveau aufweisen und die Kinder auch unterschiedliche Interessen und Erfahrungen mitbringen, ist es wichtig Schülerinnen und Schüler eigenständig nach Interesse und Sprachniveau geeignete Bücher wählen zu lassen. Dies fördert die intrinsische Motivation, auch längere und schwierigere Texte zu lesen und dabei einer spannenden Handlung möglichst gut zu folgen. |
If you feel that your students need a bit more reading practice, have a look at the Choose Your Own Adventure project. This project can be done at different levels:
The project is ideal for the end of the school-year. It includes reading, speaking and writing and only takes a few lessons. No long reading at home — everything can be done in class. Follow this link to my page on CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE books or click on the image below to go to the page.
| A Quick Reminder |
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It’s now time to order the textbooks for next year. If you would like to use our booklets (Reading diaries, Me-books, Grammar books) in one of your classes next year, you can order them as “Unterrichtsmittel eigener Wahl (UEW)” right now. Just talk to your “Schulbuchreferent/in to make sure there is money left for UEW (up to 15% of the budget). If you want to, we can send the books to you now and you can start using them right away. Of course you can order the booklets any time later if you want to use them next year.
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Yes, there is – and it is very easy to decide when is the right time to teach and/or review a particular structure or form. Research on language acquisition tells us that learning means adding new connections to existing networks in our brains. Therefore, we want to use the neural networks that already exist in our students’ brains and just add a new form. Ideally, we do this at a time when the network is already activated by other circumstances.
At a time when our students are certainly all looking forward to the upcoming Easter holidays, it will be very obvious to activate their networks for the plans they have made with family and friends. This is the ideal time to add a new grammar structure to their active networks.
To talk about PLANS and INTENTIONS in English, we need the “going to” form.
Even if your textbook does not currently suggest this grammatical structure – or if you have already taught it – now is the time to introduce and/or practice TALKING ABOUT PLANS + GOING TO.
Remember: Using several senses simultaneously will create large neural networks in the students’ brains. In the following activities the learners are speaking (and moving their lips, mouth…) hearing and thinking about personal plans.
For A1 -A2 learners, I have used the following DOMINO RACE, which “washes” the new structure into the learners’ brains. Play the game several times and record the time the class needs to complete it by using your phone’s stopwatch. Play the game again in the following lessons and see if the class can do it faster and beat their record.
Download the printable file here.
In this set of cards the learners can choose between a Yes and a NO answer, according to their true holiday plans. Always encourage this choice — it adds some personalization to the grammar and vocab activities and helps the learners to link the new language to their true experiences — and networks in their brains.
For more Domino Race games, follow this link.
Another activity that works well at this level is a “Find someone who” activity adapted for EASTER Plans. Click on the image to download the worksheet.
Both activities are communicative DRILLS where the learners make perfect MEANING-FORM connections. Do these and similar activities again before any interesting events or holidays. This will help the learners to make stable and permanent MEANING-FORM connections that they can use automatically and correctly.
For more communicative grammar tips check out “My Personal Grammarbook”
