Resource Roundup: Working on New Year's Resolutions With Your ELs
by Tomiko Breland
The New Year is just around the corner! Come January 1, educators are often focused on ways to improve their craft by engaging in more professional development, reading more books, and trying new apps. Though these are all worthy endeavors and admirable efforts, it's critical that we also enable our English learners to communicate with us and with one another about how they would like to improve themselves during the upcoming year.
Here are some ideas culled from the web to help you give your students the tools to make their own New Year’s resolutions for 2019.
1. New Year’s Activities for Beginner and Intermediate Learners
This page offers free images to scaffold a New Year’s resolution–writing activity with your beginner learners and to practice the future tense. It also includes a New Year’s reading activity for low beginners.
2. New Year’s Resolutions Lesson Plan
This complete 1-hour lesson plan from the BBC TeachingEnglish website is for ages 11–18, Levels B1/B2, and is for teaching your English learners New Year traditions and resolutions. It includes detailed steps and a student worksheet.
3. New Year’s Resolutions: A Conversation Lesson for Adults
This article by Ricardo Barros includes group discussion, pair work, reading comprehension, and a video activity; it also provides some excellent follow-up options to examine language structure and vocabulary in the lesson.
4. Activity: New Year’s Resolutions
This quick new year’s resolution activity, from TESOL Training Madrid (@TtMadridTEFL) on Twitter, uses flash cards and gets your students communicating with each other.
5. Conversation Questions: New Year’s Resolutions
This is a basic list of questions from the Internet TESL Journal to get conversations started among your students.
6. A New Year’s Lesson Your Learners Will Remember Throughout the Year
This article by Claudia Pesce on BusyTeacher.org provides some great ideas for New Year’s activities at many levels. She shares links to worksheets, ideas for young learners’ crafts, suggestions for exploring international New Year celebrations, and a list of New Year–related readings.
Tomiko Breland is TESOL project editor. She received her BA in English from Stanford University, her MA in writing from the Johns Hopkins University, and her certificate in TESOL from Anaheim University. In her free time, she writes and edits fiction.
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