Using Prompts
Prompts are a powerful way to design lessons balancing between both form and function.
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Prompts are a very valuable teaching tool. They can be used to practice productive skills (speaking and writing) and they can be tailored not just to help students produce language but also focus on form, a particular language structure.
A prompt is usually a chunk of language but it may also be a photo or image or even a video!
Here we’d like to introduce you to just a few of the many prompt focused resources in our Lesson Library. There are so many that teachers can instantly use in their lessons and classes.
Our Prompt Generator. Free for all to use. Select a category and get random generated prompts. An unrivaled tool on the web. See our Christmas one too!
Get Speaking. Conversation Cards. This is on 100s of teacher’s Amazon wishlists. Full of flashcards to use as prompts and get students speaking.
Pass The Paper. A fun, fun game for speaking. Play the music, pass the paper around the group. When the music stops, whoever has the paper completes the prompt. We have many pre-made games.
Finish It Off. Often called “sentence builders” we have dozens of resources where students are provided with a language form or structure and then must in their own words, their own writing “finish it off”. See this presentation for a basic version. Also, finish the rhyme or finish the proverb and our Finish It Off collection.
Writing prompts. Perhaps the classic and most familiar type of prompt. Students are given a question, scenario or scene and then asked to write about it. See our full book - 101 Writing Prompts.
There are so many resources to be used as prompts and we hope you start (if you haven’t already), making this teaching strategy part of our toolkit for all levels and ages of learners. Prompts truly work!
Jack. Exactly my intention. To get teachers to think of new and other possibilities for delivery, classroom lessons. Thanks for your reply!
Just reading this has my mind racing with teaching ideas 😊