Contextual Resources

Why might we decide to go to university as a mature student? Slides for L1 and L2 English learners to find out more about their career choices (in this case, applying for a university level course) while building their Functional English skills.

Editor's note

Why might we start our own business and how confident are we as a nation? Slides for L1 and L2 English learners to find out more about their career choices (in this case, running their own business) while building their English skills.

Editor's note

I put this together when I found so many of my learners trying to hone their employability skills did not know what a lot of the words on job descriptions meant. 

Resource 1 (Definition matching cards: job skills and attributes): I laminated these and cut them up and they worked in pairs or threes to match them up.

There are two other linked resources, as below, to help students with getting to grips with the keywords used in Job Descriptions and Person Specifications. 

These three simple resources are aimed for teaching the layout features and conventions of informal and formal letter writing.  There are three templates: 

A huge and extremely comprehensive pack of resources. Written for ESOL learners but many parts are also suitable for Functional English and/or Job Skills groups. Includes:

Three sets of dominoes to use in warm-up and for letter and word recognition activities. The first set, for pre-Entry ESOL and Literacy learners with very low levels of letter and word recognition, matches lower case to capital letter versions, the second set is a set of “doubles”, which can be used alongside the first. The third set, for pre-Entry / Entry 1 ESOL learners, matches a category to an example. Each set has 17 dominoes, so 4 each for a group of 4 learners, plus one to start.

Fabulous set of resources used first with OCNW Construction students but also suitable for building services and engineering. Written for L1 Functional Skills students but can easily be simplified/extended to cover Entry 3 and Level 2.
Includes detailed mapping to Functional English, Functional Maths and Functional ICT.

This is an adapted and expanded version of Jodie Travis’ ‘Hired or Fired’ resource which is of course based on the popular TV show “The apprentice”. I used Jodie’s resource last year with a really big group, getting them to create a poster to ‘sell’ Manchester. I added some more ‘Apprenticey’ bits in, such as getting them to pitch their ideas at the front of the class after they’d made the posters, and it worked really well.

Fabulous set of resources – aimed at E2-L1 Functional English but some activities are also suitable for E1 and/or L2.
10 different sets of resources encompassing a range of teaching strategies and covering many aspects of reading, writing, and discussion. A detailed mapping document is included.
Includes the following activities/topics:

A really interesting quick quiz – originally written to get e2e learners interested in numbers but makes an ideal warm up activity for any group (at any level).