Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

For students struggling to learn the alphabet. It is an Alphabet Arc with further practice pages that have an increasing number of blanks to fill in. It is designed to be given out as one page at a time, to help in memorising it. I encourage my students to write out the alphabet on their exam paper, to avoid them making avoidable errors in the alphabetical order questions. 

Editor's note

When to use (or not use) capital letters
1. with pictures
2. black font text
3. blue font text

Editor's not 
Concise and exceedingly useful. The one page text-only versions would also make handy reminder sheets for higher levels. 

A Beginners / Entry 1 level set of activities to introduce and practise using adjectives within the theme of travel.

Practise vocabulary, antonyms, spelling, sentence structure and handwriting.

Editor's note

Although written for ESOL most parts of this resource are also very suitable for E1-2 Functional English. In addition to the many tasks it also provides a short overview of adjectives  and basic sentence structure . Great for the build up to summer holidays - or indeed any time of year!

Short, sweet and very useful 1 page worksheet / handout reminding learners when to use full stops, question marks and exclamation marks. Followed by two short tasks.

Detailed Entry Level Functional English mapping is available in a separate PDF file.

I wanted to introduce the concept of basic parts of speech (nouns and verbs) to my E1 class, even though the terms as such are above E1, to help them get their heads around sentence building.  I put this resource together to focus on nouns and proper nouns which I’ve used as the basis for a couple of sessions on sentence structure and punctuation (capitalisation).

Editor's note

 UPDATED 19/4/23   -  two errors fixed on page 12 no 4 (two occurrences of the word 'you' replaced with 'your').

This booklet has many different tools to improve spelling that have been collected from various sources (a list of these resources can be found in the back of the book).

For E3 upwards it could be used as a self-study booklet. For levels before E3 it may be useful to 'cherry pick', be used as a tutor manual and/or an in-class group activitiy.

10/10/17 Several minor and one major correction made

These tasks assume no previous knowledge of compound sentences and/or conjunctions. They do assume the learner is familiar with simple sentences (i.e. one clause, one verb).
Aimed at E2-E3 students but could be useful at Level 1.

Tasks include joining pairs of Halloween sentences with a suitable conjunction; extending simple sentence with a suitable ‘ending’, and rewriting texts that are initially written using only simple sentence (in order to improve their organisation and readability).

A-Z chart of pictures with the corresponding initial sound. I’ve tried to select pictures which Beginner ESOL adults will recognise.

This was designed to be used with a group of dyslexic learners but would be applicable for any learners with spelling difficulties.

I have used this by separating the group into small groups or pairs and then giving each group a different strategy to try with one of the words from the word list (two are provided – one for E2-E3, one for L1-2) or a word of their own that they want to spell.

Visual colour-coded resource, explaining the main plural spelling rules. Created for E2/E3 learners, but could also be useful for all visual learners working between E2-L2.

Includes: colour-coded fact sheet, blank table, worksheet and flash cards to cut out and laminate. Could be used for a number of different activities.