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

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!

Simplified news article about a bus crash in Australia. Reading activity with DARTs. Can be extended into a speaking and listening and writing activity.

Editor's notes

A very sad story.  Ideal for E2-E3 reading and discussion (and equivalent Australian levels). Dictionary/vocabulary work, T/F questions, sentences, cloze exercise and discussion prompt.

Written specifically for the new reformed English content which expects secure homophone skills at much lower levels than previously. Covers 6 of the 22 homophone spellings required at E3 using differentiated sets of cloze exercises. 6 sets each with 12-15 questions / sentences plus detailed teaching notes and an appendix listing all E1, E2 & E3 spellings.

A set of tasks to practise reading and writing skills. Read about a student and his work and college life.

• Practise using conjunctions.
• Learn synonyms
• Practise using punctuation correctly.
• Write about your own experience of studying and working

Editor's notes

So practical and down to earth! Find out about Joseph's day to day college life and his busy job with Deliveroo. Also very useful for E2-E3 Functional Skills English students.

Reading and related activities focusing on a simplified version of a BBC news article reporting the results of the 2021 Australian Census. Ideal for practising reading strategies including:  relating images to text, using headings, skimming, scanning and using context to predict. My (Australian) students found it challenging but were engaged in the content. Lots of possible ways it could lead into other written and oral activities. Numbers and a graph involved so can also be used to revise numeracy concepts such as percentages and extracting information from graphs.

A simplified version of a news report taken from ABC's Behind the News. Dating from 2020 it talks bout US Gun Laws from an Australian perspective. The reading text also comes with comprehension questions, a cloze passage, dictionary activities and a writing prompt. There are related tasks at two levels E3/L1 and L1/2.

Editor's notes

Written specifically for the new reformed English content which expects secure homophone skills at much lower levels than previously. Covers 6 of the 22 homophone spellings required at E3 using differentiated sets of cloze exercises. 7 sets each with 15 questions / sentences plus detailed teaching notes and an appendix listing all E1, E2 & E3 spellings.

Written specifically for the new reformed English content which expects secure homophone skills at much lower levels than previously. Covers all the homophone spellings required at E2 using differentiated sets of cloze exercises. 7 sets each with 15 questions / sentences plus detailed teaching notes and an appendix listing all E1 & E2 spellings.

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