Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

An ESOL reading comprehension based on a BBC News report on the death of Stanislav Petrov, who averted a potential Cold War disaster in 1983.

The text contains several examples of past perfect, reported speech and third / mixed conditionals. The activity combines reading for gist, for detail, identifying vocabulary and identifying parts of speech. An extension activity gives learners an opportunity to write a similar short text, using the same elements of grammar to tell a story about a decision that changed events.

I’m using this activity to give learners a writing frame for a piece of creative writing. I want them to really think about purpose of text when they are creating it, so they have to pick the format, style and tone of their work and plan it out.

This resource is a writing task which asks the learners to use relevant literary devices (languages features) to compose a ‘For Sale’ ad for a house.

Prior to commencing the task, the learners are made aware of the following devices using a card match activity:

• Flattery
• Opinion
• Hyperbole
• Personal Pronouns
• Imperative Command
• Triples
• Emotive Language
• Statistics and Figures
• Rhetorical Questions
• Repetition

A resource suitable for GCSE or Functional Skills English (L2) that uses an image of an old lady as the basis of a series of activities for students to learn/embed the following:

• To understand how to quickly plan a piece of writing,
• To consider genre, audience, purpose, tone and use language devices
• To improve the impact of the writing.
• Use A FOREST to remember language features.

The power point presentation (18 screens) includes:

A set of writing activity cards that are easily differentiated for groups of learners working at a range of levels. Main focus is purpose of text.

Editor’s note
Please share your ideas on suitable objects to use for this really creative task. If you are a registered contributor you can log in and leave a comment – otherwise email me using the Contact us link at the bottom of any page.

A resource based on a current (Jan 2016) Huffington Post news report about a piece of homework that was sent home for a child to learn which contained incorrect spellings.
Learners are to identify and correct the errors, write a full explanation of their thoughts on the matter and write an appropriate email to the head teacher.

Editor’s note
A wonderful, real-life and very functional task!

This is a reading comprehension based on a piece of text outlining the origins of Christmas trees in the UK with accompanying questions and a descriptive writing activity.

Students are to plan and advertise a Christmas fete.
The resource covers writing lists and sentences, proof reading and using basic adjectives.
Students could use the Internet to find some ideas for Christmas stalls.

A simplified adjectives resource that I created to use with E1/E2 learners to introduce them to writing a description of something. Students should be encouraged to provide one describing word each that can be displayed on the whiteboard before discussing the term adjective.

This resource covers what an adjective is with underlining and cloze writing exercises to build knowledge before students attempt to write a description of two pictures. The descriptions of the pictures can be basic but students should be encouraged to use full sentences.

One of the Level 2 Functional English Writing exam papers asked students to write a speech.

I found a speech online and showed them how to use repeated words, emphasis, subheadings and to think about their audience. I then used the Drink Aware website to create this resource to enable students to practise speech writing.

This resource could also be used to practise writing letters or emails to colleagues to encourage them to think about drink driving, and to practise other aspects of writing styles for Level 2 exams.