Adult Literacy, Functional English, and GCSE Resources

Use alone or as a consolidation resource for learners after attempting  E2 Homophone Cloze Exercises’ and/or  E3 Homophone Cloze Exercises – Set 1’ . Covers 7 sets of homophones from the E2 and E3 spelling lists. There are also some follow-up exercises.

Short sets of words for alphabetic sorting.   These can be used with literacy or ESOL learners.  I found they worked well at the beginning of each session while learners were still arriving into the class.  They work well as individual or pairs exercises.

The first set works best when each list is cut up and laminated as individual words in each group, so learners can sort them kinaesthetically.  

I created this resource to try to engage my learners during lockdown. There are two reading tasks based on the same text, which I adapted for level 1 learners by using more basic vocabulary. The reading task can then be followed by the writing a blog task and I have included a step by step sheet to help with the writing task.

This set of steps (taken from Coady & Nation (1988)) with a worked example shows students one process for doing a ‘best guess’ of what to do when they come across a new word. Followed by a set of 10 exercises with some lovely, unusual words.

Editor's note
Fully mapped to GCSE and the new 2018 Functional English content

This is a short explanation with examples of eight sorts of conjunctive adverb arranged by type. There is an activity to complete, as well as some stretch/research activities for differentiation.

Editor’s note
Fully mapped to L2 Functional English and GCSE English

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

This resource will help learners recognise words related to personal information. Learners will read, match, fill in the gaps and identify the number of syllables.

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.

This is new from Sept 2015 for L2 reading.
It is a list of writing techniques – the name of the technique, a description and an example.

Editor’s note (updated 7/5/2017)
Also ideal for GCSE English revision.
Covers 14 techniques: similes, hyperbole, alliteration, rhetorical questions, superlatives, personification, analogy, colloquialisms, cliches, onomatopoeia, oxymorons, imperatives, metaphors and emotive language.