ESOL Resources

Some games to play with literacy or Functional English groups for revision.
Ideal for Entry 3-Level 2

Editor’s note
The students make the games, play them and then discuss them. A great combination!

This activity encourages ESOL students:
- To communicate with each other while moving around the classroom,
- To revise Past Simple (questions and answers),
- To practise basic numeracy (subtraction).

With extensive teachers’ notes

Photos and pictures to match with accounts of real emergency situations. All in the present tense. All the accounts are true. Accounts can be cut in to strips and given to pairs of learners who can put them in to a sequence to tell a story. Leads to discussion on how we tell a story, and how we sequence sentences to make sense.
Lots of new, real life vocabulary to provoke discussion.
Some stories shorter and simpler than others to allow for differentiation in group.

Used with an Entry Level 1 ESOL group.
1) Bring in some real objects such as a long red wool scarf, a green plastic bag, a small silver mobile phone. Discuss the word order used to describe them. Learners can describe their own bags, phones, and clothes as necessary and write some examples on the table.
2) Put the adjectives in order in the example sentences and check as a group.

Topics to discuss based on Ascentis ESOL Entry 2 Speaking and Listening exam. Learners work in groups of 3. Each is given a slightly different topic to prepare and discuss, all based around a theme. In this case jobs. They are all expected to demonstrate use of present simple, present continuous, past simple and future tenses, as appropriate.

Students fill in the blanks using the words given, and then they can use them in their own sentences. Very common words that I notice my students have trouble with.

Teaching learners at Entry Level I have found that many of them have difficulties using coins to pay for their snacks or checking their change.

This resource includes a collection of worksheets that start with several number sequences counting in twos, then move on to count the total value of different number of 2p coins and finish asking the learner to count the number of 2p coins that they need to make up different amounts. The sequence of worksheets is repeated counting in 5s and using 5p coins, then counting in 10s and using 10p coins.

This is great as a warm-up activity or a bit of end-of-term fun. It is suitable for a mixed ability group of numeracy learners, or indeed literacy or ESOL learners. This quiz tests learners’ knowledge of how old someone has to be in order to do certain things legally, e.g. be a blood donor. It can be used in small group or pair work (which worked well for me) as well as individually.

A 12-question test, designed for an Adult Numeracy class consisting largely of ESOL speakers.
Covers the terms “import” and “export”, since these often crop up in exams. Also mean, mode, median and range, and the meanings of “discount”, “under”, “approximately”, “difference” and “enlarged”. A little fraction revision, too: students have to identify 1/3 as “one-third”.

This is a reading exercise I will be using with my L1-2 readers here in the U.S.

My students all speak Spanish as their first language and there are many Spanish cognates in the text. We have also been working on “who/what/when/where/why” questions in class, so that is the focus of the questions.

Editor’s note Also suitable for Functional English.