ESOL Resources

This lesson is based around the story of Birkenhead resident Charlie Wright, who famously refused to leave his house when the local council decided to demolish the estate around it. Students have the opportunity to discuss themes of community, identity and change. Students watch a short documentary about Charlie from the BBC archives and answer comprehension questions. Charlie's story provides a context for a role play task whereby learners have to decide how best to regenerate Charlie's lost neighbourhood.

I made this resource for my ESOL Functional  Skills Level 1&2 class. Learners have to find where articles are missing and type them in (a/an/the). Uses three increasingly complex/lengthy texts: a charity letter, an OU magazine article and some recipe instructions.

Find the missing articles: 3 page worksheet (Google docs)  - best viewed in "print" mode.

Based on Maggie Harnew's Halloween Complex Sentences resource, this resource is aimed at Entry 3 ESOL students working towards the City and Guilds ESOL writing assessment, but may also be useful for Level 1 students.  Students look at examples of complex sentences and answer some questions about them. Finally they are asked to complete some complex sentences, as in Task 1 of the C&G assessment. 

Update 24/2/22: written by Sharon Roberts and Alexandra Bates, both of Essex ACL. 
This is a fun activity which encourages ESOL learners to engage with digital technology and transacting online. It provides opportunity to explore vocabulary related to shopping while also discussing the advantages of shopping for food online. It can be adapted to all levels and can be extended for a longer activity if required.

Editor's note

Use the family tree to help write simple and compound sentences about your family. Written for E1-2 ESOL  but also suitable for E1-2 Functional English.

Editor's notes

A lovely way to reinforce sentence structure and basic punctuation, and (for ESOL) teach key family words such as cousin, grandmother, nephew, etc. Worksheet with detailed mapping and sample answers available in a  separate document.

Based on a thought provoking Guardian article about same sex adoptive parenting, this Google Docs resource focuses on grammar (past perfect), working out vocabulary and discussion.  

Reading text and related questions (Google docs)  - best viewed in "print" mode.

Editor's note

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.  

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

British Values project based on ICT Level 2 City and Guilds covering all content including

• Task 1 - Internet Research, Word
• Task 2 - Excel IF / AND, charts, formatting, formulae,  etc
• Task 3  - PPT with images, animation, etc.
• Task 4 -  Mail Merge (needs memo.txt and employees.txt - see below)
• Task 5 - Word, poster
• Task 6  - Access database (needs training.txt file - see below)
• Task 7 -  General ICT  Knowledge 

ICT Project about British Values - based on City & Guilds Level 1 Functional ICT assessments.

• Task 1 - Internet research and copying and pasting
• Task 2 - Excel activity - including formula, adding a chart, formatting
• Task 3 - PowerPoint activity - adding slides, animation, images etc.
• Task 4 - Create a poster on Word
• Task 5 - Databases - sort and filter 
• Task 6 - General ICT Knowledge