Friday 1 March 2013

ESL Picture Story - A Lexical Approach

Picture from The British Council

In this lesson, I used  Eric the Engine picture cards from the British Council's Learn English Kids site in order to generate lexical chunks.

Find the pictures here:

http://learnenglishkids.britishcouncil.org/en/short-stories/eric-the-engine

Simply log into the site, download the PDF picture story and cut up.

Of course, you can use any pictures for this activity. Even stick men drawings would suffice. 

Stage 1

Shuffle the cards and place them face down in front of the students - one set per group.

Stage 2

Divide the white board into 7 squares.

Stage 3

A student turns over the first card and then discusses the picture (encourage students to be as descriptive as possible) 

Stage 4

Feed back as a class and write emergent lexical chunks, single nouns, verbs, adverbs on the white board. Elicit to fill any holes in language. After card 1 has been discussed, note this language in box 1 on the board. Repeat for all seven pictures.

Stage 5

Once the eliciting and noting is complete, students discuss the story order. Then rub out and correct the box numbers on the board. Encourage students to justify the order. 

"Why do you think that picture comes next?"

Stage 6 

In pairs students tell the story to each other incorporating the lexical chucks and other language on the board. Set a 3 minute limit per student.

Stage 7

Students make a storyboard 

Enjoy

TM