Back to the Well
TOOLBOX
Vocabulary Focus

Devise simple word-collection tasks: several vocabulary activities can begin with collecting items in
a grammatical category. For example, list all adjectives, nouns, or verbs from a section of text; then,
analyze the resulting list:
o You can classify adjectives as having gradable or absolute meanings; determine if any
classifications are ambiguous. {Template A}
o Ask students to put all the adjectives, nouns, or verbs from a text into groups: positive,
negative, and neutral meanings. Often, assignment of words to the neutral group can be
debatable; encourage learners to share their opinions with their classmates. {Template A}
o Work on recalling or looking up the opposites of adjectives, nouns, or verbs: do all the words
have opposites? {Template A}
o For nouns, introduce the idea of complementaries (e.g., knife and fork). {Template B}

Create semantic maps with a word from the text as the centre. Is the word part of a lexical set? Have
groups or pairs find other members of the set (for instance, a word like health may be part of a
lexical set including flu, headache and aspirin). {Template B}

Design rational cloze exercises based on part or all of an actual text. Leave gaps that focus
repeatedly on recently taught vocabulary.
{Cloze generator tool http://www.oit.ac.jp/ip/~kamiya/mwb/mwb.html}

Create opportunities to practise speaking by using vocabulary from the passage. {Template C}
Syntax Focus

As with vocabulary above, numerous tasks can begin with a collection activity. {Template D}
o Target structures instead of words. For instance, find all the nouns that involve two or three
words in a complex group, and identify the head noun.
o Pick out adjectives that appear before nouns or after be: which of these can or cannot be used
in both positions (big or lovely can, but not asleep or unwell).
o Identify main vs. subordinate clauses and explain the relationships among them.

Practice speaking, listening and re-wording: for example, the teacher says a sentence from the text in
the affirmative and students change it to the negative, and vice versa (or singular/plural, present/past,
etc.).
Based upon / extracted from “Sending Them Back to the Well: Slowing Down, Turning Fewer Pages, and Engaging Learners More Deeply,” by
Chirawibha Sivell and John Sivell, Contact Magazine, August 2012.
Back to the Well
TOOLBOX

Explore various types of sentence restoration tasks: begin with correction.
o Choose one paragraph at a time; use a tool such as www.gorewrite.com/modify.html to
remove punctuation and/or capitalization. Students restore the paragraph.
o If students have computer access, enter sentences from the text in www.SpellingCity.com to
allow students to unscramble them.
o Use www.toolsforenglish.com online tool or www.teachers-pet.org downloadable tool for
Windows to create scrambled sentence worksheets based on the chosen text.
Discourse Focus

Find lexical chains: identify chains of synonyms, hyponyms, superordinates and/or antonyms that
foster discourse coherence by recurring throughout a text; e.g., Ottawa  capital  city  citizen.

Work on various types of paragraph-writing tasks that foreground discourse structure. For example,
restore a jumbled paragraph. {Templates E1, E2, E3}
For an online tool, see http://www.toolsforenglish.com/tools/scramble-paragraphs/.

Re-apply experience of overall discourse structures and supporting discourse markers in a new
composition, perhaps one that is parallel to the original while different in content. {Template E3}

Match related sentences or larger sections from different parts of a text in such a way as to highlight
the workings of key discourse patterns like comparison/contrast, cause/effect, or general/particular.

Examine how headings and paragraph divisions reflect the discourse structure; invite students to
experiment with alternative headings and divisions.

Building on students’ experience with simple dictation, move on to dicto-gloss tasks.

Have students, in pairs or trios, select words from a passage that interest them and find as many
potential synonyms as they can for each of the words. Then have students decide whether each
synonyms works or does not work in the given passage. {Template F}

Playfully provoke learners by presenting a series of oral (or written) statements that sometimes are—
but sometimes are not—either true according to the original text, or at least consistent with it.
Deviant sentences may be literally incorrect or just inferentially unfounded. Once the class gets the
idea, individuals may propose their own sentences for classmates to judge.
Based upon / extracted from “Sending Them Back to the Well: Slowing Down, Turning Fewer Pages, and Engaging Learners More Deeply,” by
Chirawibha Sivell and John Sivell, Contact Magazine, August 2012.