This section of English Raven lists new materials/activities being added to the site as they are completed (and before I can make a decision where to slot them elsewhere on the site!). Below you will find brief summaries of the activities and the menu to the left will direct you to pages containing fuller explanations and applicable downloads.
I have received a lot of requests for picture stories from site visitors. This section contains 12 picture stories, each containing 4 or 5 images that go together to form a simple visual story. There is a downloadable teacher's guide explaining how picture stories can be used in the classroom and various templates for students to write or draw stories of their own.
This supplement attempts to assist teachers and students in the externalizing and analyzing of interlanguage. It operates under the principle that one of the first and most important processes involved in language development involves the key aspect of "noticing". The Language Development Diary may help encourage this process and generate more genuine motivation for self-correction and 'focus on form'.
This is a method/material designed to help students build their own English speeches, beginning with topic brainstorming and composition using their L1 and moving through a process that brings the speech into the realm of English, where it then becomes the center-piece for activities involving sentence stress and vocabulary development.
Word Finds are generally a popular activity with young learners, so long as they are nicely formatted and not applied too repetitively. These word finds work on the development of 'lexical sets' in application to the three levels (Starters, Movers and Flyers) of the internationally renowned Cambridge Young Learner English tests.
These materials can be used to assist students in building a whole city. Comprises 12 A4-sized street grid maps that slot together to create a city, along with literally hundreds of color images of shops and places that can be cut out and applied to the map. A great project idea!
Balancing meaning and form in language learning can be a difficult task, and the Language Shack activity is an innovative quiz approach to gap-filling which encourages students to pay as much attention to language forms and function words as they do to meaning-carrying content words.
