Bring dry lexical exercises to life: analyse all the language in them, round up with stress and paraphrase, board whole gapped sentences, then run a speaking task and reformulate what students tried to say.
Part 1: the teacher’s moves
- Before class, study the exercise for all the language present, not only the targets.
- Monitor pair-work; signal errors (“Uh-uh!” + point) without giving answers.
- Stop at ~60–70% done → pairs compare → whole-class round-up.
- In the round-up, stress-mark items (a-DDRESS) and paraphrase to elicit: “they might MMM street drinking… → BAN”.
- Board whole gapped sentences that extend the target items (prepared or improvised).
- Personal follow-up questions on the same language.
Part 2: getting students to use it
(source)
- A speaking task that needs the new language (e.g. rank three of ten social problems, explain why). Model your own answer first.
- Monitor and note what students try to say.
- Board grammaticalised, gapped versions; elicit by paraphrase; then a second pair-change task.
- If you can’t reformulate live, pre-plan what students “MIGHT or COULD say”.
Limits
Takes longer than “checking answers”; depends on the teacher’s real-time reformulation skill.
Apply in my context (Claude)
- This is a concrete upgrade for the answer-check stage of every Prepare 2e exercise. It’s also a strong DELTA M2 systems lesson procedure (lexis LSA), because it makes noticing and recycling observable.
Connections
The 5 Rs of reactive teaching · Ambient language - exploit coursebook exercises beyond the targets · Teach lexically - collocations as minimum units of meaning