ESL Sentence Examples

Using sample sentences taken directly from your ESL students is a great way for them to work on their editing and error recognition and corrections skills. There really isn't too much to complicate this idea as it is really quite simple in practice.

What you do is collect a series of sentence examples from your students' work. You can choose to select sentences that all display a similar problem (verb tense for example), or simply collect any examples you wish. I would suggest that you get permission from your students before you do this and then make sure to keep them anonymous. I've never had any student refuse, but it best to respect their privacy. On that note, be sure to choose sentences that are not personally revealing either in terms of personal information/experiences or just basic "I can guess who wrote this" information.

So what do you do with these example sentences? Well you give them to your students to work on. Their goal should be to find and correct any errors in logic, grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice etc. Of course you as the teacher can limit them to working on only very specific issues (find all spelling mistakes). I typically give 3-4 sentences out to a class and give them about 20-30 minutes to work on them. Usually individually at first, and them in pairs or threes. Once you think they have done enough, be sure to go over them in class.

What you will find is that as long as you have used sentences from students at the same basic ESL level, they will struggle mightily with this task as they are trying to find the same errors that they typically make.

If you have access to a computer lab, you can have them do this in a word processor which allows them to manipulate and move the words around very easily. It is also very good to do the review on a computer with projector so that they can see you move the words around as well.

Without fail students come away from this activity with a much greater appreciation for error recognition and correction.

A simple extension of this into the speaking realm is to have students transcribe some free speech (a commentary on a picture perhaps) and then do the error hunt and fix afterwards.

Here are a few examples to give you an idea of some basic ESL sentence examples you could work with. There are from an intermediate academic prep class I taught a few years back.

1. It is hard to see snowing in my hometown so I am very exciting.
2. It is unreasonable for me, in fact I should be exciting and happy. Because she studys in University of British Columbia.
3. When my friend has arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia. This feeling is stronger than before.
4. Braised pork slices is my favorite but my mother is board chairman in her company she hasn’t time to cook for me. but she teached me to cook some of my favorite food, especially when I came to Canada.
5. I see other people wear less clothes than me, sometimes I think “why they can wear so less, and Don’t they feel cold?”.

Example sentences are very easy to collect, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't actually use these. Use examples from your class, they will match your students' levels better.

taken from: teachers-call.com