When teaching English grammar your book will probably have several ESL worksheets to drill the concept. These are useful exercises, but you will also want to get your students working together with the new material in context. This ESL activity has your class collaborating in a group with the goal of finding grammatical errors in a short passage that you have written out.

To start off, write a short passage out about anything you want. Keep the English at the level your students can understand. Include examples of the grammatical concept you are teaching that week. As you are writing this out, make ten grammar errors throughout the reading. Don’t circle or highlight the errors. Print out enough copies to hand out to your class. The students are going to read the passage in groups of threes and they are going to discuss what the errors are. Each group is to circle all of the errors that they find and they are to write in the correct answer.

When everyone has finished have your students go back to their seats and focus their attention on you. Show the class a version of the passage with all ten of the errors indicated. You can put this on an overhead projector or write it on the board if this is not available. Have your students compare their papers with yours to see if they selected the same trouble spots as you. Now, read through the passage stopping at all of the errors. Pick on a student to offer his version of the correction. Decide as a class if this is the right way to correct the error. Go through each one until you have corrected all of them.

Any grammar concept you are teaching will work for this activity. The trick is obviously coming up with your own story that includes the target grammar. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It just needs to make sense and be at the level of your ESL students. Make sure to spread out your highest performing students around the class. When the class has finished correcting the passage have a volunteer read the new version.