10 great esl exercises to practice WRITING
It’s no secret that writing isn’t high on the list of favourite exercises for any ESL student. In a world where written communication is limited to 140 characters it’s hard to blame the youngest learners for dreading any longer forms of text. While older learners don’t suffer from this generational disadvantage they often shy away from writing exercises as it predominantly exposes the many mistakes they tend to make, which is always a hard blow to the ego.
Whatever the reason, writing seems to be at the bottom of every student’s desirable skills to practice. This makes it especially hard for the teacher to motivate their pupils when the time comes to pick up the pen.
Luckily, we’ve compiled a list of activities that make practicing writing skills a lot easier (and hopefully more fun).
A4 Story
Level: A2 and above
This is a super easy game which provides endless fun for the learners (especially teenagers).
The procedure:
1. Provide each student in the class with a blank A4 piece of paper.
2. Instruct the class to start a story by writing one sentence on the top of the page. It can start with: Once upon a time… but it doesn’t have to. Only 1 sentence.
3. Next, tell them to pass this page to the next person sitting closest to them. Everyone should have someone else’s story in front of them.
4. Instruct them to read it and add another sentence. Only one!
5. When everyone’s finished writing, instruct them to pass this paper to the same person as the last time.
6. This continues until all the students have written in all the stories and the papers returned to their original owners.
7. Students read all the stories out loud and vote for the best one.
Secret Conversations
Level: A2 and higher
If you’re lucky enough to work with teenagers this is an exercise for you. There is one, age old, secret activity all teenagers will do at some point in their educational career – sending secret notes to their classmates. I’ve done it. My parents have done it. And so did you. So here’s a writing activity inspired by something that students already enjoy.
The procedure:
1. Tell your students to rip a 3 blank pages from their notebooks and decide on 3 classmates they’d like to address.
2. Next, ask them to write a personal message to each of the 3 classmates, each message on a separate piece of paper.
3. Fold it, write the recipient’s name and send it away.
With 3 different recipients, statistically, each student will engage in a minimum of 9 different conversations. That’s a lot of writing!
What’s left for you to do is to sit comfortably on your teacher’s chair and enjoy the 25 min break 
Note: it’s possible that they’ll quickly get so engaged in the conversations that they’ll start gossiping or even forget that this is still an esl task. To make it more official you may distribute empty envelopes at the beginning of the lesson. Receiving an envelope with their name (as opposed to crumpled piece of paper) will act as a visual reminder.
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