I very much enjoyed Diana Bauducco’s article in MET 34.2 ‘Death by worksheet’, not least because I often find myself clearing away the worksheets left behind by my colleagues’ students before my class can start. This breaks my heart on two levels; one, I lament the damage we are doing to our planet, and two, I can see that by leaving the worksheets behind, the students hold this learning material in such little regard that it evidences the arguments that Diana was making about student engagement and personalisation. The kind of worksheets I often find in my classroom fall into two broad categories: ready-made lessons on a current topic made by online providers, and photocopiable materials from teachers’ books provided by the publisher. I know what my colleagues would say if I discussed the use of these with them. They would argue that they don’t have time to make their own materials and, what’s more, they are not paid for that time. This is fair enough. But over the past year, my school has been trying to reduce its paper usage and, therefore, I have been trying to find ways to go paperless in my classroom. So, in this article, I want to suggest ways to create low-paper, high-interest materials that are easy to prepare and will engage and motivate your learners.
But over the past year, my school has been trying to reduce its paper usage and, therefore, I have been trying to find ways to go paperless in my classroom.
Ready-made lesson worksheets
Let’s start with the ‘ready-made’ lesson worksheets. If you look at these, you will see they usually follow a fairly predictable lesson formula.
- Create interest
- Activate schemata / prediction
- Reading / listening work
- Some language work
- Discussion / follow-up
Once you realise this, all you need is a range of ways to do each stage and almost anything can become a lesson. Diana talks about the time teachers take to find appropriate worksheets for their lessons, I would argue that their time would be better spent looking for authentic materials and then applying their own ideas to the material they find.
Where do I find my materials?
Instagram tends to be my go-to, but also short films on YouTube, the first paragraph of an article on a news website, a verse from a song, pictures, cartoons, traditional stories and adverts all provide a rich source of material for me to utilise. I tend to have a less-is-more approach, using short texts or films to motivate my students to produce English rather than me providing more input for them.
Once I have selected something to use, I then apply the pattern I spoke about above to provide my lesson framework. We start with the creating interest and activating schemata. These might be seen as similar things, but I think of them as a funnel, going from the general to the more specific. So, creating interest might be a picture to discuss, or a word about the topic to start a word association mind map, or a general question about the topic to find out what the students already know. During this stage I try to keep the conversation general and give little away about the specific topic.
Then, I will move on to the next stage, telling the students what we are going to listen to / watch / read / look at and get them to do something with that information. This might include asking students to write questions they would like the answers to or asking them to do a KWL prediction (know, would like to know, learnt). Alternatively, I could ask them to research the topic in the target language or their own language and share what they have found with the class in English. Of course, I can simply ask them to predict what they think will be in the text or add a bit more spice by doing a jigsaw prediction. A jigsaw prediction is when you give different students in the class different information, maybe one group gets a title, and one gets the picture. In their first groups, ask them to discuss and predict based on the information they have and then regroup them with someone who had different information and get them to pool their knowledge and come up with a new prediction.
The reading / listening / watching stage is then quite straight forward as the students are doing the task to confirm what they have done in the prediction stage. For example, can they answer their questions? Is their research borne out in the text? Were their predictions accurate? One gist task I used recently was asking my students to guess why I hated the video I was about to show them. A lot of videos or articles lend themselves to a chunking approach, where you show part of the film or ask the students to read part of the text, stop and ask students to discuss and update their predictions and then play or show the next part. If you want a more thorough task, ask students to take notes while reading or listening. I might guide them on what to take notes on or allow them to choose what they find interesting.
When working with authentic material, students like to have some language input as well. We can do this by asking them to underline the tenses that are used in the text and then explaining why they have been used. Or look at the structure of the text and discuss how it is organised. Or we could ask students to pick out vocabulary that would fit into a lexical set. To encourage learner agency, it’s a nice idea for students to identify words or phrases that they’re not sure of the meaning of and look them up themselves and then share what they found with other students or translate them into their own language.
Finally, I want the students to use the information they have learnt from the text and maybe produce something of their own. This could be a simple discussion of the issues raised but there are plenty of other things you can do. My favourite activity at the moment is to ask students to work in groups and write a summary of the text. I often set this up as if they are sending a text or voice message to someone to tell them about what they have done in class. They write it on a mini-whiteboard and pass them around when finished. Alternatively, they could write an under-the-line comment, (the kind of comment you find below a YouTube video or a newspaper article) and then pass them to the next group who have to comment on the comment. Another favourite is asking them to write new questions they would like to ask the author or maker of the video and them pass them to another group who have to try to answer them. And finally, I might ask them to create their own voiceover for the video or create a director’s storyboard for a text or story.
You might want them to be more creative, so, for example, when we watched a video about the world’s most expensive strawberry, I asked my students to make an advert for that strawberry, and when we watched a video of a viral marketing campaign for a Miele vacuum cleaner the students had to create their own viral campaign for our school. My students have also recently made a time capsule, written a newspaper article about a gardening project in Brazil and, after watching a YouTube short film, made their own movies.
I have not reinvented the wheel with these activities, I have followed a fairly standard lesson outline, but I have created a more personalised approach to the material, which I hope will encourage my students to engage more with it and allow them to be creative. to share ideas. and be critical thinkers and I have used little or no paper.
Photocopiable worksheets
Let’s turn to the other type of worksheets, the photocopiable worksheets that provide extra grammar or vocabulary practice. How can we avoid these? Let’s look at three typical teaching scenarios.
Grammar
Imagine you are doing a grammar lesson on the past simple and continuous, and the students are confronted with practice that looks like this.
My sister (laughed / was laughing) when I (entered / was entering) the room.
The doorbell (was ringing / rang), while I (was cooking / cooked) dinner.
There are a few things you can do with this after the students have found the right answer.
For example, the students could use the wrong answers to write new sentences.
My sister laughed when she saw my new coat.
I was entering the room when my phone buzzed.
Alternatively, you could assign one sentence to each pair and they have to act out the scenarios to show the differences in meaning.
Or you could ask them questions to help them imagine the situation. Why was she laughing? Who was at the door? What were you cooking? What happened to the food when you answered the door?
Finally, give the students a picture or ask them to find one of their own and ask them to write sentences using the target language on mini-whiteboards. They then pass these to another group who have to identify the tenses used and determine if they have used them correctly.
Imagine you are teaching the second conditional and there is an activity asking students to match two halves of sentences, I ask them to cover the second halves and come up with their own ideas before looking at the coursebook answers and doing the original matching activity. Alternatively, we do it as per the coursebook in one lesson and then cover the second halves of the second sentences in the next lesson and ask them to come up with their own ideas. The students can then pass these to another group to do another matching activity.
These simple activities can be adapted to nearly any grammar point.
Vocabulary
Imagine you are doing a vocabulary matching activity matching words to pictures. I might start this with asking students to cover the words and see if they know the names for the items in the pictures and only then ask them to match. After the students have done the matching, ask them to write their own sentences using the words. I use mini-whiteboards for this. When they’ve finished, ask them to delete the vocabulary items and pass the boards to another group to fill in the blanks. The students have made the photocopiable material for you. They then pass the boards on again and the third group have to decide if the answers make sense. Finally, the students could ask an AI picture generator to make a picture using some of the words or, if you are worried about the environmental impact of AI, ask them to draw their own.
Focus, analyse, manipulate
These activities help students to really focus on what we already have in front of us without teachers needing to find extra resources. They encourage students not just to choose the right answer and move on, but to analyse the language and manipulate it – which is surely better than just doing the same type of exercise again on a worksheet. Once you start doing these types of activities, more and more ideas will come to you.
Using worksheets can be a safe way to plan a lesson, but sometimes all it takes is a bit of courage to go your own way. As Diana says in her article, we need to trust ourselves and have the professional confidence to give it a go, and, might I add, trust our students to bring their own creativity, curiosity and willingness to learn to the class. Give these activities a go and let me know how it goes and let me know your ideas.
