Language Teacher Toolkit: Steve Smith's blog

  Swapping sentences memory game (from an idea in Nick Bilbrough's 2011 book Memory Activities for Language Learning) Instructions. Hand out a slip of paper, each one with a sentence on. See below. Students move around the class. On approaching a partner they swap sentences, practise saying their partner’s sentence aloud several times, trying to memorise them. They move on to another person and repeat the process. Allow about 10-15 minutes of this, then pupils sit down and try to write out as many sentences as they can from memory. A good amount may be 5, but it depends on the class. Alternatively, write up about 15 sentences on the board from which pupils select one each to write on their own piece of paper. Once they have done so, remove the sentences from the board. Below are first a set of easy standard sentences for near-beginners. These are followed by a set of absurd sentences which might amuse the class. It doesn’t matter if a few pupils get the same sentences.