Today in class we worked on unit 9A from English File Upper-Intermediate Third Edition. After seeing examples and theory about linking words for contrast and purpose, the book offered an exercise called “Sentence race”, where students had to complete as many sentences as they could, from a set of eight stems. The instructions said “Try to complete as many sentences as you can in two minutes”.

I decided to adapt the exercise by extemporizing it. This is, I told my students to:

• Work in pairs
• Write their sentences in Socrative, where I had previously set up a quiz which contained the 8 beginnings of the sentence as 8 separate short-answer questions.
• Finish as many sentences as they could in 6 minutes

Nine pairs of students and a group of three carried out the activity.

• Two pairs could write an ending to all the sentences.
• The group of three managed to write seven of the eight endings.
• Two more pairs could complete six sentences. It was interesting to see that they chose which sentences they completed, they did not follow the order of the questions, but skipped two.
• Two more pairs completed the first five sentences.
• The remaining groups could only write between 3 and 4 sentences

I used the online stopwatch to control the time. Once the allowed 6 minutes were over, I projected the sentences and talked about them with students, highlighting good ideas and suggesting improvements.

If anyone is interested in running this exercise, you can use my quiz. The Socrative sharing code is SOC-34422420