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Ask Thomas is a periodic column by veteren ESL teacher, Thomas Lavelle. Thomas Lavelle received his Masters in TESL from Birmingham and has taught ESL in many countries, but currently teaches at a university in the United States.

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List-Group-Label for Speaking and Writing Development

Today I'm going to introduce an activity for low- intermediate and above learners of English which I like to use as an organizer for either a speaking or writing activity. In English, if I have to speak or write about a topic I am very familiar with, my background knowledge on that topic immediately organizes itself into categories and the information, opinions, etc.. flow out easily. But for foreign learners, speaking or writing continuously is difficult even if the vocabulary and grammar  level is adequate for the task. One reason may be that the information is not organized in their minds in a way that they can retrieve it quickly and easily. I'm a big fan of helping students get organized. The instructional routine below is designed to give learners a way to organize a topic they want to speak or write at length about. It also works well as a vocabulary developer. I stole it from a reading activity but I never use for that. It is called List-Group-Label. I expanded it for my own purposes.

Step One: Model the activity.

 Pick a topic that you know your students are pretty familiar with and put it on the board. Let's say, for illustration, 'baseball'.

Step Two: Ask students to call out any words that come to their minds about baseball and write it at random on the board. ( i.e.  inning, umpire, hot dogs, strike, home run, high salaries, baseball strike, Cal Ripken, beer, glove, catcher, peanuts, steroids, Sammy Sosa, seventh- inning stretch, fans, . . .)

Keep going until the energy runs down.

Step Three: Tell students to look at all the words. Get them to find pairs of words that are related in some way that makes sense to them and list  them in pairs:

Step Four:  After as many words as possible have been paired up, put the remaining words either under one of the categories, or keep them by themselves. Students can also now add any new words they think of  and place them together.

Step Five:  Now tell students to give each category a label:

Step Six: Students now have the whole topic organized in a way they can use to express themselves. They could use it to inform someone about baseball who didn't know about the game, they could develop just one aspect of the topic as a persuasive argument speech or essay for the outrageous salaries players make or they could present a history of baseball.If they were to continue with this topic, they now have to decide the order of presentation, which categories to delete, add information, and they would put some grammar and  linking words and phrases to all these words. They can even make a graphic organizer or outline that helps them decide the order they want to present. Tell them that they will use this process to create their own self expression on any topic they feel strongly about and would like to develop for expression.

Step Seven: Their assignment would be to prepare in advance a five or ten minute talk or  prepare an essay on another topic using the method modeled above.

 Comments: For a  speaking activity, of course, nobody in real life, has the luxury of preparing topics in advance. We usually have to do everything spontaneously. But I know from my own foreign language experience that having a repertoire of  prepared speech routines on a topic has been very helpful to me. So the above activity can give students a way to accumulate routines for future reference. They are well organized in the mind for recall. They have rehearsed them and have presented them before their classmates.

What I like about it is activity is  that the whole process is decided by the student and given meaning by the student. I'm also a big fan of repetition in language learning so,  for both speaking and writing, I always want to give them a chance to repeat the same topic several times. I come back to it  at intervals. An evaluation might consist of checking both the process and then the final product.  This has been part of my teaching tool kit for several years now. Give it try . Develop it your own way. Make it better. Let me know how it works out for your students.