This activity has the motivational element of students not knowing exactly what the entire composition they help write will look like. The results are often funny and can generate a lot of speaking.

Give a piece of paper to each student. An instruction is then read to the students who must write down from their own experience or imagination the result of that instruction. The student then folds over the top of the page to cover the line they have written and then they pass it to the person on their left. The next instruction is then read by the teacher and the students write down the result, fold it over and pass it round again. Eventually, the piece of paper will end up with the person who first wrote on it. Students then open the paper and read the complete 'story'.

As an alternative, the teacher dictates small parts of a story and then the student completes the descriptions the teacher leaves out. The student then passes the paper to the person next to them who doesn't turn it over, but continues the dictation and then supplies another missing part.

Here's an example:

"One day a young boy went to? where did he go? Pass the paper round?

He crossed the street and saw a? what did he see?? who was dressed?How was he/she/it dressed?? Pass the paper round?" and so on.

When a student hands in a piece of written work and you mark it, correcting the mistakes and giving them back, how much do your students actually learn from all the time you've spent with a red pen in your hand? Probably, not a lot. This is certainly true of my Spanish written work. When I got it back, I really only wanted to know that I'd done okay. Yes, of course I made a note to go over the mistakes and write them down in a written errors book, but I never quite got round to it. What a waste. Surely, it's better to get the students to mark their own work from hints given by you as to their mistakes.

One quick way to do this is to read through their work and, instead of marking where the problems lie, just put a number next to each line, the number corresponding to the number of mistakes the student has made in that line. The student will then get back their composition with no red through it, just numbers down the margin. They must then spend five minutes checking through and re-reading their work, making corrections as they recognise them. It?s much easier to find a mistake in a line of text if you know there is one there. There are two main benefits to be gained from doing this :

1. Students spend mental energy proof-reading their texts, helping them notice their common mistakes, those they make time after time. This, if done often enough, will make them think about these mistakes whilst writing, so that hopefully they can be avoided during the writing as opposed to being noticed during the checking.

2. Teachers can distinguish between errors made because the student was lazy or sloppy and errors which need tackling in class because the student really didn't know the structure they attempted.

In exams where accurate writing skills are of benefit, this guided self-correction can be invaluable in improving students' written work.

This is an oldie, but a goody. It's a writing exercise that combines communication, grammatical accuracy and listening skills.

Get a written passage about 100-200 words long and tell your students to put down their pens and pay attention (of course they should be paying attention anyway!). Read the passage to them twice at normal speed, without telling them why you are reading it or what's going to happen next. Then write down certain words from the passage on the board in strict chronological order. Some people advocate writing just the nouns, or adjectives, some prefer a mixture (if I'm feeling cruel, I'll just write down the indefinite articles?only joking). Then students are told that, in pairs or groups, they must re-write the story as close to the original as possible, using a combination of their memories of the passage that was read to them, the prompts on the board and their own structural control. They will have a time limit, say, 20 minutes, and at the end of it, the passages will be collected in, and students will lose a point from a maximum of twenty for every mistake they make or every word that is different from the original. Finally, the passages are given back and the passages are read back to the students, and error correction can be done.