Low-Prep Language Teaching Activities Using Just One Text

I sometimes lose inspiration for activities to carry out in my French classes which will really stimulate learning.

So I decided to put together a list of simple, no-prep activities that I can use with almost any text. Partly to help you… and partly to stop my own brain from turning round and round.

All of these activities work with any text that’s appropriate to the level and topic you’re teaching.

Take a suitable text and try one (or several) of the following:

1. Read it aloud for general understanding
   Ask comprehension questions to check meaning — or play a recording instead (there are over 150 recordings in the Resource Centre if you want to outsource the reading to someone with a better accent than yours).

2. Turn it into a dictation
   Old-school? Yes. Effective? Also yes.

3. Read it aloud but include mistakes
   Add incorrect information or grammar and ask students to spot and correct the errors. They love catching you out. It’s basically educational revenge.

4. Ask students to write a headline
   This forces them to identify the main idea and summarise without panicking.

5. Cut it up and reorder it
   Print the text, chop it into sections and ask students to put it back together in the right order.

6. Oral retelling
   Students retell the text to their partner in their own words.

7. Two truths and a lie
   Write three sentences about the text on the board: two true, one false. Students must spot the lie.

8. Tense or person transformation
   Choose one or more sentences and rewrite them in another tense or another grammatical person.

9. Rebuild from memory
   Students rewrite the text as closely as possible from memory.
   They are allowed to ask three questions to jog their memory (not forty-seven).

10. Summarise
    Orally or in writing, using a specific word limit. This stops “summaries” turning into enthusiastic rewrites of the entire text.

Putting my own advice into practice

I was recently out of inspiration for my class of improvers, so I decided to take my own advice..

I was introducing the simple future tense, and I wanted to go carefully so that the learners could really embed the learning rather than just vaguely recognise it and move on with their lives.

So I took a text from the Grab & Go Resource Centre and repurposed it into the simple future tense.

We then worked on the same text in several different ways:

1. We did a vocabulary preparation activity.

2. They completed a simple listening activity.

3. I cut the text up and asked them to put it back together from memory.

4. We did a dictation exercise (I read it aloud, they wrote it down - not exactly revolutionary, but oh-so effective).

5. Finally, the learners worked in pairs to summarise the text orally.

What worked particularly well was the recycling of the same language.

The learners became comfortable with the vocabulary through the prep activity, processed the text thoroughly through listening and dictation, and were then able to speak independently about the topic.

In other words:
✔ vocabulary was embedded
✔ the grammar was reinforced
✔ and they actually spoke without looking terrified

I was genuinely pleased with how well the activity worked - which is not something I say lightly.

This is something I’m going to be working on more and more with all my groups, because it:

• reduces planning time

• increases reuse of good material

• and avoids me having to endlessly over-prep

Need a text?

If you'd like to grab your copy of the exact worksheet I used click the link here - there are lots more like this is in the Resource Centre or ask ChatGpt to write you a text