5 activities to revise grammar

Do your students easily get bored when it is time to revise grammar or do grammar tests? Are you searching for creative techniques to revise English grammar with your students? If yes, go on reading today’s article. Taking into consideration the crucial importance of revision in the ESL classroom, we have prepared a list of the best ways to revise grammar with English learners.

Dixit (for all levels)

Dixit is a storytelling board game that consists of colourful picture cards. Students make up stories around these cards. The most important thing here is to assign the task correctly. If your main purpose is to revise Present tenses or Past tenses, ask your students to create a story using these tenses respectively. If you want them to concentrate on ‘will + infinitive’, ask them to look at the pictures and make predictions on what will happen next. In fact, this task can be carried out in writing activities as well. Thus, your students will revise the target grammar and improve their writing skills.

With higher-level students, you can try more complicated tasks. In case you want to revise Conditionals, ask your students to pick up a card and write a conditional that describes it, e.g. “If the seaman hadn’t sailed on that stormy day, he wouldn’t have drowned”. Then students mingle. They show their cards to their new partners and ask them to come up with a conditional. Students score a point if they come up with a correct and logical conditional sentence.

You can download Dixit cards from Pinterest, order them on Amazon or just Google them. Additionally, you can watch the video to find out the main rules of playing Dixit and adapt it to your classes.

Grammar Flashcards (for elementary and pre-intermediate levels)

Teaching online has led me to come up with more and more new ideas on how to revise grammar with my remote students. I have made my own flashcards on different topics of grammar, that always come in handy. Mainly I use them not to interrupt my students to correct their mistakes, and finally, they turned out to be useful instruments to revise grammar. I just show the corresponding card and ask them to brainstorm grammar ideas connected with this special word. Let’s take ‘will’: they speak about its usage in the sentence and word order, make examples with each point and analyse them. Of course, this activity can be applied in higher grades as well. But intermediate and higher-level students may sometimes find it not so challenging.

Storyboards (for elementary — intermediate levels)

Storyboards are stories in the pictures. They serve a great tool not only for improving speaking skills and breaking the silence in the classroom but also for revising English grammar. You just need to tell your students in advance what grammar material they should use in their stories. I mostly download storyboards from Pinterest. But many more resources can be found on different websites as well. You can read more about using storyboards in lessons in this article.

Basketball (for beginner and elementary levels)

For this activity, you will need a large container to use as a basket and paper balls. Each student should use balls of different colours. Ask them questions with the target grammar. They should answer them using the corresponding tense or grammar structure. If they answer correctly, they throw the ball into the basket and score points. The winner is the student who has thrown the most balls into the basket.

Jeopardy (beginner-intermediate levels)

Divide your whiteboard into columns for grammar structures and tenses and rows with different point values. Divide your students into two teams. Each team chooses a category and the points they want to play for: We choose Present Tenses for 25 points. Ask them questions with Present tenses or give a list of sentences with tense mistakes. If they guess the right answer, they score points. Adapt this game to any level of difficulty and include as many categories as you wish.

You can find online jeopardy games here and here or download Powerpoint template here.

Apply the activities mentioned in the article and spice up your revision lessons. Grammar revision will be a fun and amazing activity for your students.

What activities do you use for grammar revision?