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Same way question tags speaking activity

This activity aims at providing the students with real life context for using same way question tags. I encountered this grammar point in the coursebook, there was absolutely no context to it and my students took very little out of this class. Learning from my mistake of not offering extra speaking practice, I devised this brief speaking activity.

The Task

Students have to react to the situation accordingly, using same way question tags. You might want to try to work on the first one from each category with the whole group and then let your students work in pairs. Emphasise that it is all about trying to react naturally in a number of situations. If your students find some situations unbelievable or too artificial, encourage them to come up with some other examples.

Would like to see more ideas on how to incorporate fun grammar practice in your lessons? See this lesson plan idea focusing on using adverbs or this one about unreal past.

Personal Experience

It was super fun! My students did not limit themselves to just reacting, they acted out dialogues using the cues from the worksheet. I realised that when coming up against a bit vague or obscure grammar points, the best solution is to put them in a real-life context and let students practise and have fun. Same way question tags definitely are not discussed in detail by a lot of coursebooks and very often students end up very confused (as if ordinary question tags were not enough!) The remedy to that is fairly simple; personalising the topic and making it  a bit more fun is often enough to boost students’ confidence and make them feel they have just overcome a seemingly complicated grammar issue.

Material

Same way Question Tags

3 Comments

  1. I’m confused by this. What textbook were you using that taught these? As a native English speaker I can confirm that we do use the positive-positive question tags, but I have never used a negative-negative question tag. Those examples of the negative ones sound wrong to me.

    Love the activity though, and I think it would work brilliantly for the positive ones.

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