Interacting with a peer from a different part of the world is one of the best ways for students to learn about experiences, ways of living, and points of view different from their own. Thankfully, today’s technology makes it easier than ever before for teachers to set up such interactions.

Matching students with an international pen pal gives them the opportunity to ask questions and learn about the daily life of a student from another country. In this activity, students will also share information about their lives and experiences in order to help their pen pals learn more about what life is like where they live.

High beginner to advanced

Reading and writing

During this ongoing activity, students will be able to participate in the following tasks:

• Communicate in English with a peer from another part of the world
• Develop informal reading and writing skills

• A world map
• Notebooks or paper and pencils
• Chart paper or a chalkboard/whiteboard and writing utensils
• A means of exchanging international letters, such as through e-mail, through file-sharing services (for example, Dropbox or Google Drive), or through a postal service
• If mailing letters, large mailing envelopes (to hold all students’ letters) and postage

Initially, this activity requires 1–3 class periods of 45–60 minutes to explain the relationship, to brainstorm questions, and to write the first letter. The amount of time required after these initial stages will depend on how much support students need when writing letters. After sending the first letter, students should be able to read replies from their pen pals and write a response letter in 1–2 class periods.

• The first step in this activity is to establish a relationship with an English teacher in a different country. There are many places to look for potential partner teachers, including your own personal network of English teachers, the American English for Educators Facebook page, Skype in the Classroom, or PenPal Schools. Explain that you would like students to be able to write letters to each other to learn more about each other’s countries and lives. Letters can be handwritten and mailed or sent via e-mail if your students have access. Teachers should agree upon how the letters will be exchanged and how often students will write to each other.
• Keep in mind your class size and students’ ages when establishing pen pals. Try to find a class that has close to the same number of students as yours and that has students close in age to your students.

o   If there are extra students, you can assign two pen pals to a more advanced student in your class who could manage writing multiple letters.

o   Students who are one grade level or year away from each other should still be acceptable for pen pals, but same-age peers may be best because students will most likely relate to each other more.

• Share a list of students’ names with the teacher from the other class. (For privacy, you may choose to only share students’ first names and last initials; for example, “Sarah B.”) Decide how students will be paired. Some teachers prefer to pair students of the same sex and with similar interests, if possible. However, students may gain more from the activity if the pairs are random. The pairing of students will be guided by the framework of your culture and context, as well as that of the other group.
• Discuss the details with the other teacher in advance so that students can begin writing to each other as soon as you introduce the activity in class. For example, decide how students will exchange letters: through e-mail, through file-sharing (such as Google Drive or Dropbox), or through the mail (one option is to mail students’ letters in one large envelope to the other school). Also choose the dates to exchange letters, and consider how much class time you can devote to students reading and writing letters.

1. Introduce the activity to your students. For example, you could say, “I have been in contact with a teacher from [COUNTRY]. We are going to start writing letters/e-mails with his/her students who are also studying English. This will be an ongoing project, and you will write and receive letters with one of the students from the class in [COUNTRY] several times during our course/school year. By exchanging letters, you will get to learn about how students in [COUNTRY] live, and they will also get to learn more about your life.”
2. Explain to students that they will be matched with one student from the partner class to exchange letters with him or her. If there are any students who will have more than one pen pal, you can also let them know at that time.
3. Using a world map or globe, help students to locate the country where their pen pals live. Ask students to write down what they think life is like in the place where their pen pals live. If there is enough time, students can then discuss their ideas in small groups or discuss their ideas as a whole class.
4. Ask students questions about the other place. Here are some possible questions to ask:
   • What do you think life is like in ________?
   • What is the weather like?
   • What do people eat?
   • What languages do people speak?
   • What do you imagine a classroom might look like in ________?
   • What hobbies or activities do you think students your age do for fun?
   • What challenges do you think students face?
   • What do you think a student your age plans for their future in ________?
5. As students share their ideas, write the ideas on the board or on chart paper. Another option is for students to write down the ideas in their notebooks. This list of students’ ideas about life in the other place should be saved in some way so that students can think about these ideas later on when writing to their pen pal.
6. Next, ask students to think of information they would like to learn about their pen pals. Students can discuss their ideas in groups or as a whole class. Make a list of these questions as well, and save this list for future use. For example, the questions can be written on chart paper and displayed in the classroom for students to refer to later, or the questions can be written on the board for students to copy into their notebooks.
7. Remind students that when writing to their pen pals, they should also share information about themselves and their lives. You may want to create a list of things that students could share, such as their age, number of family members, favorite hobbies, favorite subjects, etc. Students can help think of ideas for this list. Again, this list can be posted on chart paper to use later, or students can copy the list from the board.
8. Talk about the structure of the letter students will write. If needed, review the elements of a letter, such as the date, the greeting, the closing, etc. Remind students that in the body of the letter they should share information about themselves as well as ask questions to learn about their pen pal.
9. Modeling a letter from start to finish is one option. Or, if your students are more advanced and are familiar with writing letters, you can briefly discuss the structure.
10. Provide students with some time to write their letters. Offer them help as needed depending on their proficiency level. For instance, beginner-level students might benefit from sentence frames such as “My name is ________. I am ____ years old and am from ________. I go to ________ school. I have ____ brothers and ____ sisters.” More advanced students may be able to write independently or even complete their letter as a homework assignment.
11. Students can write letters by hand, or if you plan to share them electronically, they can type them on a computer. However, students should not send the letters or e-mails until you have had a chance to review the content.
12. Once students have had enough time to write their letters, review all of the letters to be sure that they meet the goal of promoting an exchange of information. While you may wish to let students correct errors that might cause misunderstanding, remember that the pen pal activity is also an opportunity for students to practice English, and therefore the letters do not have to be perfect.
13. Once the letters are ready, you can send them to the partner class. Your students should also receive letters around the same time.
14. When your students receive letters, give them time to read the letters and to share information about their pen pal with their classmates. Each time your class gets letters, you can remind them of their list of initial ideas about the partner class and their way of life and then discuss whether their initial ideas were correct or if they have learned something new. If you wish, write down what they have learned on chart paper or on the board. Students can also write down or copy this information in their notebooks.
15. If needed, remind students how to respond to the letters they receive. They can react to something their pen pals have written, share new information, respond directly to their pen pals’ questions, or discuss something that is similar or different about their lives.
16. Students should continue to write back and forth as often as you and the partner teacher have agreed upon.
17. Throughout the exchange of pen pal letters, continue to have students reflect on what they are learning about the part of the world where their pen pals live. Encourage them to think carefully about first impressions they may have had that were actually wrong, or to find things in common in the ways they and their pen pals live. One possibility is for students to keep a journal and write about these reflections each time they get a new letter. Students can also participate in small-group or whole-class discussions about these topics, or even make a presentation about what they have learned from the experience.

By interacting directly with students around the same age, learners build a connection with someone outside of their own community. Despite the many differences that may exist in the daily lives of two students, getting to know each other by exchanging letters helps students to see that people often share common experiences, goals, and challenges.

Activities about current events are an excellent way to help students develop an awareness of stories and issues in communities outside of their own. Often, educators may only use an activity in which students examine and summarize news stories once or twice during a course. This week’s current events activity is designed so that students regularly monitor and discuss news events from different parts of the world throughout a course or an academic year. Regular attention to global events encourages the development of students’ global citizenship.

High beginner to advanced

Reading, writing, speaking, and listening

Through this activity, students will be able to participate in the following tasks:

• Develop reading comprehension skills for non-fiction texts
• Understand and reflect on global current events
• Write and present news reports in groups

• A list of regions or countries that students will be assigned to as reporters
• Access to international news sources online or in print (Voice of America and News in Levels are two sites with news stories available for different English proficiency levels.)
• Notebooks or paper and pencils

• This activity is most effective when it is ongoing throughout the English course. It will work best if you regularly schedule a class period or other amount of time for students to report information and engage in discussion. The frequency of the reporting sessions can vary and can be weekly, bi-weekly, or even monthly. Keep in mind that the more frequently the sessions are scheduled, the more students will have the opportunity to learn about and reflect on news events from around the world.
• Decide on the dates for the reporting sessions and discussion. Again, these sessions can be as frequent as your schedule permits, but the more often they happen, the more students will benefit from the experience.
• Decide how you will group students or if you will allow students to choose their own groups. Ideally, each group would have no more than four members.

1. The number of groups will depend on how much time is available. Each group should have enough time to briefly share news stories from their assigned area of the world during part of the scheduled reporting session.
2. If the class is large, one option could be to have one half of the groups present at one session and the other half present at the next session. In this option, a group would report every other session.

• Create a list of areas of the world that students will be assigned to research and report on. Depending on the number of groups, the areas could be continents, regions, or countries (either one country or a group of countries). Students can also choose their own areas.

1.     Explain the purpose of the activity to the class by saying, “An important part of being a global citizen is to learn about events that are taking place outside of our own community or country. Knowing about these events and thinking about how they affect people helps us to better understand our role in the world.”

2.     Tell students that in order to support this goal, they will work in groups and become reporters for an assigned or chosen area of the world. Say, “As reporters, your group will be in charge of monitoring news stories and events from the part of the world you are assigned. We will have regularly scheduled reporting sessions and class discussions. During this time, your group will give the class an overview of the news from your area. You will also listen to other groups and participate in a class discussion about global events.”

3.     If desired, give students an overview of the news sources you plan to use for the activity. You can show them the websites or print materials you would like them to use, and ask if they have any other ideas about where to find news stories.

4.     If your students need explicit instructions, you can choose one area of the world and model how to use the news sources to collect information. If needed, provide students with guiding questions, or use a copy of the 5Ws + H Graphic Organizer from Try This: Current Events in English Teaching Forum. You can also choose a news story and model how to record information on this graphic organizer. Otherwise, students can simply take notes about important news stories and the key elements they would like to share during the reporting session.

5.     Let students know the dates for the reporting sessions scheduled throughout the course. Explain that they will have to regularly check the news throughout the period of time between reporting sessions in order to stay informed.

• If posting homework on the board or elsewhere, include monitoring the news as part of the homework. Remind students regularly about this part of the assignment.
• If students will need to monitor the news at school, periodically provide them time to do so.

6.     During the reporting sessions, groups should gather together. Provide time for each group o share news stories from their area of the world. Groups can present in front of the class or from where they are seated.

• Emphasize to students that they cannot share every detail of each news item, but that they should focus on summarizing the key information. Summarizing may take some practice, but asking groups to stick to an allotted amount of time will help.
• Try to leave 15–20 minutes at the end of the reporting session for students to discuss what they heave heard.

7.     Once each group has had a chance to share current events from their assigned area, you can use the remaining class time in several different ways:

• Lead a class discussion about the current events. The discussion can take place as a whole class or in small groups (either the same as reporting groups or different ones). Questions to ask can include: Which news story do you think impacts you the most and why? Which news story was the most uplifting, devastating, etc. and why? Which news story do you think will cause the most change in people’s lives? Is there a story you would like to know more about or to keep following, and why? Did any common issues or topics seem to appear in multiple areas of the world during this reporting session? If so, what were they?
• Ask students to write a reflection. If you plan to use this strategy often, you may want to have students keep a “News Journal” in a single notebook. They can respond to the questions above in writing rather than as part of a discussion. Another option is to have students imagine they are writing a letter to someone directly affected by the news story or event.
• Have students choose a news story and make a prediction. Students can predict what will happen next or as a result of the event. This can be done in writing or as part of a discussion. Students can also create an illustration or comic strip about what they think will happen.
• Write letters to government officials or the editor. If students are concerned about an issue or have strong feelings about an event or news story, you may want to guide them to write to the editor of the news source, or even to government officials, if appropriate. Depending on students’ experience with this type of writing, you may need to discuss the components of a formal letter and offer them support as they write.

Keeping up-to-date on current events outside of their own communities can help students develop an understanding of common issues affecting people around the world. By reflecting on these issues, having thoughtful discussion with peers, and potentially writing to newspapers or government officials, students begin to understand how their own actions can play a role in the larger global community.

Enjoy these two puzzles related to the topic of debates. One puzzle gives "For" and "Against" statements with blanks that must be filled in. The second puzzle, available only online, is a crossword that features vocabulary commonly used in debates.

Academic writing teachers try to help learners understand and imitate the various rhetorical styles used in academic texts. Understanding academic writing involves careful and repeated reading, analysis, and evaluation of many texts.  It then requires further analysis, synthesis, and creation to imitate the writing style. All of this work involves using critical thinking and language skills. One way to engage learners in this process and support the acquisition of advanced writing skills is to use students’ existing critical thinking skills in an activity that analyzes the components of academic writing.

This Teacher’s Corner offers a strategy to introduce learners to academic writing through the familiar task of outlining. Writers use outlining as a way to plan and organize their ideas at the beginning of the writing process. In this activity, learners use the outline in reverse as a way to break down and analyze the structure of an academic text. This process is called a reverse outline and is explained in detail here. Keep in mind that a reverse outline can be adapted to fit the needs of intermediate writers as well, as long as the reading is selected to meet learners’ language level.

Advanced (university level)

• Reading
• Writing

During this activity, students will be able to complete the following tasks:

• Read an academic text to identify the organization and structure of ideas.
• Organize the information presented in an academic text into an outline template in order to recognize the structure and organization of an academic text.

• Reading:  “Helping Students Develop Coherence in Writing” by Icy Lee
• Outline Template in Appendix A
• Paper and pencils or pens

• Print enough copies of the reading for each student.
•  Print enough copies of the outline template for each student.

1.     Start class with a warm-up discussion to elicit ideas about the structure of academic writing. Use these questions as a guide:

• What are the important parts of an academic essay?
• What do we call the first paragraph(s)? The main paragraphs? The final paragraph(s)?
• What have you been told to include in the first paragraph(s) of an essay?
• What is included in the main paragraphs?
• What is included in the final paragraph(s)?

2.     Hand out the outline template (Appendix A) to students. (The outline template can be adapted and adjusted to meet the needs of essay writing in your specific class. Feel free to add components to this outline or delete components that are unnecessary.)  Ask learners to review the template for similarities between what they said in the discussion and what the template lists as components of academic writing.

• Is there anything on the outline template that was not mentioned in the discussion? If so, what are the differences? Is there anything that students think the outline template needs to include that is not listed?

3.     Explain that this outline is a model of the structure, but that every article differs slightly as to how each of the core parts is structured. For example, one essay might have 10 body paragraphs but another essay might only have 4.

4.     Tell students they are now going to use the outline to read an academic article. They will complete an outline, using the template as a model, based on the information from the article they read.

5.     Give everyone a copy of the article. Explain that before trying to complete the outline, they should read the article once and make notes. Reading once will help them process the article, ask questions, and get an overview of the structure of the article.

6.     Have learners read, make notes, and complete their outlines. While they are working, circulate to answer any questions they have.

7.     After learners have completed the outlines, bring the class back together as a group.

8.     Place students in pairs by dividing the class in half and counting off each group (for example: 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). The two students who are assigned 1 will work together, the students assigned 2 will work together, etc.

9.     Once learners are in their pairs, ask them to read over their partners’ outlines, paying attention to similarities and differences.

10.  While they are reading, write these directions on the board.

• Compare the two outlines and identify any areas where the information is different or where information is on one outline but not the other.
• Work together to complete a new outline that combines the information from both outlines.
• Work together to decide how to include information that is different on personal outlines.

11.  Then give each pair a new outline template. Explain that students will work together to create a new outline, using the directions on the board.

12.  When pairs have finished, bring the class back together to discuss what they learned from the outline activity.

• What information on the outline did they expect to see? What information was unexpected in the article’s structure? What else did they learn about how academic writing is structured?

One simple variation is to have students read the text at home and take notes before working on the outline in class. This variation allows students to read at their own pace so that when students come to class, they are all familiar with the text.

Another alternative to this assignment is to have students work in pairs from the beginning of the process. After everyone in the class reads the article, put students in pairs and have them work together to complete the outlines. This variation ensures that learners will vocalize, discuss, and negotiate what is included on the outline and what is not.

A possible extension to this activity is to revisit the reverse outline when students are writing their own essays. During the revision process students could complete a reverse outline of their own work or complete reverse outlines of their classmates’ work. For example, if students have written a first draft of an essay, before they revise it or write a second draft, they could do a reverse outline of their first draft. By doing so, they could recognize areas in their writing to improve. Then, students could use their reverse outline for help in preparing and writing a second draft.

Outline Template

      I.         Introduction

• Attention grabbing device
• Background/Contextual information
• Thesis statement

     II.         Main Paragraphs (repeat for each paragraph)

• Topic statements/ideas
• Supporting evidence (data, anecdotes, stories, definitions, etc.): paraphrase, summary, quotes
• Connections to thesis

   III.         Conclusion

• Final thoughts
• Implications and areas for future analysis
• Suggestions for next steps