Teaching adjectives in ESL classroom

📝 Adjectives are one of the first parts of speech that beginners (both adults and kids) get acquainted with on their journey to English language proficiency. 

However, it doesn’t mean that they are the easiest to understand and start using actively due to their variety and even a certain degree of resemblance to other parts of speech. 

Anyway, a true ESL professional’s task is to make sure students can freely and correctly use adjectives in their speech. 

This article will help you to do so by proposing a list of activities and games which you can use for the successful adjectives’ presentation, drilling and revision.

We have to admit that educators often lack comprehensive guidelines on how to teach adjectives to ESL students. Below, you will see a step-by-step guide on how to present adjectives in your ESL classroom to adult learners and kids.

Tip 1. Use eliciting to see what your students know

Students likely recognize certain terms that are adjectives even if they don't completely understand what an adjective is yet. 

Chances are, adjectives will appear among some of the students’ ideas.

Relying on the previous learning background is crucial, as it helps students to link new material with something they already know. Also, it increases a positive learning attitude as they feel confident that they know something!

Tip 2. Provide a definition of an adjective

After eliciting what adjectives are, it’s time to give your students a proper definition. However, don’t give a long, complicated definition that might even require some linguistic background. These definitions do not really make sense for people without such education. That is why your task is to focus on showing what adjectives do in a sentence i.e., why they are important and what their function is. 

You can do it by writing a simple sentence on your blackboard. 

While expanding your sentence as much as possible, you may ask:

• what do these additional words do?
• What is their function? 
• Why are they necessary for our sentences? Etc. 

With the help of this simple activity and teacher’s guidance, students basically create a definition on their own and clearly see the function of the adjective.

Tip 3. Teach how to find an adjective 

As you may know, adjectives might be not as easy to find as they initially seem. Beginners often confuse adjectives with adverbs or nouns. Moreover, they may simply not recognize the adjectives if they are not aware that they might change their form (comparative, superlative). 

Tip 4. Wrap everything up with some practice

Last but not least, all the theory that you elicit and present should be practiced and drilled in a very careful way. So, make sure your lesson is not only about the rules and definitions but also about practical application of the things you have learnt. 

Below, we have collected a list of useful activities for adjectives and games that will help your students to remember the material better and learn how to use it properly. 

Task 1. Brainstorm

Students brainstorm as many adjectives as they can and note them all.

All you need to do is to divide your students into groups, make a short lead-in to the topic you are going to talk about and ask to come up with as many adjectives as they can within a limited period of time.

When the time is up, you compare the groups’ results, exchange ideas and choose the best team. 

Task 2. Synonym-antonym race

Students try to find the corresponding word in the allotted time.

This is another nice game for giving your students a chance to get acquainted with adjectives. Again, this activity is great for any age and topic.

You just need to share a list of adjectives with the class and ask them to find appropriate synonyms or antonyms (it is up to you whether you want to stick with the synonyms or antonyms). The easier mode would be a matching game where students need to match the adjectives from different columns. The easier task to assign to the class would be recalling the synonyms or antonyms on their own using only their background knowledge. 

Task 3. Chain builder

The teacher has to present the topic first. Then, the first student is nominated and supposed to name the first adjectives. The second student has to name the next adjective that starts with the last letter of the previous adjective. This game might be really endless. The more advanced your students are, the longer and more sophisticated this game gets. 

Task 1. Pictionary

The student draws a picture of an adjective while other students need to guess what adjective it is. 

Task 2. Expansion

The students get the sentence and should try to expand it as much as possible. 

For this activity, you have to prepare a set of simple sentences. You assign one sentence per group, and each group takes some time to of how they can expand the given sentence by adding more and more adjectives till further expansion is impossible.

Task 3. Order game

The students are supposed to put the multiple adjectives into the correct order as fast as they can. 

For this task, you need to divide students into groups and present them sentences with a lot of adjectives. The order of the adjectives has to be wrong, so the groups can practice correcting this mistake as fast as they can. 

Conclusion

As we can see, there are so many ways to have fun with adjectives and make your lessons even more memorable and engaging! 

However, practice makes perfect, both in students’ and teachers’ cases. If you are interested in learning more about some fun and useful activities, online English courses for teachers by Grade University are the best and the most obvious choice!