"A" Little Review Never Hurt Anybody

Yesterday, Ellie approached me and said, "Kate, it seems like all of us are having trouble using articles in our writing. Could we have a lesson based on this?" Let me just say that it's a teacher's dream come true to have a student who comes right out and tells you what she needs! I think that Ellie was absolutely right. I know that the members of my class have spent plenty of time studying articles in the past, but it's one of those grammar points that is particularly hard to master, especially if your native language has a completely different structure. Today, we warmed up with a peer editing exercise where I posted actual mistakes from previous assignments and asked my students to make the appropriate corrections. That activity turned out to be not so challenging, but then we took a pretest to get a better feel for our understanding of how to use articles in more complex writing. After the pretest, we watched a few select segments from this video (some of it is a bit too introductory) & had a class discussion where students thought more deeply about specific instances where articles are or are not necessary. Check out the links if you want to brush up on your skills!