Activities

Sentence Structure Practice: Disappearing Sentence

Written by Keith Taylor
Last updated on 28 January, 2022

This is a downloadable ESL activity to increase awareness of correct sentence structure.

Here’s some more info about the activity:

Aim	To increase awareness of correct sentence structure.
Activity	Students remove words from sentences.
Organisation	Individual / pair work / groups
Preparation	Make enough copies of the worksheet for the number of students in your class.
What do I do?	Write the sentence on the board. Divide students in to two or more teams. Explain that they must remove words from the sentence to make a shorter, but still grammatically correct sentence. Teams take it in turns to remove words, according to the rules below, until the sentence has disappeared. Erase the words as the teams choose them, making the sentence shorter and shorter. The team who removes the last word(s) is the winner. RULES You can remove one, two, or three consecutive words. The sentence must still be grammatically correct after you have removed the word(s). (optional rule) You can add or remove punctuation when you remove words.

Jane went out early and walked sleepily down the street to buy some milk and bread when she saw her old friend driving very fast in a beautiful new red car; she waved quickly just before the car disappeared around the sharp corner.

Keith is the co-founder of Eslbase. He has been a teacher and teacher trainer for over 20 years, in Indonesia, Australia, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Poland, France and now in the UK.

Share this post: