Teaching Relative Pronouns

Inspector

Intermediate learners will often spend severallessons on topics such as relative pronouns. Some teachers prefer tointroduce only one or two relative pronouns at a time and then combineall of them in a final relative pronoun lesson. The outline belowfollows another method where all five are introduced at the same timebut this approach will also take several lessons to complete.How To Proceed

1
Warm up
Plan a warm up activitybased on the materials you want to use later on in class. Askingquestions about hobbies, pets, and family members is useful because youcan use the responses from students as examples during later stages ofthe lesson. If you ask “What do you like to do?” and Meg says, “I like to play tennis.” write her answer on the board.
2
Introduce and Drill Vocabulary
There are five relative pronouns in the English language. They are that, which, who, whom, and whose. Write these words on the board, model the pronunciation for your students, and drill.Unlike most vocabulary words, there are no pictures or definitions thatwill help your students understand their meaning so the best thing youcan do is explain how to use these words.
3
Introduce Structure
Using the responses fromthe warm up, show students how to use these new vocabulary words. Oursample response could easily become “Meg is a girl who likes to play tennis.” or “Meg is a student that likes to play tennis.” It is important to demonstrate that that can be used to refer to both people and things while who and whom refer only to people, which refers only to things, and whose is the only one of the five that reflects possession. If your students have difficulty, focus the first lesson only on that and who.
4
Practice Relative Pronouns
For the firstpractice activity, have a worksheet where students circle the correctrelative pronoun for each sentence. There should only be two optionsper sentence and only one correct answer. The activity should not takelong to complete but use the time correcting answers as speakingpractice for your students. Ask for volunteers to provide the correctanswer and ask for translations of the sentences to ensure thatstudents understand them.
5
Practice Relative Pronouns More
On the sameworksheet, you can include a pair activity. You will need eightsentences with relative pronouns where Student A has the first half offour sentences and the second half of four sentences while student Bhas the opposite halves. Student A goes first by reading the first halfsentence while Student B searches his endings to find the one thatmatches and dictates it to Student A. When Student A has completed allhis sentences, students should switch roles. It will be easier forstudents to complete sentences if there is no ambiguity as to whichendings go with which beginnings. You can ensure that this is the caseby using sentences such as I love going to zoos that have pandas. Inthis example the words zoo and panda should help students place themtogether.
6
Produce
For a production exercise, have students write the names of five people on their worksheet (celebrities,for example). Have students work in pairs and take turns describingtheir people using relative pronoun sentences until all the names theyhave written down have been guessed. Using another teacher as anexample, give students some easy model sentences such as “She is a woman who teaches History. She is the teacher that drives a red car.” Another activity students may enjoy is a board game.Have students work in groups of three to four taking turns rolling thedice and moving. For every space on the board have a picture so thateach student must make a relative pronoun sentence on his turn. Both ofthese activities require your students to understand the material quitewell so be sure to do sufficient practice exercises before moving on tothis stage of the lesson. Especially in large classes, it will beimpossible to correct every mistake in activities such as these.
7
Review
As a review or warm up activity, play fruit basket.Have students stand in a circle surrounded by a ring of chairs wherethere is one less chair than students. The student in the middle has tomake a relative pronoun sentence and every student it applies to mustthen scramble to change chairs leaving a new student in the middle tocreate the next sentence. If certain students have not moved in a longtime, mix things up with a sentence such as “I am a student who studies English.”

Relative pronouns can be confusing for students to grasp as they arepart of a more complex sentence structure. Students will see relativepronouns more and more as they progress through their English studiesso please dedicate plenty of time to this topic.

COPIED

Honour Member

As in any language learning, practice is to be well designed , otherwise the teacher's efforts will go with the wind. Thank you , Mrs. B.R.N for the tips.