ESL Educators Blog Carnival: Teaching ESL Writing is Fun!

As an English teacher in Taiwan, I spent the majority of my time teaching basic English to four to six year olds. Besides learning how to write their names, this age group wasn't ready for more advanced writing exercises. I did, however, teach a group of older students three times a week in the afternoon. Their spoken English was already quite advanced, which allowed me to focus more time on their reading and writing skills.

One of my favorite teaching techniques was to create unique Mad Libs that tied into our classroom material. I loved this word game when I was a student, and felt it was the perfect method to teach my students some of the important elements of effective written communication.

For those of you not familiar with Mad Libs, the game is very simple. Any short story can be used and the idea is to take out a select number of words (usually nouns, verbs, and adjectives) that will be filled back in later with different words. You can easily buy a book of stories ready to be filled in, but I usually wrote my own short stories that tied in more closely with our curriculum.

To start the exercise I created photocopies of my story and handed these out to my students. I was careful to leave a large space for omitted words and a hint as to the correct word usage (noun, verb, adjective). I usually gave my students free reign to fill in the blanks as long as the word was used and spelled correctly. As you can imagine, this exercise often lead to some very funny and creative stories!

I gave my students 10-15 minutes to complete their stories, and then invited them to the front of the class to read their stories aloud. If anyone made a mistake we would correct the sentence together as a class. For additional fun, I would have everyone vote for their favorite story and give the winner a small prize.

Example of a Mad Libs word game

Other Tips and Variations

• Try allowing students to use dictionaries
• Try giving students a box with suggested words
• Try setting minimum and maximum letter counts
• Try focusing on different word groups. For example, body parts, colors, or animals.
• Try setting limitations on allowed letters. For example, nouns can only start with the letter 'n'

Click here to find more Mad Libs examples.

Copy and paste this text to create your own Mad Libs story in the comments section:

This ___ is part of a monthly series for ___ educators, to share teaching ___ and tips in classrooms around the ___. As part of an ___ Educators Blog Carnival, I will be posting a new article on the 20th of each ___. Check out this month’s host for more great ___!