Saturday, 17 March 2012

Speaking Pairwork 9: 5 Survey Questions about Internet Surfing Habits


Click here for ‘The Basic Method for Speaking Pairwork’

This is a simple but enjoyable exercise. Ask the students to think of questions they might ask people to find out about their internet habits and elicit/prompt them until you have a series of questions on the board, something like this.

Why do you like that site?
How often do you use it?

How long do you usually spend there?
When was the last time you used it? What content did you view?
Does it have photos? videos? a forum? user comments?


Ask them then to write down 5 websites they like and use often. I tell them to exclude Facebook and Youtube since they’re so popular and I want variation in their answers, and also exclude search engines and e-mail programs since I want to concentrate on sites with actual content. Once they’re ready they work in pairs telling each other about their 5 websites. This should take at least 10 minutes per pairing.

This exercise has the added benefit of being a ‘knowledge-share’; you can often see students writing down URLs as they learn from their classmates of new sites that sound interesting to them. So you can ask each student at the end ‘Did you learn about any new sites? What’s it about?’

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