Intermediate Level Connectors Chat Board

As with other board games that I have put up on this blog, I hope that this one will be useful to both teachers and students.  I used it recently with an intermediate group of ESL learners in a TOEFL writing preparatory class (they learned how to write independent task essays).  Along with vocabulary building activities, the students had the chance to orally practice using connectors (conjunctions) with the assistance of the attached game board and the comparative word chat board.

You can use a die or not (it will go faster using dice and game pieces).  However, I wanted my students to do a lot of practice, and it was highly successful making the students alternate turns.  They did not finish the whole board, but got a lot of practice after 20-30 minutes.  Happily, they remained engaged until I stopped them because they were challenged creating their own sentences that linked words or ideas from the comparative chat board and used the conjunction that came up next on the board.  The partner could choose any pair of words on the comparative chat board. I was able to monitor students and spot-checked to ensure that they knew how to punctuate coordinating (the FANBOYS) and subordinating conjunctions (e.g., when, because, while, before, after) and conjunctive adverbs (e.g., however, therefore, first, second, finally).

This board is designed for lower intermediate level students.  In the future, I will post my more advanced level game connectors board along with some other ideas for how to use it.  Meanwhile, I hope that you'll find this one useful.