Reading to practice English is the best way to get better at the language as a whole. Reading to practice English is so important for learning the language and I love giving my students time to read books in my lesson. I love when they are reading comic books, or magazines too to improve their language skills. But I also love changing up what they read sometimes, so that they can get acquainted with many different text types. One such text types is: recipes!
Wanna know how I plan my lessons around a text type like recipes? Grab my free Rad Reading Lesson Checklist to find out!
Language in reading recipes
There’s so much language to be found in recipes. I teach about layout and conventions so that they’ll learn about text type. I also go over imperatives, vocabulary for ingredients, and the cooking verbs so that they understand the techniques used in recipes. But the most important thing is that students can learn how to actually make their favorite food! Some active learning has to done here.
Authentic reading to practice English
In order for my students to practice their English through reading recipes, I made a lesson series out of recipes, and one feature is finding a recipe for a meal they love. They come back with such a variety of dishes! Some want to learn how to make brownies, others prefer spaghetti bolognese. The beauty in teaching this is that students can do something useful with what they learn in my lesson.
Provide them with your choice of recipes first. Get them to identify the language, and the layout and conventions. Teach the cooking verbs and vocabulary for ingredients. Get them to bring their own choice of recipe (found online for example) and identify the language in this piece of text. Finally, get them to cook the dish themselves and show the class the result!
Now that I wrote this down, I can’t wait to teach it again this year! I hope you’ll love it too!
If you’d like a more detailed plan or other resources, click below:
Recipes & Cooking Lesson Series Plan
Would you like some ideas on using other text types, like Menus, Magazines, Newspapers, or Brochures in your lessons? Check the links to find my blog posts on them as well!
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