Editorial
The article first appeared in a special issue of the ETAI Forum 2013, celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Lexical Approach.

Slot-filler Relay Race

Ken Lackman, Canada

Ken Lackman spent many years in Prague and Warsaw teaching and developing materials before returning to his native Canada in 2003. After spending five years as Director of Studies at EF Toronto, he left to pursue a career as a freelance teacher trainer and writer. He has had several articles published in English Teaching Professional and is a frequent presenter at conferences in Canada as well as the IATEFL conference in the UK. E-mail: klackman@kenlackman.com

This is a great activity to get students to see the generative value of specific semi-fixed expressions and just generally to reinforce the importance of semi-fixed expressions in terms of developing language proficiency. The students work together with a group of expressions to come up with as many variations of them as they can within a set time. One of the best aspects of this activity is that the learners produce the slot-fillers completely on their own without input from the teacher or any other resource. This task should emphasize to students the flexibility of semi-fixed expressions as well as give them the confidence to experiment more with them in the future.

The activity is meant to be used with a text and requires that the students first pick out a number of semi-fixed expressions from that text. Once they have done that, elicit the expressions and list them on a large sheet of paper or on the very top of the board (you’ll need most of the board later). Somewhere between six and ten expressions should suffice. Then number each expression and underline the parts of each one that could be varied. You could get the students to help you identify these slot-fillers. Then divide the class into two teams and have each team look at the list of expressions and discuss which ones they feel they could vary the most, i.e., provide the most slot-fillers for. You could even ask them to rank them all in descending order. Then you are ready to start the competition.

Get one of the teams to choose an expression and have them stand in a line in front of the board. Then write their expression across the board, underline the part that is to be changed and draw a line to form a column beneath it. In some cases, there will be two parts to be changed and you will need two columns (see example below). You should also make any adjustments to allow for singular or plural slot-fillers (see below). Then tell students that they will be given 90 seconds or two minutes (for lower levels) to list as many different slot-fillers in the column(s) as they can and it will be done as a relay race. When you give the signal to begin, the first member of the team takes the marker, goes up to the board, fills in a slot-filler, hands the marker to the next student and goes to the back of the line. The next student does the same. Note that when there are two slots, each student has to fill in both. And let them know that if their teammate at the front is having problems thinking of something, they can help them by shouting out possible answers.

When time is up, stop the students, eliminate incorrect or repeated slot-fillers, make any spelling or grammar corrections, and award a point for each correct slot-filler. Then the other team takes their turn. Continue having teams alternate turns until each has worked with an equal number of expressions and then total the scores to determine a winner. For an example of how the board might look, below are some sample slot-fillers that would fit the semi-fixed expression from the first sentence of this paragraph.

One other very important aspect of this activity is that in getting students to choose which expressions they think they can vary the most, it is training them for autonomous learning. It will hopefully encourage them to analyze the generative value of semi-fixed expressions whenever they come across them. And you should emphasize to them that this practice will not only help them choose useful expressions, but the cognitive processing that goes into the analysis will help them remember the expressions. To follow up this activity, try giving them homework consisting of noticing a certain number of semi-fixed expressions, identifying the variable parts and then ranking the expressions in terms of most generative value.

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