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Grammar & Usage, Teaching with Ellii

How to Assign Grammar Tasks Online

Tanya TruslerApril 9, 2020

Teaching Grammar Online with ESL Library

Teaching grammar can be a challenge at the best of times, and having to suddenly manage it digitally can be especially difficult. We hope this series of posts on how to teach grammar online will be helpful! Please feel free to leave comments and questions below. We're here for you!

This three-part grammar series will cover:

How to Assign Grammar Tasks Online

Our Grammar Practice Worksheets section has 60 lessons available on our online platform.

Once you've chosen a target and clicked on the Digital tab, you will see all the digital tasks that are available to our subscribers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, our Standard plan subscribers have free access to all our Premium plan digital tasks, so you will be able to use them all with your students.

1. Order of Tasks

The digital tasks in every Grammar Practice Worksheets lesson follow a logical, progressive order (with the easiest tasks at the beginning and the more difficult ones at the end). All these lessons begin with the grammar notes and most end with a quiz (see How to Assess Grammar Online).

For example, our Simple Past lesson includes the grammar notes followed by two easy multiple-choice exercises to practice positive and negative sentences in the simple past. After that, there are two tasks to practice regular verbs. Next comes an irregular verb list and two practice exercises. The remaining four tasks include a mix of regular and irregular verbs and cover time markers, question formation, and opposites. The lesson concludes with a quiz—a quick assessment task so you can check your students' comprehension of everything they learned in this lesson.

Keep in mind that the task order is only a general guideline. Feel free to vary the order of the tasks you assign according to the needs of your students.

2. Launching Tasks

You can preview each task before you assign it by clicking the task title. This is also how you would launch the task if you were screensharing it. Under Task Info, you will find the answer key and the task at a glance all on one page.

How many tasks should you do at one time? This depends on the time of your session and the needs of your learners. 

If you only have an hour, try going through two or three tasks plus correction and discussion. If you are teaching the same learners all week, you could break up the lesson and do two or three tasks a day from the lesson along with other related material (see the Related section of any lesson page). If your students appear to know the grammar target quite well, you could do a couple of tasks and then move on to another target. However, if you have a long class, you could definitely cover the whole lesson (all the tasks for one target) since they are progressive in difficulty and not repetitive in nature.

You could always assign one or two tasks (or all of them!) for homework. See the next section for more information on assigning tasks for homework.

3. Assigning Tasks

To assign a task for homework, use the Assignment Manager button from a lesson page (see our Help Docs and How-To Videos for help with this). 

You will get your students' results in real time for most tasks. For tasks with written (typed) answers, you will be able to score the answers and leave written feedback for your learners.

Keep in mind that you could also assign tasks for your students to complete during an online session. This way they can complete the tasks individually at their own pace (just as they would in class using a paper-based exercise), and you can see the results for all your students while you're conducting a class using a screensharing platform. After your students complete a task, you could choose to go through it while screensharing to discuss any problems they may have had.

The beauty of assigning homework tasks is that you could always choose to assign more to students who are struggling and fewer to students who aren't. You can also assign a random, one-off task on a certain target from any lesson to a student who had a question about it or wanted extra practice.

Teaching Order

When should you teach articles? How about prepositions of place? Should you teach imperative verbs before the present progressive? Many teachers wonder which order of grammar targets is best. We have a Teaching Order chart for our Grammar Practice Worksheets section that you can apply to all our grammar materials.

Please keep in mind that this is a general guideline and is absolutely not set in stone! The order can vary according to your students' needs. It may also vary if you're following a certain curriculum.

This resource is mainly for teachers, and as such it is not available as an assignable digital resource, but feel free to share this order with your students using a screensharing platform. You could also download the PDF and email it to your students if you want them to see it.

If you're an online tutor, you can customize your teaching order much more easily. Try giving your student(s) a list of grammar targets and ask which ones they struggle with the most. Assign writing and/or speaking tasks to discover which targets your student struggles with. You could also use the four assessment/placement tests mentioned above. Any of these methods will also work with a big class, but it might be a bit more difficult to establish a teaching order if your students' needs vary widely.

We hope you found this second post in our three-part series about teaching grammar online useful!

 

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Comments (8)

Leave a Comment

Dorothy C.(Teacher)

Hello,
How do I add a new student to a class that is already created?
How do I assign already assigned homework to a new student?
Thank you,
Dorothy

Reply
Reply to Comment

Tara Benwell(Author)

Hi, Dorothy!
This Help Doc will help you add a new student to your class: https://help.ellii.com/article/115-how-to-create-classes-on-esl-library-digital
When your student joins this class, they will see the same assignments that the rest of the class has. They will see the assignments on their Student Dashboard when they log in.

Let us know if you have any problems.
Thanks!

Reply
Reply to Comment

Sammi S.(Teacher)

If the due date goes by, do the students still have access to the tasks or do they need to be reassigned? How do you reassign or change the due date?

Reply
Reply to Comment

Tanya Trusler(Author)

Hi Sammi,
Yes, your students will still have access to tasks after the due date has passed. Once they complete and submit it, you will see a "Late" status under the results for that student and that task, meaning they submitted it past the due date.

If you want to change the due date, cancel the assignment, or reassign a task, you can do so by either clicking Class Prep, then Results, from the top navigation bar. Then choose a new due date for the task and click Save, or click Cancel Assignment.

Find more help in https://ellii.com/blog/faq-teachers and https://help.ellii.com/article/122-how-to-assign-digital-homework, or ask us if you have any other questions.

Luca C.(Teacher)

Hi, how can I remove an assigned task? I accidentaly assigned the same task two times.
Thank you,
Luca

Reply
Reply to Comment

Tammy Wik(Ellii Staff)

Hi Lucas,

Go to Class Prep 🠒 My Classes. Then, Click into the class that you assigned the task to.

Click over to the Assignments tab. You can click into the lesson and click on the due date. This will allow you change the due date or click the X on the far right side and Cancel the Assignment entirely.

Remember to click Save :)

Alternatively, if you know which lesson you assigned twice, you can just go to the Search Tool in the top right corner, type in the name of the lesson. Select it.

Once in the lesson, you can click over to the Digital side, select the class you'd assigned it to, click Assign Task and then cancel it this way.

Two options for you! If you bump into any trouble, just go ahead and use the Contact Us form at the very bottom of this page and we'll help get you sorted.

Happy teaching!

Haley D.(Teacher)

Can I assign activities to only certain students in my class?

Reply
Reply to Comment

Tammy Wik(Ellii Staff)

Hi Haley,

That is a feature that is going to be released before the end of 2020. I cannot wait until that feature is live! We get a lot of requests for it.

However, for your immediate teaching needs, if you teach mixed level classes, I would recommend creating a separate "class" for individual students (something like "Grammar - Beginners" and "Grammar - Intermediate". Or, if students from a similar linguistic background share the same learning needs, you might do "Grammar - Japanese" and "Grammar - Mandarin", for example. You can even create a "class" for an individual student, if you're working with a small enough group. You might take a look at this Help Doc: https://help.ellii.com/article/131-how-to-assign-digital-homework-to-individual-students

Or this video "Assigning Digital Tasks to Multi-Level Classes": https://help.ellii.com/article/195-assigning-digital-tasks-to-multi-level-classes

We realize both are stop-gap solutions. The real fix is coming soon. Thanks for your patience while we're building our site up to be the best it can be for our teachers!

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