The Oxford Languages Dictionary explanation of alliteration is using the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words. Using alliteration in class is one of the challenges I give my advanced ESL students. I always find it to be a very effective way of extracting vocabulary.
Here are some of the sentences they came up with:
- Thomas takes three tablets together three times on Tuesdays.
- Barbara buys biscuits before breaktime.
- Claire chops celery carefully
We then move on to Limericks which is a favourite of mine being from Ireland! This is a humorous five-line poem with a rhyme scheme AABBA. I ask them to be as funny and ridiculous as they like. I start with this example:
There once was a man from Nantucket, (A)
Who kept all his cash in a bucket. (A)
But his daughter, named Nan, (B)
Ran away with a man, (B)
And as for the bucket, Nantucket. (A)
Here is one my C1 Advanced student wrote:
There once was a man from Kentucky,
Who not once in his life was lucky,
Until one day he met Jan,
Who gave him a van,
And together they drove to Kentucky.
I then introduce them to tongue twisters which are a sequence of words or sounds that are difficult to pronounce correctly and quickly. I put my Advanced students in groups of three to compose their own. We always start with an example:
Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
A few that they came up with are:
Lovely Lucy lies lazily on a lilac lounger.
Rudy Rabbit runs rings around red robin.
Barber Bob brushes black and brown beards
Once they are happy with their tongue twister, I test their pronunciation against the clock. The student who pronounces their tongue twister correctly in the shortest time wins.
As the Syllabus for C1 and C2 students is demanding and intense I try to lighten the mood by giving them these challenges. They enjoy them a lot and it helps them switch off from the pressure of exams. They leave the class in a lighter mood and in a more positive frame of mind.
Are you up for the challenge?