Text Improvement

Students receive a bare-bones, grammatically correct but underdeveloped text and must expand and enrich it by adding detail, subordination, and appropriate grammar structures.

Procedure

1. Prepare a short text (4–6 sentences) that is correct but thin — simple subject-verb-object sentences with no subordination, modifiers, or cohesive devices. Example: The city is big. There are many people. They work in offices. The offices are tall. People go home at night.
2. Students read it and identify what is missing (detail, connection between ideas, variety).
3. Students rewrite the text, expanding each sentence and weaving them into a coherent paragraph. No sentence count limit.
4. Pairs share and read each other's versions.
5. Class discussion: what grammar structures did people add? What kinds of detail? Display 2–3 varied versions for comparison.

Tips

• Deliberately write the seed text with a grammar gap you are currently teaching — if practising relative clauses, write sentences that beg for them. Students fill the gap organically.
• A useful extension: students compress a partner's expanded version back to a bare skeleton, practising summarisation.
• Lower the prep bar by using learner writing from a previous activity as the seed text (with permission) — it adds personal relevance and makes the improvement feel purposeful.
• Distinct from Reformulation (teacher rewrites student text): here, the teacher provides the seed and students generate the expansion, controlling their own choices.