Today I want to share with you a series of activities involving the use of emojis. Not only are they great fun but –most importantly- they also have great value from a language practice standpoint. Last but not least: Gen.AI will whip up this material in a flash, ready to be used and enjoyed in the language classroom.
Basically, we will be providing sentences for Gen.AI –I will be using Claude this time- to convert into emojis. This activity will work particularly well for lower levels and is specially useful for practicing verb tenses. For instance, we can type sentences into Claude using the present continuous (or copy and paste them from an online source or digital coursebook) and get them converted into emojis. Students can then generate sentences based on those emojis.
Prompt: I am going to write a series of sentences, and I want you to express the same idea conveyed by each sentence using only emojis. Here are the sentences: 1. He is watching a film. 2. She is eating an ice cream. 3. The school children are waiting for the bus.
Here are some challenging exercises for lower-intermediate learners to practice the past simple using the same prompt: 1. It took us two hours to get to Paris. 2. He felt terrible after eating the oysters. 3. I bought her a watch as a birthday present.
So what we would do is take screenshots of these emojis and copy and paste them into a Word/Powerpoint document, IWB software, or an online presentation tool to display on a whiteboard, IWB, or digital panel in class later on.
We could also ask Claude to complete missing parts in sentences. This will work particularly well with conditional sentences for lower levels. Prompt: Complete these conditional sentences using emojis. 1. If I were you… 2. If I had enough money… 3. I would come to dinner…
This can also be adapted for practicing connectors at the lower-intermediate level. Prompt: Complete these sentences using emojis: 1. We couldn’t go on the trip because… 2. Although…., we decided not to take a chance this time. 3. I got to the airport two hours early. However, …
Let’s get a bit more creative with some additional ideas for higher levels. We could choose a song, select certain sections of it and ask Gen.AI to convert those lines into emojis. Students would then work in pairs or small groups to try to guess the missing lines. After eliciting their answers, we could play the song for them to see how close they were. Here is an all-time ELT classic. Can you guess the song title and its missing first lines?
To make things easier, we could also copy and paste the lyrics from a song and bold certain words. Then we could paste the text into a Gen.AI tool and ask it to convert the bolded words into emojis.
What about converting proverbs into emojis?
Claude actually provided the written version as well, but if we want to hide this from view when showing it to students later, we can easily fix this by including the following sentence in the prompt: “do not reveal the hidden proverbs until I type ok”.
P.S. The song was Englishman in New York by Sting.
AI in ELT 