TODD: Hi, everybody. This is Todd, the teacher and creator of ELLLO and this is Tip 10. And it’s fitting that it’s Tip 10 because Tip 10 is the ten-in-one challenge.

I give this challenge to my students all the time. It’s a great way to practice grammar and speaking. Here’s how it works.

Take a grammar tense or a grammar point. The student must use that grammar point ten times in one minute of spoken English in a natural, meaningful way. So for example, here we have ‘will’. You can listen to the audio files in the course to get an idea of what you can talk about. So let’s listen to ‘will’ in the course and see what they talk about, get an idea, and then do the speaking challenge ourself.

TODD (Audio): Hello. I will talk about my plans for tonight. So tonight I don’t have specific plans. I think I will go to the mall and maybe I will meet my friend. He will come if he has free time, and we will probably sit in the food court and just talk.

TODD: Okay, I’m going to stop there to save time. But notice in the audio you can hear ‘will’ about five times in just about 30 seconds, so we want to do the same thing. Now it’s time for our ten-in-one challenge. Can we use ‘will’ ten times in one minute? Okay, ready. Here I go. Now to do this activity, I’m going to use the online stopwatch so you can see how I can say ten things in less than one minute. So here I go, and wish me luck.

So tonight I won’t do anything exciting. I will stay home because on Monday I will fly to Thailand and then on Tuesday I will fly to Dubai for a teacher conference. So I won’t go outside because I just don’t have time. I will pack my bags. I will do my laundry so I have clothes for myself. I won’t cook dinner tonight because I don’t want to cook and make a mess. So I will buy my dinner. I will probably go to the supermarket and buy something there. I will buy sashimi if they have it because I love fish. I will buy some vegetables. I won’t buy anything fatty or with a lot of carbohydrates because I’m on a diet. So I will try to stick to my diet tonight. It should be an easy evening. I will go to bed fairly early and I will wake up tomorrow early, as well.

So I said 16 things in one minute. As a student, your goal would be about 10. If you could say 10, that’s really good. And I tell my students 10 is A+ or an A, perfect, 9 (A+), 8 (B), 7 (C), etcetera, so you can kind of see how good your grammar fluency is. And that’s it. So that is the grammar fluency activity that you can do for Tip 10. And again, we have lots of examples of people doing this, in most cases, myself. In the course, you can hear a short, short mini talk of somebody using the grammar tense or grammar point again and again, and again. And that’s it. That’s the speaking ten-in-one challenge.

Give it a try and see how you do.