Activities for Using Junk Email in the ESL/EFL Classroom TESL-J) (2025)

And so it goes. Most of us regularly get messages which areperhaps not quite like the above, but which nonetheless areall too familiar to those who use the Net. Most of us don't evenbother to read them, but delete the offending messages as soonas look at them.

But perhaps, if we are TEFLers, we shouldn't act so hastily. Ipropose to demonstrate that quite a lot of mileage can be madeout of junk mail, and that it's always worth filing away a fewof those unsolicited messages back from time to time.

Almost as soon as I signed up to my ISP, I began getting junkmail, so I created a folder entitled "Scams", into which, fromtime to time, I would divert the occasional missive. Soon I hadtwenty or more.

The time then came to make some sense of them, and I hope thefollowing exercises illustrate the kind of material anyone cancreate, given adequate time. I have created six different typesof exercise. Here they are:

1. Matching Types: there's a list of categories (Sex, Get RichQuick, Your Fears, etc) and the student has to match each typewith the extract to which it corresponds. (See types.txt)
2. Typical Language: read through three junk e-mails, anddetermine what sort of phrases and expressions are typical ofjunk e-mail. (See typical.txt)
3. Comprehension Exercise: I took a chain-letter proposal andadded a few questions at the end: what's potentially wrong withthe offer; summarise what the punter has to do in under fiftywords; how does the perpetrator of the scheme make money. (See comp.txt)
4. Paraphrases: read a sample junk mail message, then match theextracted sentences to their paraphrases. A bit obvious as anexercise, but I think it gives the students a flavour of thelanguage of scams. (See PARAPHRA.TXT) (See paraphra.txt)
5. Cloze: Short cloze exercise based on an advertisement receivedin a junk mail message. (See cloze.txt)
6. Howlers: spot the mistakes made by junk-mail writers. I havecomposed this from a British English standpoint, but most of themistakes would, I think, be unacceptable on either side of thepond. (See howlers.txt)

And finally, once the students have familiarised themselves withthe language...

7. Write Your Own! In this exercise, use the list of expressionsprovided to help you compose your own junk mail messages. Changeand adapt the phrases to suit your own imagination. (See write.txt)

Exercises 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7 would be best used by studentsat Intermediate level (say Cambridge First Certificate inEnglish) as a minimum; number 1 and 5 might be tackled bypre-intermediate students. The beauty of computer-based texts is,of course, that they can be worked on to suit students at mostlevels.

In addition, short texts of up to 2,000 characters can easily beimported into a CALL program such as WIDA's StoryBoard orGapMaster.

A final suggestion. When saving junk mail texts, get as wide arange as you can. By far the majority seem to fall into the GetRich Quick category and their vocabulary is rather limited. Thoseoffering sex can sometimes contain entertaining slang andcolloquialisms, but explaining "burned-out strippers", "Internetsmut" or "some skank laying on a sheet" may best be kept forrelatively advanced classes, all other things, such as localcultural considerations, being equal.

A warning needs to be made about copyright: I have changed thenames of products and services, and deleted names and addresses,as I am told that the publication thereof could break the law.So any resemblance between product or service names appearing inthis article and any person, product or organisation, whether inexistence or defunct, is purely coincidental.