The Monkey's Paw: Reading and Writing Prompt

(TESOL Materials--Time Fillers, Writing, Interesting Input plus Production Prompts)

I'm continuing to look for new materials to add to my "Interesting Input plus Production Prompts" project.  I was searching around on esl-bits and found the original version of The Monkey's Paw.  

It seemed like a good story to use: nice and short, and also suitably creepy.  (As I've mentioned before, my teenage students love horror stories.)

The original ungraded version could almost be used in the ESL classroom (with a high level class, of course.)  The sentences are pretty short and simple and easy to understand.  An advanced level class could almost understand it without help.

There's just some vocabulary that would need to be adjusted to make it more comprehensible for an ESL class.

I was in the process of trying to re-write the story myself, when I thought to myself, "You know what?  I bet somebody's done this already."

So, I searched for "The Monkey's Paw ESL" and sure enough, found a pretty good version here.  For the most part, it manages to preserve the vibrancy of the original text, while also simplifying the vocabulary where necessary.

For the purposes of sharing this version with my students, I took the liberty of copying and pasting it over to Google docs, so I could print it out and distribute in in my classroom (docs, pub).  While I was at it, I also edited it slightly--e.g. cleaned up a few typos and grammar mistakes that had been in the original.

I distributed the google document to my students, and we read it together in class.

The production prompt, then, is to write about what happens to the Monkey's Paw next.  The Monkey's Paw finds a new owner, who will make new wishes.  How will these new wishes go wrong?

For the purposes of giving my students maximum freedom, I left the prompt as wide open as possible--i.e. I didn't specify who the new owner would be.  But for students who were having trouble getting started, I gave them some helpful ideas.

"Imagine there's a Vietnamese boy who wishes to be a gamer.  But then" (spooky voice) "the wish goes horribly wrong."

or "Imagine there's a Vietnamese boy who wants to be a famous tiktoker.  So he makes the wish but then" (spooky voice) "the wish goes horribly wrong."

Etc.  Other ideas I gave were students who wished to get a band 9 on the IELTS, or become a successful businessman, or get into a top university, etc.

[Sidenote: The original story of The Monkey's Paw states that the paw was only cursed for 3 owners, and that this old couple is now the 3rd owner, so presumably in the original story the curse of the Monkey's Paw is now finished.  But I just ignored this little detail when designing the production prompt, and so far my students haven't noticed the contradiction.]

Production worksheet is here: docs, pub

Now, imagine that someone else finds the Monkey’s paw, and tries to make three wishes.  Write about what will happen next.

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