Methods of teaching comparison of degrees adjective in english

Comparative and superlative stories and storytelling activities
There are a few picture books with both comparative and superlative forms such as Big Bigger Biggest Adventure by Kate Banks and Pig Pigger Piggest by Rick Walton, but I’m surprised there aren’t more. I have therefore put up two of my own on this site, one based around the structure “John wrote a long poem, Harry wrote a longer poem, and Graham wrote the longest poem in the whole world” and the other with the structure “His eyebrows are long, his nose hair is longer, and his nose is the longest in the world.” You can also make up or ask students to make up stories with structures like “He’s not the strongest in the world, but he’s stronger than my kitten” or “He got stronger and stronger until he was the strongest person in…” As in books, the (tricky) secret to a good story is a good conclusion.


Comparative and superlative you must say yes
Students ask each other questions about their families like “Are you the angriest person in your family?” and “Is your father stricter than your mother?” and answer “Yes” to all of them. Perhaps after follow up questions like “What do you do when you are angry?”, they guess if the initial “Yes” answer was true or not.
Superlatives and comparatives in the classroom
Students get points for making true statements comparing things and/ or people in the class that no one else has said yet, e.g. one point for “My desk is lower than the teacher’s desk”. If you want to encourage more of a range of language, you could give double points for also using collocations such as “by far” and/or forbid using the same adjective twice. With very competitive classes, you can encourage personal statements like “I can jump further than Pedro” and “I am the second tallest in the class” [11.36-37].
Comparisons in groups
In groups of three or four, students make sentence which they are think are true like “I’m the tallest in this group” and “My father is much older than Juan’s father”, then ask questions like “How tall are you?” and “How old is your father?” to check. To prompt more complex language, you can give them a list of words and expressions that they must use and/ or give two points for true sentences with collocations like “a little” and “considerably”.
This also works well with the ever popular topics of their week and weekend, with students making sentences like “(I think) Maria had the most stressful week” and then asking questions to check if the sentences are true.