Moving Beyong the Book

A major weakness that I can see in my students is their ability to move beyond the book. They're actually pretty decent for the most part at reproducing what's in front of them, with the typical answers. Examples: "My hobby is playing computer games." "I'm from Korea!" "I have a sister, brother, mother and father."

But anytime they need to move beyond this, it's like pulling teeth to get any sort of interesting, creative or original answer. My solution is to offer points/stamps/grades (whatever you use) for interesting answers, that use a bit of creative power and originality and to praise these highly, while just giving the boring, old answers a blank response basically. No response, either negative or positive. And the students pick up on this and in a couple weeks, they're all striving to move beyond what's right in front of them. Everyone likes positive feedback...as a teacher, you can control the class using this to your advantage.