Oxford`s teachhing methods of english language (стр. 6 из 7)
7. Ask the student how many advantages they came up with and how many disadvantages. Ask the students to divide up into three groups according to which statement applies to them:
I thought mainly of advantages.
I thought of some of both.
I thought mainly of disadvantages.
8. Ask the three groups to come up with five to ten adjectives to describe their group state of mind and put these up n the board.
9. Round off the exercise by telling the class that when de Bono asked different groups of people to do this kind of exercise, it turned out that primary school children mostly saw advantages, business people had plenty of both while groups of teachers were the most negative.
Note
Advantages the students offered:
In a hot country you can collect rain water.
It won’t drip round the edges.
You can use it for carrying shopping.
It’s not dangerous in a crowd.
It’s an optimistic umbrella.
It’s easy to hold if two people are walking together.
With this umbrella you’ll look special.
It’ll take less floor space to dry.
This umbrella makes people communicate. They can see each other.
You can paint this umbrella to look like a flower.
You’ll get a free supply of ice if it hails.
Presentation
Listening to time
| Grammar: | Time phrases |
| Upper intermediate to very advanced | |
| Time: | 40-50 minutes |
| Materials | None |
| Grammar: | Varied+question form |
| Level: | Elementary to intermediate |
| Time: | 55 minutes |
| Materials | None |
In class
1. Choose a grammar area the students need to review. In the example below there are adjectives, adverbs and relative pronouns.
2. Ask each student to work alone and write a sentence of 12-16 words (the exact length is not too important). Each sentence should contain an adjective, and adverb and a relative pronoun, or whatever grammar you’ve chosen to practise. For example: ‘She sat quietly by the golden river that stretched to the sea’.
3. Now ask the students to rewrite their sentences on a separate piece of paper, leaving in the target grammar and any punctuation, but leaving the rest as blanks, one dash for each letter. The sentence above would look like this:
--- --- quietly -- --- golden ----- that --------- -- --- ---.
While they are doing this ask any students who are not sure of the correctness of their sentence to check with you.
4. Now ask the students to draw a picture or pictures which illustrate as much of the meaning of the sentence as possible.
5. As students finish drawing, put them into groups of three. One person shows the blanked sentence and the drawing, reserving their original sentence for their own reference. The other should guess: ‘ Is the first word the?’ or ask questions ‘Is the second word a verb?’ etc. The student should only answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. As they guess the words, they fill in the blanks.
6. They continue until all the blanks are filled and then they do the other two person’s sentences.
Note
Groups tend to finish this activity at widely different speeds. If a couple of groups finish early, pair them across the groups, ask them to rub out the completed blanked out sentences and try them on a new partner.
Acknowledgement
Ian Jasper originated this exercise. He’s a co-author of Teacher Development: One group’s experience, edited by Janie Rees Miller.
Puzzle stories
| Grammar: | Simple present and simple past interrogative forms |
| Level: | Beginners |
| Time: | 30 minutes |
| Materials: | Puzzle story (to be written on the board) |
Preparation
Ask a couple of students from an advanced class to come to your beginners group. Explain that they will have some interesting interpreting to do.
In class
1. Introduce the interpreters to your class and welcome them.
2. Write this puzzle story on the board in English. Leave good spaces between the lines :
There were three people in the room.
A man spoke.
There was a short pause.
The second man spoke.
The woman jumped up and slapped the first man in the face.
3. Ask one of the beginners to come to the board and underline the words they know. Ask others to come and underline the ones they know. Tell the group the words none of them know. Ask one of the interpreters to write a translation into mother tongue. The translation should come under the respective line of English.
4. Tell the students their task is to find out why the woman slapped the first man. They are to ask questions that you can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Tell them they can try and make questions directly in English, or they can call the interpreter and ask the questions in their mother tongue. The interpreter will whisper the English in their ear and they then ask you in English.
5. Erase the mother tongue translation of the story from the board.
6. One of the interpreters moves round the room interpreting questions while the other stays at the board and writes up the questions in both English and mother tongue.
7. You should aim to let the class ask about 15-25 questions, more will overload them linguistically. To speed the process up you should give them clues.
8. Finally, have the students copy all the questions written on the board into their books. You now have a presentation of the main interrogative forms of the simple present and past.
9. After the lesson go through any problems the interpreters had-offer them plenty of parallel translation.
The solution
The second man was an interpreter.
Further material
Do you know the one about the seven-year-old who went to the baker’s? His Mum had told him to get three loaves. He went in, bought two and came home. He put them on the kitchen table. He ran back to the backer’s and bought a third. He rushed in and put the third one on the kitchen table. The question: Why? Solution: he had a speech defect and couldn’t say ‘th’.
Word order dictation
| Grammar: | Word order at sentence level The grammar you decide to input in this example: reflexive phrases, e.g. to myself/by myself/in myself |
| Level: | Intermediate |
| Time: | 20-30 minutes |
| Materials: | Jumbled extracts (for dictation) One copy of Extract from Sarah’s letter per pair of students |
In class
1. Pair the students and ask one person in each pair to prepare to write on a loose sheet of paper.
2. Dictate the first sentence from the Jumbled extracts. One person in each pair takes it down.
3. Ask the pairs to rewrite the jumbled words into a meaningful sentence, using all the words and putting in necessary punctuation.
4. Tell the pairs to pass their papers to the right. The pairs receiving their neighbours’ sentences check out grammar and spelling, correcting where necessary.
5. Dictate the second jumbled sentence.
6. Repeat steps 3 and 4.
7. When you’ve dictated all the sentences this way give out the original, unjumbled Extract from Sarah’s letter and ask the students to compare with the sentences they’ve got in front of them. They may sometimes have created excellent, viable alternative sentences.
Jumbled extracts
1. Myself in absorbed more and more becoming am I find I
2. When mix I do other people me inside a confusion have I I find
3. David John and Nick as though I am me I do not feel when I walk through the park with
4. Strange seems it and a role acting am I like feel I
5. Walk park myself talk aloud myself to I by the through I when
6. Completely feel content I
Extract from Sarah’s letter
I find I am becoming more and more absorbed in myself.
When I do mix with other people I find I have a confusion inside me.
When I walk through the park with David, John and Nick, I do not feel as though I am me.
I feel like I am acting a role and it seems strange.
When I walk through the park by myself I talk aloud to myself.
I feel completely content.
Grammar lessons Taking notes
Passive voiceDuring the lecture ask the students to note cases when we use passive:
- In more formal contexts than active sentences.
For example: Your attention is drawn to Paragraph 6. (But note that using got, usually makes the sentence less formal, for example: We got beaten.They got married.) - when the agent is not clear.
For example: Their office was burgled. - or not important
For example: This cake was made from carrots. - or obvious
For example: They were all arrested. - to give emphasis to the passive subject and add weight to the message.
For example: A state of emergency has been declared. - to make our message more impersonal.
For example, as in a letter saying: No police action will be taken.
Read the following newspaper article and ask the students to:
- note down the six verbs that are in the passive
- suggest a possible reason for the use of the passive in this article.
| ORCHESTRA'S SCHOOLS BOOST Schools and community groups will be the winners if the world famous Philharmonia comes to town. Negotiations are still under way to make Bedford the orchestra's first British residency outside London beginning in 1995, it has been confirmed. What is being talked about is a strong educational emphasis on the deal, which would see members of the orchestra travelling into the community doing workshops with school and other local groups in the borough. School children will be invited in to the Corn Exchange for afternoon rehearsals of the main concerts to be staged. Massive alterations to the Corn Exchange are being planned in tandem so that the orchestra, which was formed in 1945, and the audiences watching them, will enjoy superior back and frontstage facilities including new sloped seating going from the stage to the present balcony and a new auditorium. |
Comment
1. The six verbs in the passive are:
a. it has been confirmed
b. What is being talked about
c. School children will be invited
d. the main concerts to be staged
e. Massive alterations to the Corn Exchange are being planned
f. which was formed.
(Notice that there are five different forms of the verb be in these sentences.)
2. The reason for so much use of the passive here could be that the events which have occurred and those which are planned are more important than the people behind them. It is also an informative article in a newspaper so that some formality is more appropriate than it would be in a friendly letter or in conversation.
Context and meaning
Lecture We'll turn now from context and grammar to the importance of context for meaning. One aspect of meaning is the extent of meaning that a word has. Imagine you are asked the meaning of the word chair. What do you say? 'It's something you sit on', perhaps.What we need to know are the boundaries of its use. Can you say chair for what you sit on in a train? In a car? When milking? On a bike? In church? Suddenly all sorts of judgements have to be made about whether you are going to introduce related words like bench, stool, pew, seat, armchair.
So a simple question about a simple object leads into questions about its use, and also what it must look like. Must a chair have a back? Legs? Arms? This is important because although you may be able to translate chair, its full range of meaning will never overlap 100% with its equivalent in another language.
Now close your eyes and think white. If that's all I say, you are likely to think of the colour white, perhaps on a wall or a shirt or paper. But if I say white wine, you'll think of a yellow colour, or white people, a pinkish colour, or a white lie, no colour at all. Clearly then, the meaning of words often depends on the context.
| In what different contexts could the speaker encountere these words? See if you can find at least two different contexts for each. wings right-winger term rate bar |
Comment
Some of the possible contexts for these words are:
wings: theatre, bird or car
right-winger: football or politics
term: language, school or maths
rate: currency exchange, tax on housing, or speed of increase/decrease
bar: law, music or drinking.