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4. Other areas
a) Traditions and customs, e.g. Pancake Day, Thanksgiving
b) The Royal Family
c) Political institutions
d) Castles, stately homes and gardens
e) Folk music
f) Food and cooking
g) Porcelain and pottery, e.g. Wedgwood, Royal Doulton
h) Sport
i) Ways of being, e.g. attitudes, norms, taboos, behaviours
Ask your students each to decide on their project to tell you next lesson.
3. Next lesson ask each student what their project is going to be about and make a note of it. If more than one wants to work on a particular area, suggest they work in a pair, but discourage more than two students working on one project. There are so many to choose from that it is a pity not to have a wide range. Agree a target date for completion of the project and presentation to the class - in a one-month course it will have to be near the end of the course, in a year-long course towards the end of the term you start the project in. Tell your students that you will ask them from time to time how their projects are going and will set aside some class time to discuss progress and to deal with any problems.
Variation
Mini-projects have great success, where the students identify some small thing about English-speaking culture they want to know about and have just one lesson in a library to find out. You accompany them to the library and help them find the materials they need. The next lesson they report back what they found. Among the mini-projects which may be suggested are: willow-pattern pottery, Shakespeare’s life, the historical King Arthur, prehistoric monuments in Britain, Elgar, Liverpool and child labour in Victorian England.
2.3 Project Work Activities for the Advanced Level
Taking the Plunge
1. Ask your class what they think are the main problems of being a more advanced learner. They usually talk about difficult vocabulary, complex structures and other language items. Accept these points but put it to them that there is often a much more fundamental problem, namely how they go about their learning. If any student raises any of the more fundamental areas outlined in the handout, use this as a direct springboard into the next step.
2. Give each student a copy of the following handout.
Being a good advanced learner
Many learners of English manage to reach a level where they can understand, speak and write for everyday purposes. Yet only a relatively small proportion of these people ever become genuinely advanced users of the language, though many make the attempt. As you are just beginning a course in more advanced English, it is important for you to be aware of what you need to do and how to go about it, so that you can make a success of your course.
You are going to read a short text, with a series of tasks to do as you read. This will provide an opportunity to reflect on your learning and, through your answers to the tasks, will give your teacher valuable information about you as a learner, so that he or she can give you greater guidance for the future.
Beyond spoon-feeding
In many language courses the teaching at lower levels tends to follow a pattern of what could be described as 'spoon-feeding' - the teacher chooses the elements of the language to teach (the food), plans how to present it (puts it onto a spoon) and teaches (feeds) the learners with it, as if they were children. However, just as children become progressively more independent and in due course have to assume full responsibility for themselves as adults, so learners of a language, as they advance, have to become more independent and assume greater responsibility for their own learning.
To be successful at an advanced level, you will have to commit yourself not only to attending classes but also to spending a substantial amount of time studying out of class. This should partly be directed by your teacher (homework and preparation) and partly through your own initiative.
A typical student with three to five hours of English classes per week should expect to spend about the same number of hours studying out of class - doing grammar exercises and writing tasks, learning vocabulary, reading extensively, and so on. The fewer hours you have with a teacher, the more you will have to work on your own. Without this kind of commitment you cannot expect to make a lot of progress.
1. How many hours of English classes do you have each week?
2. How many more hours can you commit to learning English each week?
It is easy to commit yourself to a theoretical number of hours per week, but unless you set aside particular days and times, you will keep finding you are too busy doing other things. So decide now which days and times you are going to dedicate to studying English.
3. In the light of your commitment, how much progress do you expect to make? In what areas (e.g. listening/speaking/reading/writing, accuracy/fluency)? Be specific about your objectives.
Ways of studying
Making good progress depends not only on how much time you spend but also how you go about studying. For example, how do you organise the things you want to learn?
4. Write about how you organise the notes you take in class and the things you want to learn when studying on your own.
5. What techniques do you use to memorise things?
6. When you are studying alone, you need good reference materials. What dictionaries, grammar books and other materials do you have?
The quantum leap
Ironically, one of the greatest problems that often arises among more advanced learners is the fact that they can already function in English for a lot of everyday purposes and, instead of extending their knowledge, go on just using what they already know. To be successful at an advanced level, thin is not enough. You have to make a ‘quantum leap’, in other words a significant jump towards something much more sophisticated and wide-ranging. You have to aim to function like a mature, well-educated native speaker of the language. This means that you need to be able to draw upon your experience of the world and to have a reasonable, though not specialist, knowledge of any subject you are speaking or writing about. The content is vitally important, because if this is too limited, your language will be correspondingly limited - you won't need and therefore won't use more advanced structures and vocabulary.
7. How old are you?
8. What areas do you feel you have some knowledge about?
9. In what areas do you feel you have very little knowledge?
There are three areas that contribute substantially to making the quantum leap and particularly to writing in a more sophisticated way: observation, imagination and thinking.
10. Do you consider yourself to be good at
a) observing
b) imagining
c) thinking
Explain your answers.
Good luck with your advanced course.
Ask them to read the text and answer the questions. Set a time limit of thirty minutes. Tell your students that you will want to collect the completed handouts in to read, but that you are interested in what they say, not in how correct the English is. With students that finish early, take the opportunity to speak to individuals and discuss some of their answers.
3. When they have finished, initiate a discussion about what they have read and written. Ask them if they feel they have learnt anything important that they perhaps hadn't thought about before. Encourage an exchange of views among the members of the class. Collect in the completed handouts.
4. Later, go through the handouts, noting down any points you want to use for feedback and any you want to keep for your own reference. Make comments on the handouts about the contents where you feel this would be helpful to the student but don't correct. In a follow-up lesson, preferably the lesson immediately following, go over any points that emerged from the handouts. In particular, you may want to draw attention to reference materials you would recommend.
Variation
In Step 3, after the students have completed their handouts, put them into groups of four to compare and discuss what they wrote. In particular, ask them to discuss the specific contexts where the quantum leap would be important and the sort of tasks that might involve the three areas of observing, imagining and thinking. This can be very valuable but you will need to set aside about twenty minutes extra.
Ups and Downs
1. Initiate a discussion on ‘ups and downs’ – when we feel better or not so good. Draw the first to these graphs on the board, showing your own ups and downs. Explain your day rhythms with reference to the graphs.
|
Best Worst midnight 3 6 9 midday 15 18 21 midnight |
|
Best Worst Mon Tues Weds Thurs Fri Sat Sun am pm am pm am pm am pm am pm am pm am pm |
|
Best Worst J F M A M J J A S O N D |
A) Day Rhythms
B) Week Rhythms
C) Year RhythmsAsk your students to copy the graphs and complete them with their own rhythms. When they are ready, ask them to explain their graphs to their colleagues. If your class has more than about twelve students, divide the class into groups of up to twelve for this phase; monitor them and when they have finished get the groups to report to the whole class the kinds of things they found.
English-Speaking Countries
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