Now ask the students to draw a picture or pictures which illustrate as much of the meaning of the sentence as possible

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 voice

During 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.

You have just been thinking about different areas of meaning for the same word. Sometimes these different areas depend on shared cultural assumptions and usage. An example of this is a British Rail poster advertising their Family Railcard, depicting a jungle with some monkeys playing in the trees. The text under this poster reads:

Grown-ups get 25% off rail fares. Your little monkeys go for only Ј1.00. Don't drag your feet (or your knuckles). A family Railcard only costs 20 for a year swing by and pick up a leaflet from any main British Rail Station.

Note different meanings of the words used here and their sense.

Comment

You would first need to establish that the usual meaning of all the words was understood and then explain that monkeys can be used to refer to children in English, that it carries the idea of naughtiness but that it's used affectionately. To explain knuckles, you would have to refer to (or demonstrate) how monkeys move, using their knuckles, and explain that knuckles is substituting for the word feet in the phrase 'drag your feet'. You would need to take the same approach to 'swing by'. It might be wise to point out that the use of this sort of language can change quite quickly and could become unfashionable in, say, ten years' time.

2. AAn advertisement for Remy Martin Champagne Cognac uses three sentences suggesting that the consumers of the product are very special. I have changed one word in each to produce unusual collocations. Identify the word and replace it with a word that collocates better. Ask another person and see if they agree with you. HAVE YOU EVER CREWED A YACHT BEYOND THE VISION OF LAND? HAVE YOU EVER THROWN A BARBECUE THAT FRIENDS STILL TALK ABOUT? HAVE YOU EVER RECEIVED STANDING APPLAUSE?

Comment

2. You should have suggested:

a.     vision: sight (vision doesn't collocate with land)

b.     barbecue: party (barbecue doesn't collocate with throw)

c.     applause: a (standing) ovation (applause doesn't collocate with standing)

(Note that we need to add the indefinite article a, because ovation is a count noun whereas applause is not.)

Bottom of Form 1

Subject matter lessons Taking notes

 

ü  The learners are watching a recorded university lecture on acid rain. They are taking notes and will write a summary of the content, using dictionaries (bilingual and monolingual as appropriate). Earlier the teacher had elicited from them some of the key words used in the lecture, their meaning and usage, and listed them on the board.

ü  Small groups of learners are trying to match some cut-out newspaper headlines with the relevant articles. The teacher is going round monitoring each group. Earlier they listened to, discussed and noted some news items on the radio which introduced some of the vocabulary they are encountering.

ü  Individual learners are scattered about outside the classroom asking people pre-prepared questions about their opinions on a new sports centre that is proposed in the area. They are talking in the interviewees' mother tongue, and will then report their findings to the rest of the class in English with the rest of the students taking notes on the matter they present.

ü  Half the class are reading about the early life of a writer they have chosen to study. The other half are reading about the same writer's later life. They make notes of what they had learnt about unknown part of writer’s life.In pairs they'll tell each other what they have found out and then they'll each write an obituary.

ü  In small groups, the learners are looking at examples of different types of text. Their aim is to identify what they are and note any differences in style, formality, length, print-size, comprehensibility, grammar patterns, etc. The examples include: a recipe, a newspaper article, computer instructions, diary entries, an extract from a novel, a letter to some English friends.

  Conclusion

Each of the two methods has its own advantages and disadvantages and their aims are quite different, that’s why I included them both in this single work. Games help students to relax, entertain and encourage them and help to develop their communicative competence, while note-taking is a very serious work demanding an amount of concentration and developing and writing practice. Both of them are to be used in a write time and in a write place. For some students games are a bit unserious while the other part of students may find note-taking too fatiguing so the teacher must take into account all these points. All in all with all these spots to think over I find them necessary in teacher’s work. While some of the methods are let be omitted by the teacher (like silent way, synthetic or analytic (every teacher choose his own way to work with students)) the two of these in my opinion must be included in the learning process. They act like general concepts giving you a full lenth of technics to apply within one method. They don’t give strict directions of how to apply them but a wide space for creative work.

 

 

References

French Allen, V. 1983. Techniques in teaching vocabulary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gear, J. and R. Gear. 1988. Incongruous visuals for the EFL classroom. English Teaching Forum, 26, 2. pp.43. Vocabulary picture puzzle. English Teaching Forum, 23, 4, pp. 41-42. Gulland, D. M. and D. Hinds-Howell. 1986. The penguin dictionary of English idioms. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Haycraft, J. 1978. An introduction to English language teaching. Harlow: Longman. Hubbard, P., H. Jones, B. Thornton, and R. Wheeler. 1983. A training course for TEFL. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lee, W. R. 1979. Language teaching games and contests. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rixon, S. 1981. How to use games in language teaching. London: Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Mario Rinvolucri and Paul Davis.1992. More grammar games. Cambridge University Press. Abbott, G., D. McKeating, J. Greenwood, and P. Wingard. 1981. The teaching of English as an international language. A practical guide. London: Collins. Raimes, A. 1983. Techniques in teaching writing. New York: Oxford University Press. Games, Games, Games ( a Woodcraft Folk handbook sold in Oxfam shops in UK) Berer, Marge and Frank, Christine and Rinvolucri, Mario. Challenge to think. Oxford University Press, 1982.

Internet Key

http://search.atomz.com/ http://e.usia.gov/forum/vols/vol36/no1/p20.htm-games http://e.usia.gov/forum/vols/vol34/no2/p22.htm-note-taking