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The selection and adaptation of the material on the topic “Towns and places”
Kharkiv 2003
Contents
This research paper is devoted to the topic “The selection and adaptation of the material on the topic “Towns and places”. The topicality of this subject is brought about that many students travel to other cities, towns and abroad, and they are eager to tell about their impressions, adventures. The topic is closely connected with our life; it is easy for pupils to learn the words, to make up sentences, dialogues. They have discussions, surveys, and questionnaires. To our mind, most of students take part in the role-plays with great pleasure. Such lessons should be very various, intensive, full of joy. At the first lesson students learn new words, expressions, enrich their vocabulary stock. Later they can bring their own albums and describe their trips, cities, towns they've visited. There is a wide range of material for teachers, which helps them in teaching such an interesting topic.
The aim of our paper is to work out the system of exercises on the topic “Towns and places” for students of intermediate level.
According to the aim the following tasks are to fulfill:
1) Observe the ways of selections material on the topic;
2) Design a set of activities and exercises, directed on development of writing skills, speaking, listening, reading, on the material from course books adopted by ministry of education and science of Ukraine.
II. Theoretical part
a) The ways of introducing the new material
Whatever the level of the pupils and however language study is organized within ESA teaching sequences, there are four things that need to do with new language: be exposed to it, understand its meaning, understand its form (how it's constructed) and practice it). Teachers use different wooden blocks of different length and colours there are different visual possibilities too: cards, drawings, and pictures.
Topic “Towns and places” gives wide opportunity for using different kinds of texts about cities and towns of the USA, Great Britain and Ukraine, about the most important places of interest. Types of texts may be quite different, they are encyclopedia - type texts or short stories. The teacher must take the pupils read magazines articles, letters, stories, menus, advertisements, reports, play extracts, instructions, and poems.
There are very different kinds of work with texts:
1) Students are given a number of words from the text. They must guess what city or town it is;
2) They read the text and have to guess where people come from (city, town). Some places of interest are mentioned there;
3) Students read narrative with the end missing. They have to supply their own ending.
As we understand the teacher must choose the material on the “Towns and places” so interesting and useful, that every pupil will work with pleasure, will be interested in learning this topic.
Practice sessions at this level are likely to be a combination of repetition and simple - making of the kind the teacher is using in this example. With different words and constructions he may not be able to hold up objects or point to them, instead he can use pictures, drawings, mime, gesture, words, etc.
It's very useful to use invitations. It's a good chance to make up good dialogues.
For example:
- Would you like to visit the museum of water in Chuguyev on Sunday?
- That would be great! I'm sure I'll be free and we'll go there.
b) Types of activities
Students need to practice the questions and answer exchange, they work in pairs and make as many invitations and replies as they can. In very large classes, it may be useful to divide the class in half: one half is Sarah; the other half is Joe.
The teacher can conduct the halves so that they can practice the questions and answers.
A much better kind of practice is to ask them to make their own sentences using the words correctly if they make some mistakes.
The main aim of the pupils is to perform some kind of talk about towns and places of interest. There are different kinds of speaking activities from puzzle - like tasks to more involved role-playing.
One type of speaking activity involves the so-called “information gap” - where two speakers have different parts of information making up a whole. Because they have different information there is a gap between them. One popular information gap activity is called “Describe and draw”. In this activity one student has a picture which he or she must not show his or her partner. All the partners have to do is to draw the picture without looking at the original, so the one with the picture will give instructions and descriptions and the “artist” will ask questions.
“Describe and draw” has many of the elements of an ideal speaking activity. It is highly motivating; there is a real purpose for communication.
A further extension of the information gap idea occurs in the story - telling activity. The teacher puts the class into four groups, calling them A, B, C, D. each group receives some pictures of the places of interest of some city or town. The groups memorize everything they can about the pictures. The teacher collects the pictures and asks for one student from each group to form a new four - person group. He tells them that they each seen a different picture, but the picture taken together in some order or other tell a story about the city, may the pupils remember some facts, details about the monuments, museums, etc. the final stories may be different. The groups tell the whole class what their version is, and the teacher can finally re-show the pictures. Their story-telling can, of course be useful as a prelude to written narrative work. One way of provoking conversation opinion exchange is to get students to conduct questionnaires and surveys. If the pupils plan these questionnaires themselves, the activity becomes even more useful. The teacher wants to activate pupils' knowledge.
- What kind of questionnaire can it be?
- What places of interest do you always try to visit?
- Where do you stop? (a hotel, private flat or a house)
- Have you met any interesting people during your excursion?
- Have you taken any photos?
If you answer `yes', describe the experience. The pupils go round the class questioning other pupils noting down what they say. While they are doing this the teacher listens and prompts where necessary and he then gets them to tell the class of any interesting experience. Encouraging pupils to get up and walk around talking to other classmates has many advantages. It varies the structure of classroom period, allows pupil a bit of physical movement and provides a welcome variety of interaction. Pupils can design and use surveys and questionnaires about any topic - transport, places where you can rest, services in the city, etc.
The change of opinions provokes spontaneous fluent language use. The first thing to remember is that people need time to assemble their thoughts before discussion. The ability to give spontaneous and articulate opinions is challenging in our own language, let alone the language we are struggling to learn.
The teacher starts by asking individual students to name any museums they have visited. Did they enjoy the excursion? Did they learn any interesting facts about the history? Students are broken up into groups. They have a chance to think of ideas. This kind of discussion can be formalized into proper debate-speakers on different sides giving speeches comments. Role - play activities are those where students are asked to imaging that they are in different situations and act accordingly. The teacher may tell them to role-play being guests from another city, travel agents answering customer questions, participants in a public-building project, guides.
For example, the conversation at the travel agency. The teacher asks pupils to ask about details of their traveling. Pupils must stick to the information on their original cards, but can invent new facts, which fit with that information. The teacher now tells the group to start, but sets a time limit for the chairperson to announce the result. While the activity is going on the teacher goes around the groups prompting where necessary and making notes on examples of good and bad English usage that he hears. When the time limit is up, the teacher asks the various chairpeople to say haw their groups voted and why.
The role-game can now lead into a number of possible writing tasks: a segment of the dialogue, a newspaper report, letters to the newspaper, posters, etc.
We want to describe some material, which can de used for teaching pupils. It is divided into two aspects:
1) Cities of English-speaking countries;
2) Cities and town of Ukraine;
III. Practical part. The cities of English speaking countries
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