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News
about the Parcial and the Make-up
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Parcial
:
Friday 20th July 8:30 - 10:30 hours. (Both Morning and Afternoon
Shifts)
Publication
of Results : Friday 20th July 12:30
hours
Make
up
: Wednesday 8th August . 13:30 hours (Both Morning and Afternoon
Shifts)
Material
to be included : The Whole of Fichas de Cátedra 1 & 2 plus the corresponding
sections from
Ur,
Penny ( 1996).
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More Questions from Prof.b Marisa Caccia to
help you with the Parcial
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Moon Jayne.2000.Children Learning English, Oxford : Macmillan
Heinemann
Chapters
7-8-9-
CHAPTER
7
1.
“But it is not
the materials in themselves which are important, but how they are used to help
pupils’ language learning”. Discuss
and provide and example.
2.
Do you think
teachers should create their own activities, materials?
Why?
3.
Discuss
language-learning activities, teachers’ and learners’
roles.
4.
There are
several points we need to keep in mind when choosing activities. Discuss
them.
5.
Choose a game
and make comments taking into account
Learning purpose, Learners, Management and Learning
principles.
6.
When can you
create or adapt activities? What are the benefits?
CHAPTER
8
1.
What decisions
should you make when planning?
2.
What is meant by
content?
3.
What is meant by
procedure?
4.
When should you
write your objectives?
5.
What’s the
difference between objectives written from the teacher’s point of view or the
pupil’s?
6.
Why is feedback
important?
CHAPTER
9
1.
Provide an
example of topic work. Define it.
2.
How would you
choose a topic and what factors would influence your choice of topic and
activities?
3.
How would you
choose the activities related to your topic?
4.
How do students
profit from topic work?
5.
What should you consider when choosing starting points for your topic
work?
6.
How would you
organize topic work?
7.
What are the
advantages and disadvantages of using topic work?
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LESSON
PLANNING - An Overview
by Omar Villarreal (c)
2001
THE SECTIONS IN EACH LESSON
Within the logical variation of
objectives, subject-matter content and the various functional and grammatical
applications that every lesson affords, each lesson should be organized along a common pattern of :
(1) activation,
(2) presentation-
comprehension- clarification
(3) application
(4) reflection.
I suggest this kind of organization
with basically a very similar framework for every lesson to offer students and teachers the
possibility of treading safely on familiar ground as they deal with the more
complex processes of learning and acquiring the new linguistic material in each
lesson.
The lay-out of each lesson plan should
include the following parts:
1 Communicative Goal/s
2 Grammar Focus
Vocabulary
Focus
Recycled Language.
3
Activation.
3
Presentation : Listening and Reading.
4 Comprehension
- Clarification.
6 Application
7 Reflection
Let us analyse each of these in
turn:
Communicative Goals :
Under this heading you shuld include main
goal or goals of the lesson
expressed
in terms of communicative functions. To this /these communicative functions
we will again refer to during our final "reflection" at the end of the
les
Focii and Recycled
Language
In the Grammar Focus and the Vocabulary Focus you should clearly indicate the grammatical
exponents and lexical fields covered in the lesson.
One of the keys to success in ELT is
the constant recycling of the linguistic
material presented in previous lessons in such a way that, for
example, the material presented in
lesson 1 is recycled in lesson . This operation does not need to be of
a purely sequential nature and often material presented very early on in your
syllabus is recycled not only immediately after its first presentation but
also at a much later stage in a real spiral fashion. All
this information should be included in the section " Recycled
Language".
Activation.
In the “activation” stage of the
lesson. The questions and/or tasks
in this section intend to activate the students´ previous knowledge by focusing
on decoding and interpreting the photograph or photographs that accompany the dialogues or asking
general/"personal" questions always tapping on the students´ personal
experience.
Presentation: Listening and Reading.-
Comprehension- Clarification
While it is true
that every part of the lesson is important, it is equally true that the
Listening and Reading section is the heart of each lesson. The processes of presentation-
comprehension- clarification spring directly from its contents.
In this section we pay special
attention the teaching of Listening comprehension in the conviction that most
often than not we, teachers of
English, “test” rather than “teach”
Listening Comprehension. In this sense asking students to listen to a cassette
twice and then answering a host of True or False questions cannot be considered
teaching students to listen and understand.
A
detailed plan of re-construction of the message after a number of
subsequent “hearings” (each one of them with a clear aim) must be worked
out in each “Listening and Reading” section. The same "model" can
also be used to tackle other Listening activities that you may wish to
include.
In order to clarify the
meaning of words, phrases or prefabricated routines, you might wish to use
:
(a) definition, (b) synonymy (c)
visuals/ realia (d) contextualization (re-contextualization) (e) translation.
In principle do not avoid using any
technique or device you think might work in the benefit of your students simply because
it does not follow the prescriptions of a particular methodology. Reference
books and articles written by
experienced practitioners and learned theoreticians might be your best friends
but when everything else fails, let sound common sense and be your guide. Never
let dogmatism get in the way of effectiveness.
At this stage, you might want your students to give evidence of their understanding of the dialogue.
Different formats can be used for this purpose : multiple choice, true and
false, completion of a chart, etc. It should be stressed
that when the format adopted is that of “ wh-questions” and “yes-no questions” every effort must
be made not to lose sight of the aim of the activity and to confuse it with a
writing exercise. Short answers ( like “yes” or
“no” or simply a name) should always be welcomed and encouraged.
Sections of the relevant
"grammatical focus should always be isolated for clarification. Let us
consider this example:
Ø Direct the
students´attention to these
sentences:
“There´s a bottle in that pile” and
“There are two clean
T-shirts under the bench”.
Ø
Copy these sentences on the board.
Ø
Ask the students if
they can figure out the meaning of these two sentences.
Ø
Ask them to
translate these two sentences.
Ø
Make them aware
that the translation for both of them is
“HAY”.
Ø
Copy “HAY” next to
the sentences on the
board.
Ø
Elicit from them
that one of the expressions is used for the singular and the other for the
plural.
Ø
Complete your chart
with the words “singular” and
“plural” conveniently placed alongside the sentences
Ø Tell them (if this were more economical than
eliciting the notion from them) that these sentences are
used to express
"Existence"
Ø Write the
heading “Existence” on top
of the sentences..
Ø
Ask the students to
copy this chart in their notebooks.
Blackboard (bb/)
EXISTENCE
There´s a bottle in that
pile.
SINGULAR
HAY
There
are two clean T-shirts under the
bench. PLURAL
Application
In this section we should
afford afford practice in all four
macro-skills (and incidentally in a few micro-skills, such as spelling). Skills
can sometimes be presented in isolation but preferably in combinations
of two or three of them as it
happens to be the case in real life. The kind of activities presented move
should along a continuum that ranges from drill-type ( with as much
contextualization as possible) and quasi –communicative
activities to the
more authentic communicative open-ended
activities that challenge the students creativity as well as their
linguistic competence, depending on our understanding of what was needed at each
stage. Whatever the activity we choose to do with our students, the guiding
principle should always be: "the linguistic pay-off", that is to say, "how much
is this activity going to pay me off in terms of language development
(acquisition and/or learning)?"
Again every possible
provision must be made to ensure that previously presented items are constantly recycled.
The
communicative activities should encourage the students to use the functions
and exponents introduced in a particular lesson in the context of
meaningful communication. Some of these activities should expand onto
the wider context of real life,
while others should be of a more ludicrous or game-like type. The level of
complexity and authenticity of the tasks increases as the students progress
along the course.
Different
grouping schemes can be used with the various activities . The four main types
are : Solo
Pairs, Small
Group and Whole Class
In each activity you vary the groping
svheme at your discretion to vary according to your own classroom dynamics or
use a combination of several schemes. For example, an activity might well be
started off in pairs and be finished as a whole class activity ( a most typical arrangement, indeed) or proceed from solo to pairs.
It has almost become commonplace today to talk about mixed
ability classes. I strongly believe that there are in all classes students with
the most diverse abilities. What is at stake here is, to our understanding, not
the idea of different abilities but that of different levels of linguistic
competence. The concept of the “fast finisher” student is closely associated
with this idea of different levels of competence in the same class. I suggest that you should
motivate those more able students to embark on some middle-term task ( like that
of reading a short story, a novel or a simplified reader) which can be chopped
up in stages with each one of these stages assigned to one particular lesson.
For example, if a guided reader
(stages “starter” “beginner” and “elementary” might be particularly useful) were
assigned as an extra task for the “fast finisher”, the reader could be divided
into sections and these more advanced students be asked to write a short report,
elaborate a mind map, a web, a comic strip, etc on what they have just read.
Reflection
This
section encourages metalinguistic reflection about the speech events in a
particular lesson.
The
students are systematically asked to
reflect on the communicative function of the material or part of the
material covered in the lesson. The relevant tasks might entail identifying
the correct expressions, finding examples in the dialogue, matching functions
with examples, etc.
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A big, big hug to you all
Omar Villarreal