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Activity Plan: A Snapshot of What's to Come
Click on Badtzy to go to the Teacher's Guide |
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Audience
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Beginner to low intermediate English for Academic Purposes (EAP) students at a North American university enrolled in an Oral Communication course |
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Objectives
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Provide additional listening, pronunciation, and vocabulary support as a supplement to the course textbook Interactions 2: Listening/Speaking (4th Ed.) |
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Methods
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Since the basic information will be presented in class and by their text, I will be working on recognition of forms and patterns of use as a means of recycling information. Most of the activities will focus on stress patterns (I avoid the use of the word rules to describe stress in the English language because I believe that patterns more accurately describes stress in use), i.e. recognition of stress and reduced forms in discourse samples and conversation. Other activities will emphasize vocabulary recognition and production most likely in cloze activities or multiple choice items. I would like to have sound bites, but do not know if that is feasible since many computer classrooms only have sound enabled on the instructor's computer. Sound bites also require a media player of some sort like Real One or Windows Media Player. I am not sure if my students will have access to these programs or if Hot Potatoes allows this kind of information. I want to create a fun supplement to in-class work that will enable students to practice what they have been learning. |
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Technological Issues
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I'll try to include all the types, but I am uncertain which will lend themselves easily to listening and pronunciation skills. I still have not figured out how to add sound to the activities. I do not have enough computer knowledge at this point. I hope that by the time I have my activities firmly planned out that I'll be able to manipulate MP3 files or maybe create links to sound bites through Hot Potatoes. I'll also need to find a classroom that has speakers enabled on student computers so that I can test the activities with some of my students. |
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Activities 1 - 5
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An introduction to some of the most basic patterns of stress. This could be done through a text or a conversation with the stressed items in bold or highlighted. Each sample would be followed by a set of questions asking what the student noticed about each word, i.e. was it a content word, new information, a strong emotion, etc. Perhaps there could also be a set of true/false questions. This set will focus on recognition. | ||
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Activities 6 - 10
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Review of key idiomatic expressions from each chapter. Maybe the activities could be thematically named, so the students could refer to their class notes. These activities will probably be multiple choice, matching, jumbled sentences, and crossword puzzles. I might alternate the stress activities with these vocabulary items, an odd even sequence maybe?? | ||
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Activities 11 - 15
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At this point, I want to include production and listening activities. I would really like to include some excerpts from songs which have reductions. (One great song is 'You Gotta Be' by Des'ree.) The students would have to fill in the blanks with the correct reduced forms or maybe even write out the long form of the reductions. A matching exercise with reductions and long forms might also be fun. If at all possible, I'd like to have a nice mix of idioms, vocab, and stress patterns represented in the sound bites. I might be able to record some of my own material here, but I am not sure how since I do not have a microphone on my computer. | ||
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