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Production. Give the goal of each part and explain what types of activities

Engage (E)

Most of us can remember lessons at school which were uninvolving and where we 'switched off' from what was being taught. We may also remember lessons where we were more or less paying attention, but where we were not really 'hooked'. We were not engaged emotionally with what was going on; we were not curious, passionate or involved. Yet things are learnt much better if both our minds and our hearts are brought into service. Engagement of this type is one of the vital ingredients for successful learning.

Activities and materials which frequently engage students include: games (depending on the age of the learners and the type of game), music, discussions (when handled challengingly), stimulating pictures, dramatic stories, amusing anecdotes, etc. Even where such activities and materials are not used, teachers can do their best to ensure that their students engage with the topic, exercise or language they are going to be dealing with by asking them to make predictions, or relate classroom materials to their own lives. A lot will depend, of course, on what the individual students are like, as we saw in Chapter 1, and how well the teacher provokes and encourages engagement.

The reason why this element is so important in teaching sequences, therefore, is that when students are properly engaged, their involvement in the study and activation stages is likely to be far more pronounced, and, as a result, the benefit they get from these will be considerably greater.

Study (S)

Study activities are those where the students are asked to focus on the construction of something, whether it is the language itself, the ways in which it is used or how it sounds and looks. Study activities can range from the focus on and practice of a single sound to an investigation of how a writer achieves a particular effect in a long text; from the examination and practice of a verb tense to the study of a transcript of informal speech in order to discuss spoken style. In the PPP procedure described above, both presentation and practice (the first two stages) are focusing on the construction of an element of grammar or lexis; after all, controlled practice (where students repeat many phrases using the language they are focusing on) is designed to make students think about language construction. When we have students repeat words with the correct pronunciation (or say the words we want them to say based on cues we give them), it is because we want them to think about the best way to say the words. We want them to think of the construction of the words' pronunciation.

But study here means more than the PPP procedure - although PPP is, of course, one kind of study. Students can study in a variety of different ways. Sometimes we may show them a new grammar pattern, repeating each element separately or putting a diagram on the board before getting them to repeat sentences, and that is very much like a PPP procedure. But at other times, we may show students examples of language and ask them to try to work out the rules. Such discovery activities ask the students to do all the intellectual work, rather than leaving it to the teacher. Sometimes students can read a text together and find words and phrases they want to concentrate on for later study. At other times, they may spend time, with the teacher, listening to or looking at the language they have used to see when it has been more or less successful. All of these (and many other possibilities) are examples of the study of language construction.



Some typical language areas for study might be the study and practice of the vowel sound in 'ship' and 'sheep' (e.g. 'chip', 'cheap', 'dip', 'deep', 'bit', 'beat', etc), the study and practice of the third person singular of the present simple ('He sleeps', 'she laughs', 'it works', etc), the study and practice of lexical phrases for inviting (' Would you like to come to the cinema/to a concert?', etc), the study and practice of the way we use pronouns in written discourse (e.g. A man entered a house in Brixton. He was tall with an unusual hat. It was multicoloured ...’, etc), the study and practice of paragraph organisation (topic sentence, development, conclusion) or of the rules for using 'make' and 'do'.

Activate (A)

This element describes exercises and activities which are designed to get students using language as freely and communicatively as they can (as in CLT - see page 50). We will not be asking them to focus on the use of a particular structure, or to try to use words from a list we give them. That would make what they are doing more like a study activity, where they are expected to focus on the accuracy of specific bits of language, rather than on the message they are trying to convey or the task that needs to be performed. The objective in an activate activity is for them to use all and any language which may be appropriate for a given situation or topic. In this way, students get a chance to try out real language use with little or no restriction - a kind of rehearsal for the real world.

Personalisation (where students use language they have studied to talk about themselves, or to make their own original dialogues, often as the third or production phase of PPP) provides a bridge between the study and activate stages. But more genuinely activate exercises include role-plays (where students act out, as realistically as possible, an exchange between a travel agent and a client, for example), advertisement design (where students write and then record a radio commercial, for example), debates and discussions, Describe and draw (where one student tries to get another to draw a picture without that other student being able to see the original), story and poem writing, email exchanges, writing in groups, etc.

Activation is not just about producing language in speech and writing, however. When students read or listen for pleasure (or when they are listening or reading to understand the message rather than thinking about the form of the language they are seeing or hearing), they are involved in language activation. They are using all and any language at their disposal to comprehend the reading or listening text.

But, of course, students may, once they have been through an activation stage, go back to what they have said or to the text they have read, and focus upon its construction. Activation can be a prelude to study, rather than necessarily the other way round.

 

All three ESA elements need to be present in most lessons or teaching sequences. Whatever the main focus of the lesson (e.g. a grammar topic or a reading skills exercise), students always need to be engaged, if possible, so that they can get the maximum benefit from the learning experience. Most students will readily appreciate opportunities to activate their language knowledge, but for many of them the inclusion of study elements, however small or of short duration these are, will persuade them of the usefulness of the lesson.

Some events, for example a debate or a role-play, a prolonged Internet-based search or a piece of extended writing take a lot of time and so, in one lesson, teachers may not want to interrupt the flow of activation with a study stage. But they may want to use the exercise as a basis for study (perhaps in a different lesson). The same might be true of an extended study period where chances for activation are few. But, in both these cases, the only limitation is time. The missing elements will appear at some other time.

The majority of teaching and learning at lower levels is not made up of such long activities, however. Instead, it is far more likely that there will be more than one ESA sequence in a given lesson sequence or period.

4.Describe each of 4 parts of a lesson: Warm-up, Presentation, Practice and

Production. Give the goal of each part and explain what types of activities


Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1305


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