Ministry of education and science of Ukraine

Kharkiv State Pedagogical University by G.S. Skovoroda

Department: English Philology

 

 

 

Course paper on the topic

The selection and adaptation of the material on the topic “Towns and places”

Kharkiv 2003

Contents

I.  Introduction

II.  Theoretical part

1.  The ways of introducing the topic “Towns and places”

2.  Types of activities

III.  Practical part

1.  The set of the exercises on the topic

a)  Towns of the USA

b)  Towns of Ukraine

2.  The working out of the lessons for students of the 10th form

IV.  Conclusion

I. Introduction

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.

The main condition of learning of the topic is knowing words and expressions. It’s basis. How can pupils remember the new words best of all? They repeat the new words after the teacher. Repetition can be very useful. Chorus repetition allows pupils to try the new words out with everybody else rather than having to risk getting it wrong in front of the class. The pupils repeat the words individually. Choral and individual repetitions are useful for sentences as well.

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. ............