divendres, de març 10, 2006

“English” will possibly become more alive and lively through different learning techniques the teacher may include in his/her lessons. What about offering the student the possibility of facing real life English in a real life situation? The task requires complex organisation. Nevertheless, the results are worthwhile. That’s why we have discussed the process in order to put into practice a real life simulation activity today.
First, the topic must be chosen carefully so that it attracts the students’ interest. Television or radio programmes are usually an appealing option for a teenager since, who hasn’t dreamed to be a news broadcaster in his/her adult life? And that’s what we are going to sort out today, we are going to allow students to dream for a while, but they will dream by means of their English.
Second, the task must be introduced properly so it is correctly understood. We may endow the students with some previous activities pre-teaching vocabulary, provide preceding discussion activities dealing with their own interests in or everyday habits towards certain radio programmes, etc.
Third, we will organize the groups, the roles, set the concrete situation where they have to work out their own news programme and present the activity with some details which make it most interesting: while they are preparing their programme (which is required to last exactly, exactly ten minutes) for example, lots of news letters, opinion letters, advertisement information… will be arriving regularly in such a way that the group of students will have to decide hurriedly which ones are going to be on, which ones are going to be left out, which ones are going to be kept just in case, which ones should be rewritten, if there will be headlines, which ones will be useful for an interview…etc. (As they are real life journalists who have to fix the most attention-grabbing radio programme of the day)
And then, after a time of preparation, they will be given their opportunity to be on the local or national network. They will be given the opportunity to dream and enjoy English while their mates are listening to them or/and the teacher is recording them.
Of course, after this listening, writing, speaking and reading activity the teacher may draw attention to different aspects such as the different ways of classifying the news information detected in the different groups, the ways of summarizing a piece of news, grammar, pronunciation mistakes… etc.
See you after “Fallas”. By Adelaida Blasco.