English for Teachers/Suggestions

by Daniel D. Holt

SUGGESTIONS FOR USING THIS MATERIAL

As learning plans are written for experiences which will exact more from the students and less from the teacher, the following approaches for each of the kinds of material included in the Units might be considered:

1. Comprehensive Reading
   1. Before dealing with this in any way, the teacher should check the grammar boxes in each Chapter of the Unit. Wherever possible, page references from the Appendix of Language and Life in the U.S.A. are included to give the teacher a clear understanding of what the various grammar point(s) are.
   2. This Comprehensive Reading may be seen as a PREVIEW of the Unit. The teacher might use part or all of this reading in assisting the students with:
      1. RECOGNIZING what grammar points will be developed in the Chapters of that Unit and
      2. GENERATING the grammar points before/after they are dealt with in each of the Chapters.
   3. While many parts of the Chapter will refer to this reading, the teacher should make every effort to use it at any time to indicate or develop the grammar point(s) in listening, speaking, reading, and writing exercises.
   4. A process that may be useful for students in dealing with the Comprehensive Reading (as well as the other Readings) to develop reading ability is reprinted here from Interactions in English with the permission of Cynthia Choy-ong, Dale A. Enger, and Park Myong-seok.
      1. Read each selection all the way through without stopping to decode and decipher or translate sentences that are difficult to understand. In this first reading, try to get a general idea of the content of the selection.
      2. Read the selection a second time without stopping, but this time underline words and expression you do not understand

3. Go back and look at each underlined word or expression and try to guess its meaning. In some cases, your guess will be very imprecise and vague. You may know that a word means "something good" or "something bad" or "some kind of machine" or "an action". In other cases, especially when the word is used several times in the passage you may be able to arrive at a very precise meaning.
   • To see how this process is applied to one of the Readings, see Unit 4, Chapter 4.

2. Grammar Points
   1. The grammar points around which each Chapter was developed can be found in the box at the beginning of the Chapter.
   2. The importance of researching the grammar point(s) with the reference pages given cannot be stressed enough. Through, investigation of the grammar points in Language and Life in the U.S.A., as well as in other grammar books and textbooks, the teacher can develop a clear understanding of the grammar points are and how they can be inter-related.
   3. The knowledge achieved by the teacher and students about the grammar points should NOT result in extended discussions about the language. It should result in learning plans that give the students every opportunity to generate and use the language intensively and competently.
3. Review Reading
   1. This may be seen as a REVIEW of the Unit. It contains most of the grammar points included in the Comprehensive Reading and in the Unit.
   2. This reading should give the students a chance to see that the competency they achieved during their experiences in the Unit has allowed them to read, comprehend, and discuss this reading with ease.
   3. The teacher could also use this reading to give the students further experience with grammar points that were troublesome for them during study of the Unit.

4. Exchanges

   In a number of Chapters, Exchanges are included to show how the grammar points work in natural, short conversation. The teacher should allow the students to expand each of these two or three line Exchanges by:

   1. substituting other vocabulary in them at every opportunity,
   2. letting the students make sentences similar in meaning but different in form than those in the Exchanges,
   3. adding sentences to the Exchanges that contain grammar points from previous chapters,
   4. developing situations and visuals to add "reality" to the practice involved, (As with all work in the classroom, then Exchanges should be practiced in "real" situations or with pictures.)
   5. writing more Exchanges and re-writing those included here,
   6. having the students write Exchanges around the grammar points of one chapter or all chapters studied to that point.
5. Remaining Parts of the Chapter
   
   The Dialogues, Activities, Proverbs, etc. represent further development of the grammar point(s) and/or topic in each Unit. The teacher should consult other TESOL materials for suggestions that will make the greatest use of these parts of the Chapter.

With all of the parts of the Chapter the teacher should remember that any text (including this one) must be adapted to fit the needs of a particular moment in the classroom. The teacher must continually strive to use the text to develop special activities that exact more and more from the students and less and less from the teacher. Perhaps the best way for the teacher to create such activities is to make every effort to focus on what the students are and/or could be thinking and doing.

Regarding the students as primary in the learning situation will create situations in which their interests, aspirations, likes, and dislikes will come alive, allowing them to discover things about their world, themselves, and the language they are trying to master.

- d.h.