This Smith’s
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Imperatives
How would you warn someone of a dangerous situation? Would you recognize such a warning if you heard it yourself?
This Smith’sSchool of English
This Smith’s
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2 comments:
This lesson focused a great deal on imperatives since the student had never been exposed to them before. I spread out the picture cards onto the table and instructed her to divide them into two groups; one for dangerous situations, and the other for somewhat dangerous situations. Once she had completed that task, we carefully went over each card, writing down new vocabulary on the board whenever it became necessary.
After the picture cards were fully understood, I wrote the strong and weak warnings on the board. She practiced using such sentences as, "Don't pet the tiger!", or "Mind your step!" Next, we went through the warning signs and matched them up with the actual verbal warnings. Again, she had very little trouble with this but we stopped a few times to go over some new phrases.
By the end of it, she had memorized every warning and was very eager to apply her knowledge with the practice dialogues. So, using just the picture cards, we went through the dialogues, testing her memory of each individual warning. With the exception of a few mistakes, she got this section down with relative ease.
E.T.
There were two students with different onepoints in this class, and they were both a little late so I reviewed both of them, giving them both a chance for quick review as well as become comfortable.
Routine 7 The Restaurant
I had already written the routine up on the board which was lucky, as it saved time when they were both late! I went through the routine once while they listened. I then went through each of the sentences, part by part and had them repeat after me. I spent a bit longer on some of the more complicated sentences, and made sure that they could say the whole thing correctly. As we were out of time in the end, I didn't ask them to repeat the whole routine back to me at the end, instead saving it for next time!
Item - Imperatives
I chose for this item to take up the majority of the lesson, because as SJ wrote above, these warnings are indeed imperative.
They division of the cards didn't get so far, for both of the students decided that everything was "dangerous". After writing examples of strong and weak warnings on the board, however, they were able to together divide them into groups depending on what warning was most appropriate.
We then went through the warning sign cards, and I had them take turns matching the pictures with the words. When they had completed this I took the word cards away, as it was clear that they didn't need these extra hints for the task to come.
I wrote a dialogue up on the board, including not only two different forms of practicing the same warning (NO smoking and don't smoke!), but also idiomatic expressions like "are you blind??" and "I don't care! So what!". I made sure that they both had plenty of turns on both sides of the dialogue, before I developed the lesson a little further.
Without warning, I erased the dialogue from the board, and asked them to close their books and continue a similar dialogue off the tops of their heads. They felt a bit nervous about this at first, and stuck as closely to the dialogue that they had just been practicing as they could remember, but after a bit certain phrases posed problems. Because the dialogue had contained so many fun phrases, if one them asked a strange question like "what sign did you see?" the other one could reply using a newly learnt phrase like "what are you talking about?" All in all it was a great deal of fun for everyone, and a really good exercise for the students to try and apply the fresh pieces of information in an almost real life conversation.
Onepoint B20 from Smith's School of English Onepoint series
I asked one of the students what they would do next week, and she said "work". I asked her what else she would do, for example, I said, I will probably go shopping, but maybe I'll save my money. She told me "I'll probably go to work, but maybe I'll take the day off". Add a "next week" at the beginning of that sentence and it's a perfectly elicited onepoint, letting the student see how the sentence is created on the board. The other student was more of my mind, probably going shopping. Maybe I should save my money though...
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