Saturday, February 9, 2008
Passive Voice
"Wagahai wa neko de aru is a famous book written by Souseki Natsume", "This new video game was developed by Nintendo." Passive voice is used frequently in our daily conversations and it comes in handy when you are trying to introduce new things to non-locals. This lesson plan not only teaches students when and how passive voice is used, but also focuses on the application of this particular grammar point by offering picture-based dialogues, sentence-completing practices and real life conversation topics.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
It was a freezing day with huge snowflakes dancing outside the windows. We were just worrying that maybe our students today would be discouraged to come here by the heavy snow when my 2pm students walked into the office shivering. After offering them some nice hot drinks, I directed them to my classroom.
E.T. C24
“You won’t believe this, but...” When the older student saw this on the whiteboard, her eyes lit up and said really excitedly “ You won’t believe this, but this is the first heavy snow in Osaka since more than 10 years ago!”
The younger student was a skinny university boy with a great sense of humor, he smiled at us and said “ You won’t believe this, but I am really strong!” I was well impressed by both of them.
Routine 1
We flew through the review of Routine 1 as well as the stretching exercise since both of them had done this quite a few times, but it was always good to visit the basics.
Item – Passive voice
This lesson focused mainly on the item. I presented the lesson topic by writing down a bunch of passive voice questions on the white board:
“What is your (T-shirt) made of?”
“Where was your (bag) made?”
“Who was your (electronic dictionary) made by?”
After successfully eliciting the answers from both students, I underlined the verbial section of each question and answer to show how passive voice was usually formed. Since most people had learned this in junior high school, our job here was simply to remind them and then make them use the particular grammar point in sentences. The former was the easy part, the latter was usually the focus of the lesson here at Smith’s School of English. After the start-up, I brought out the picture cards for this lesson and copied down a Q&A dialogue from the lesson plan with missing bits and pieces on the board. Once students’ comprehension of the dialogue was ensured, I handed them the picture cards one by one so that they could use the information on the cards to fill in the incomplete dialogue, naturally the missing parts were all in passive voice form. This was a good practice for the students as it was not just mechanical drilling, students had to first organize the sentences themselves. We then moved on to Practice 2 where students were required to take a passive voice quiz. Instead of writing down the answers in their notebooks, I decided that they should give me the answers verbally. We had a lot of fun in this section at the expense of the young student who had no idea of Japanese history, the older student asked him if he was Japanese after his repeated wrong answers to some Japanese history questions! But apart from the history questions, he scored 100%. He laughed at the end of the lesson and declared that he was from another planet!
One-point: A2.1
“Just between you and me, ...” I turned to the bubbly young guy and asked him to repeat what he said a few seconds earlier but add the one-point at the beginning, “ Just between you and me, I am E.T from another planet.” I nodded at both of them and said “ this is just between you and me, let’s keep it as a secret.”
The passive voice is often difficult for the student to understand. So I usually don't try it for students below intermediate level. The presentation and practice portions are great. They provide a good introduction and help students identify the grammar point used in this lesson.
Once the students have gone through the picture cards they feel confident to challenge the passive voice quiz and questionnaire. Most students struggle with some of the answers but they are easy to explain. Then if there is time remaining I always try to expand this lesson to some more WH question formation and answering practice. This solidifys the students comprehension and helps them understand how the passive voice is used in everyday English conversation. This is the main goal I try to achieve since many students are studying English to try to talk and even think like a natural native speaker.
In the practise 2 part of this lesson, like Wendy, I like to do the quiz verbally. Not only is this testing knowledge, but it is really quizzing how much they understood and soaked up in the introduction, presenation and practise sections. I think it's really good for the student to think very quickly about the answers, and this quiz lets them to do that. It's important to have a short thinking time to force students to answer with gut reactions rather than trying to translate the questions and answers into Japanese and then back into English.
Post a Comment