Group №13 Individual work on the practice of improving Speaking skills

Part Two Topics


Part One – Part two
Restaurants – A restaurant
Reading – A book
Public Transport – Form of public transport
TV – TV programme
The sea – a river, lake or sea
Seasons – a season
Clothes – an item of clothing
Photography – a photograph
Hobbies – a hobby
Sports – a sport
Animals – an animal
Buildings – a building


The most obvious categories are as follows:

1. 
   Experiences/past events
   
2. 
   Objects/material possessions
   
3. 
   People
   
4. 
   Places
   
5. 
   Media related
   
6. 
   Others (anything that doesn’t fit into the 5 categories above)
   

The three-step preparation method
Step 1: Selection

1. 
   Have lots of features
   
2. 
   Be expandable
   
3. 
   Include some “invented” aspects. (i.e lies…)
   
4. 
   Ignore the adjective
   
5. 
   Don’t go with the first idea
   

Examples: An interesting trip you have been on
An important building in your city
A subject you liked at school
Something interesting or unusual you do in your free time
A walk you take regularly
Some travelling you would like to do
A happy event in your life

Topic	Easy	Difficult
An important building A trip A famous person	A shopping mall To Hong Kong A singer/actor	Your school library To Yellow Mountain A politician/leader

Step 2: Vocabulary


Ask the question: “Can this word be used for many other topics?”
Topic-related words, for example, on a question: Describe some travelling you like to do.


Tourism sightseeing backpack explore excursion


Step 3: Grammar point
In Part Two, there are 3 basic tense requirements:

Describe an object you use every day

Describe a vehicle that you would like to own
Describe a happy event in your life


Example:

1. 
   Describe an activity you enjoyed in an English lesson.
   

(Mostly past tenses) eg: The teacher asked us to pretend…

2. 
   Describe a place in a city that you know well.
   

(Mostly present tenses) eg: This place is quite special because it has…

3. 
   Describe a vehicle which you would like to own.
   

(Mostly conditional tenses and some present tenses for describing)
Eg: If I had a helicopter I would be able to…
Helicopters are an expensive luxury.
The Fluency-based Strategy

First look at the following topic card.

Describe a sport that you like playing or watching
You should say:
What the sport is
How often you play/watch it
Why you like it
Whether it is popular in your country

Look carefully at the 4 prompts on any topic card and you should notice that they all share the same grammar feature.

Most people think that these are 4 questions. Look carefully – they are not questions; they are in fact a single clause or part of a sentence (statement). This fact is true for every Part Two topic card.