Activity 3 Jigsaw reading Objective: to raise participants’ awareness of some principles of a language awareness approach.
Time: 25 min
Materials: 4 copies of handout 2, 20 copies of handout 3
►Procedure:
- ☺☺☺ (1 min) Participants remain in the same groups. Distribute to participants handout 2(one set per group).
- ☺☺☺ (3 min) Tell them to put these sentences in the correct order and notice the language elements which enabled them to do that. Ask them to report their results to the whole group.
Key: 1b, 2a, 3c.
Possible answers: the use of articles (‘An American’, ‘the drug’), the use of tenses (‘has been jailed’, ‘had faced’, ‘admitted’, ‘was in a taxi’ ‘was stopped’) and referencing (‘An American’, Jason Taylor’, ‘Taylor’).
- ☺☺☺ (5 min) Ask participants to focus on the use of tenses and put all the verbs and verb forms in the text into chronological order. Give each participant handout 3 with the whole text.
Suggested answers: 1. living in Singapore (started before the event)
2. was in a taxi (got in a taxi before he was stopped)
3. was stopped by the police
4. being caught with 0.71 g of cocaine
5. admitted cocaine possession
6. had faced a jail term
7. has been jailed
- ☺(5 min) Ask participants to comment on how particular tense forms helped them to reconstruct the chronological order of the events. Ask them why a particular tense formwas used in each case and what precise meaning it conveyed. Draw their attention to the use of past perfect and present perfect. Ask the following question:
~ Why is ‘has been jailed’ (present perfect) used in the first sentence? ~ Why is ‘had faced’ (past perfect) used in the text after 5 other verb forms? ~ What important event has been missed out in the text? How do you know? Suggested answers: 1. Sometimes in the news a fact is reported in present perfect and later put into context in past simple.
2-3. After Taylor had faced a jail term and before he has been jailed, he was also tried in court and sentenced to 11 months. These two important events in the Past Simple were missing in the text. (Optional: The use of past perfect not only implies the missing verbs, but also emphasises the difference between Taylor’s possible sentence and the actual sentence that was much milder than he might have received.)
- ☺(5 min) Discuss the responses about each use of verbs (1-7) with the whole group.
- ☺(2 min) Ask participants to reflect on the activity and to consider the following questions:
~ What was the focus of this activity? ~ How were language elements (the use of verbs and perfect tenses in particular) taught with the help of this activity? Elicit a few random responses.
- ☺(2 min) Ask the following questions:
∼ What did you have to do in this activity as learners? ∼ What kind of learning was taking place during the activity? Elicit a few random responses.
- ☺(1 min) Establish that the overall meaning of the text comes from a combination of
verb forms (and other feature).
- ☺(1 min) Say that you would like participants to compare the three above activities and to work out the underlying principles behind these activities.