Participant 1: I’ve been teaching for … years. And you?
Participant 2: I’ve been teaching for …. And you?
Ask teachers the following questions:
1. Is it controlled or less controlled practice?
2. Is it an effective technique? Why? Why not?
Answer keys: 1) It’s controlled practice 2) It’s effective because it gives opportunity to all pupils to practise the structure
Establish that this technique gives pupils a limited practice in substituting the sentence with different words.
Show Handout 1. Ask participants to work in pairs and choose the most useful activity for practising the structure after the explanation that the teacher has done.
Say that they have 10 minutes.
Check the instruction. Distribute Handout 1.
Discuss the techniques together. Ask teachers to answer the following questions in pairs:
1. Which of them are more controlled? Which are less controlled?
2. Which of them are easier? Why?
3. Which of them are more effective? Why?
4. Is the ‘Play a game’ activity different from the others? Why? Why not?
Possible answers:
1) Substitution Table and Prompts – controlled; Chain Drill – less controlled
2) The easiest way to practise the structures would be with a Substitution table: pupils make up sentences using the prompts in the table. Using Prompts is also easy as teacher gives prompts and gets the pupils to give examples.
3) They are all effective but should be done in a proper order: from controlled to less controlled. It would prepare pupils for freer practice.
4) ‘Play a game’ is different because pupils don’t have any prompts to use. It’s a free practice.
Ask participants to copy the triangle and put the activities on the five lines.
3. Free Practice Objective: to give participants opportunity to explore and practise techniques for freer and production stage
Time: 25 minutes
Materials: none
Interaction: pair work, group work, plenary
Procedure:
Say that participants will experience some activities where learners have an opportunity to practise grammar structures freely.
Tell participants that they will practise and analyse activity which is called “Three Interesting Things about Me”.
Give each participant three pieces of paper. Ask them to write three interesting things they have done in their life. Ask them to write each sentence on a separate piece of paper. Example: I’ve been to Nepal. I’ve ridden a horse.
Check the instruction.
Ask them to work in groups of 5/6. Participants put all their sentences in a bag. They take turns to choose a sentence and read it to the group. The other participants guess who wrote it. Ask them to check their guesses by asking a question: e.g. Nodira, have you been to Nepal?
NB: If a participant will take own sentence s/he can put it back into a bag and take another paper.
Ask participants the following questions:
1. What grammar did you practise?
2. Is it a controlled activity?
3. Would your pupils find this activity interesting? Why/Why not?
4. Is it effective? Why/Why not?
Possible answers:
1)Present Perfect; 2) It’s free activity because each learner can write any sentence they like; 3) pupils will probably like the activity because it’s personal and they can find lots of interesting facts about each other; 4) It’s effective because pupils get lots of practice: they write sentences and then ask lots of questions.