CELTA Intensive written assignment 3
CELTA Written Assignment 3
Language Skills Related Tasks
Lucy Gudgeon-Brennand
The authentic reading text I have chosen for Elementary students is a recipe page from a popular magazine and is approximately 150 words long, excluding ingredients.
The reason I have chosen this text is because it is current, relevant to daily life, informative, visually appealing, and also based on a topic that people are naturally interested in – food. The universally familiar format this article takes; list, photographic image of a meal, and numbered paragraphs, builds an automatic understanding of context (however basic) and activates schemata amongst readers of various languages. In group situations this potentially elicits a more naturally induced discourse. As J. Harmer says, quoting Cook 1989:60, in his book The Practice of English Language Teaching; ‘In order to make sense of the text we need to have pre-existent knowledge of the world.’
It’s suitability for a receptive skills lesson lies in the fact that the information is broken into four small sections: The article title followed by a short introduction, the afore mentioned list of ingredients – which in itself holds the majority of the lexis to be found within the following lines of the cooking directions. Lastly, there is a ‘quick tip’ section of prose promoting a branded food item. Each section provides ideal opportunity for separate tasks so that the student doesn’t have to look at the text on the page as a whole, which could otherwise over-face elementary students, especially given the unfamiliar lexis to be found in it. As Harmer says, in the afore referenced book;
‘It is clear that both sentence length and the percentage of unknown words both play their part in a text’s comprehensibility.’
Lead-in
To engage the students and allow them the time to process the context, I would make use of realia; oven gloves, chopping board, the recipe and a sign on the edge of the desk saying ‘Kitchen’. To accompany the
Language Skills Related Tasks
Lucy Gudgeon-Brennand
The authentic reading text I have chosen for Elementary students is a recipe page from a popular magazine and is approximately 150 words long, excluding ingredients.
The reason I have chosen this text is because it is current, relevant to daily life, informative, visually appealing, and also based on a topic that people are naturally interested in – food. The universally familiar format this article takes; list, photographic image of a meal, and numbered paragraphs, builds an automatic understanding of context (however basic) and activates schemata amongst readers of various languages. In group situations this potentially elicits a more naturally induced discourse. As J. Harmer says, quoting Cook 1989:60, in his book The Practice of English Language Teaching; ‘In order to make sense of the text we need to have pre-existent knowledge of the world.’
It’s suitability for a receptive skills lesson lies in the fact that the information is broken into four small sections: The article title followed by a short introduction, the afore mentioned list of ingredients – which in itself holds the majority of the lexis to be found within the following lines of the cooking directions. Lastly, there is a ‘quick tip’ section of prose promoting a branded food item. Each section provides ideal opportunity for separate tasks so that the student doesn’t have to look at the text on the page as a whole, which could otherwise over-face elementary students, especially given the unfamiliar lexis to be found in it. As Harmer says, in the afore referenced book;
‘It is clear that both sentence length and the percentage of unknown words both play their part in a text’s comprehensibility.’
Lead-in
To engage the students and allow them the time to process the context, I would make use of realia; oven gloves, chopping board, the recipe and a sign on the edge of the desk saying ‘Kitchen’. To accompany the
References: The practice of English Language Teaching, Third Edition, Jeremy Harmer, Longman, 2001 Jim Scrivener, Learning Teaching, Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2005. Input session notes. CELTA Intensive, Manchester Academy of English, 2013.