20/01/2013

Two new stories about sport

Check out the two new stories I have added under the Story tab- both sport related. The theme is winning?

With older higher level teens comparing these with an article about the recent Lance Armstrong revelations would stimulate some interesting discussion. 

Or use the first text for reading comprehension, but rather than set your own questions, show the picture and ask students to come up with questions they would like answered about the picture e.g. Who are the athletes? Why is one of them pointing at something? Collect the questions on the board. (A focus on correct question forms might be needed). Then ask your students to read the text and in pairs check if they can find the answers to the questions they set. I call this a D-I-Y (do it yourself) reading comprehension. I find students are more motivated to find answers to questions they themselves have posed.

I use the short text about the Seattle Special Olympics for dictogloss. 

What's a dictogloss?

  •  Read the text through once at a normal speed, asking students to listen carefully and visualise the story.
  • Read the text a second time, again at normal speed and tell students to make notes of the key ideas / words
  • Organise students into pairs of threes and ask them to work together to reconstruct the text, reminding students that they should try to write their text so that it will be as close to the original as possible in grammar and content, but the words and phrases don't have to be identical to the ones in the original passage. 
  • During this time students form hypotheses and test them. they can use resources such as dictionaries and verb reference books.
  • Look at all the texts as a class and encourage the class to decide if the reconstructed texts are correct - as to details as well as grammatically.


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