Fri Mar 20

Objectives:

- conceptualize and use modals of deduction and their level of probability

Rather than getting the sts to write today, I asked them to share some interesting but little-known facts. I started them off with "no-one can kiss their elbow" and "Mexico is the second most linguistically diverse country in the world, after India". A number of sts volunteered facts but some couldn't think of anything. I agree that at this time of night it's not so easy to think about things like this off the top of your head.

We discussed the movie trailers activity. They all enjoyed it and talked about what they relied on in order to understand: gestures, camera angles, facial expressions, repetition of words, sound effects etc.

I then wrote on the board the simple sentences: 

I am sick.

I might be sick.

I must be sick.

And asked them to infer the different meaning of each one. They had trouble defining "must be", considering it to be an obligation, so I explained the idea of deduction based on the evidence.

We turned to pages 98-99 and went through the exercises and the language summary, skipping the analysis. We practiced with exercises 1 and 2. The picture in ex. 1 appears to be from Mexico City. In the future I should exploit this more and consciously ask the sts to use "must", "could" etc. to talk about where they think this is.

Then I handed out some close-up pictures of everyday objects. The idea was that sts use modals of possibility to work out what they could be. Finally I showed them the complete picture. Unfortunately, again, I didn't make it so clear that the idea was to use modals, and I'm not sure I paid as much attention to it while monitoring as I could have. Still, I think the activity was a worthwhile one.

"Guess the picture" is from http://floorsix.blogspot.com