Mon Mar 23

Objectives:

- Exchange information about myths and urban legends, and listen for specific information

- Induce the use of past modals through listening to a mystery; then choose correct modals in a dialogue

- Follow a spoken song

The journal writing today was on "the most beautiful sunset you've ever seen. Where did you see it?" This was inspired by the amazing sunset I saw on the way to class. But interestingly enough, the song we listened to "Alice's Restaurant" also mentioned sunsets.

I gave back half of the oral production feedback sheets. Hopefully the rest will be ready by Wednesday. We went to p. 99 and in threes the sts discussed the beliefs and myths ("urban legends") and tried to identify which were true. We then listened to the answers. Like the earlier listening text, some sts doubted the veracity of some of the answers.

We then went to p. 100, discussed the vocabulary in the box and the sts tried to predict the story following the pictures. There were a few mistakes but some made good efforts at working it out. However, while listening to the story it became clear that there were elements no-one had actually thought about at all. They tried to produce possible explanations for the mystery, and then we listened to one that the "experts" consider the most probable. After doing the activity we looked at the language summary on p. 154. However as a number of sts hadn't come last Friday they didn't understand so well, not having done the groundwork with modals. Still, doing the "Spy Talk" handout of Oskar and Andrei, most of them seemed to work it out. This exercise also helped them to see that there are a number of possible answers and it often depends on the level of certainly one has for the situation as to which modal one will use.

We then went to the final activity of listening to Alice's Restaurant. It's a long song and I wanted the sts to listen and enjoy and understand the story without worrying about filling in the gaps; so they simply read along. Many of them laughed as well (especially Elvia!). We did some important vocabulary first (important because it helps them understand the story and the humour more).

The exercises (and homework for Friday) are to work out the meaning of words in bold according to the context; underline all the past and present modals they can find; and work out the meaning of various collocations which were in italics.