Wed Mar 11

Objectives:

- To verbally summarize a news article and give their opinion on it.

- To create humorous captions for comic pictures

- To identify captions correctly for each picture

The journal writing today was based on a semi-guided activity I've shown my Formación teacher trainees: to write the inner part of a paragraph with these sentences as the first and last:

- Last week my sister bought a lottery ticket.

- If only she still had her coat, she'd be a wealthy woman today.

Some sts read their "stories" out loud and two were very coherent but different in content; one was difficult to understand and didn't seem coherent. I wasn't sure what to do with that one, but thanked the st for sharing anyway (the sharing was voluntary).

Then the sts began sharing their articles. The "rules" were 2 minutes each; one minute to share the content of the article, and one to give your opinion about it. I had written on the board what criteria I would be using: Use language fluently and accurately; communicate with good grammatical control; express opinions with precision; and summarize an article. These were taken from the Oral grading sheet for level 6. But I let the sts know that I wasn't going to give them a grade as such; rather give them feedback on which areas they need to work on more. This settled them down a little!

We listened to ten articles and on occasions I invited comments and questions from the rest of the group so that it wouldn't seem so boring for them. After the tenth article we took a break and read a silly poem (How to prepare a hippopotamus sandwich), just to get their minds thinking about something completely different. After the next ten articles we again did something completely different and fun in order to break the tension. It's my experience that even though sts are willing to share and talk in class, as soon as they have to do something remotely "formal" they become very tense and nervous. One st was visibly trembling throughout, and others forgot the words they had rehearsed saying. But to their credit, a number spoke very well and made few errors. I encouraged them with this as I had previously substitute taught a level 5 group which had numerous pronunciation and grammatical errors when speaking. All of them gave their opinion as well, which demonstrated good understanding of the task set before them.

So we looked at some Gary Larson pictures afterwards - actually got photos from a website that people had created to imitate the cartoons. First the sts had to guess punchlines for them. Of course some sts had difficulty due to the time of day and low level of creativity. But many came up with good punchlines. Then I gave them the punchlines on strips of paper and they had to match the punchline with the cartoon. Most successfully did this although there was some debate on a few concerning bears.