2009年3月16日 星期一

Talk in English can be fun

I think my students had lots of fun while practicing conversation in English yesterday, Mar. 16. I made all of them work in pair talking with the handout. Some of them did a pretty good job; those dialogues were like:



A asked,"What's your favorite fruit?"

B responded,"My favorite fruit is pineapple." "Do you like pineapple?

A responded, " No, I don't. It's sour."



C asked, "where can I try Taiwanese local food?"

D responded, "You can go to Rei-Fong night market?

C asked, "How can I get there?"

D responded," You can take bus number 94."



E asked, " What is seasonal fruit now?"

F responded, " It's bell fruit (wax apple) ?''

E asked, " Do you like it?"

F responded, "Yes, I do. How about you?"

E responded, " Me too."

( I taught them they can also say " I do, too." or "So do I." And I found their favorite topic is FOOD.)



This kind of conversation went on about 20 minutes, and then the new student, Tony, just entered into the classroom. As Laura didn't have a conversational partner, she turned to him immediately.



Laura: "Why are you late? Did you forget this class?"

Tony: "No, I didn't. I had some matters."

(After his explanation, I told them Tony's words meant, "I ran some errands this morning."

And then Carol asked me, " What's the difference between errands and chores?" I answered," For example: Going to banks, paying bills, mailing letters.... are errands; cleaning rooms, doing dishes or laundry.... are chores.")



We had a reading time yesterday. The article posted below:



Reading Unit 13 Copied from: Intermediate Steps to Understanding
OXFORD University Press
Text:
Mr. Hodge was a chicken farmer. He had hundreds of chickens, and sold the eggs and the meat and got quite a lot of money for them, but he lived in very hot part of the country, and he found that his hens laid hardly any eggs in the summer. So he decided to put air-conditioning into his chicken-house so that the hens would lay well all through the year and he could get more eggs and in that way earn more money.

The owner of the company which sold the air-conditioning came to see him, and when he saw Mr. Hodge’s house, he thought that he might be able to persuade him to buy some air-conditioning for that too.

“Your wife would be much happier and more comfortable then, “he said to Mr. Hodge. But Mr. Hodge was not interested.
“My wife doesn't lay eggs,” he said.



After taking turns reading out loud, I interpreted some key words in the passage.

Like: lay, laid, laid ; lie, lied, lied ; lie, lay, lain those verbs are easy to get confused.

Laid hardly; how to use hard as a adj. or a adv. also what "hardly" (adv.) means? .. so that,

..in that way.... We may talk about" which" and "that" more next time. And we'll do some exercises attached in the textbook like T/F and filling the blanks. I hope they'd still have fun.



Cindy R Shih

1 則留言:

  1. Hi Cindy,

    You can join the group for Taiwanese teachers which I created years ago. I usually post teaching resources to the group.

    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/taiwanese_efl_teachers/

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