Practice Activities – M&R

SUBJECT PRACTICE ACTIVITIES:

MATERIALS AND RESOURCES

GENERAL INFORMATION:

The subject practice activities consist of doing individually three short exercises. The
document must fulfil the following conditions:

- Length: 3 pages (without including cover, index or appendices –if there are any-).
- Type of font: Arial or Times New Roman.
- Size: 11.
- Line height: 1.5.
- Alignment: Justified.

Besides, the activities have to be done in this Word document: leave the activities’
statements where they are and just answer below them. In order to make the correction
process easier, please, do not write the answers in bold, and it will then be easier to
distinguish between them and the activities’ statements. On the other hand, the
document must still fulfil the rules of presentation and edition, and follow the rubric for
quoting and making bibliographical references as detailed in the Study Guide.

Also, it has to be submitted following the procedure specified in the “Subject

Evaluation” document. Sending it to the teacher’s e-mail is not permitted.

In addition to this, it is very important to read the assessment criteria, which can be
found in the “Subject Evaluation” document.

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 Practice Activities – M&R

Name and surname(s): Piñeyro, Romina Paola

Group: 2017-02
Date: August, 15th

Practice Activities

Do the following exercises below:

Task 1 - (1 page)

Read chapter 4 and design a communicative task for the following educational
situation below:

You are an English teacher who’s teaching the content of phrasal verbs to your pre-
intermediate to intermediate students.

Task 2 - (1 page)

Evaluate your own task by explaining each step proposed for Ellis in Tomlinson
(1998) to evaluate a task:

1. Description of the task:

2. Planning the evaluation:
3. Collecting information:
4. Analysis of information collected:
5. Conclusions and recommendations:

Task 3 - (1 page)

Read the comic presented below and answer:

In case you would have to work with mixed-abilities, describe what kind of
activities you would propose for intermediate and advanced level, using the
same comic as an input.

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For example, for beginner level:

Read the story in the comics and underline the words you do not know. Then, search
these words in the dictionary and read the text again.

Justify your answers.

1. Intermediate: In the case of intermediate students, I would probably ask them

to focus on the context and the images, since both aspects help the students to
understand, monitoring their reading, as a means of adapting the comic to their
level of comprehension. Here again, the learning would be implicit, from the
context to the target language. Once they have made sense of the context, I
would ask them to work with the dictionary, as the activity proposes, and ask
them to check whether their initial understanding of the comic was accurate. In
this sense, they will be acquiring phrasal verbs (target language content)
meaningfully.

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2. Advanced: Probably these students will not need to use the dictionary and
hence will be able to make sense of the sarcasm and pragmatic meaning of the
comic, so, after the reading, a discussion which includes all the students could
be proposed from the topic of the comic.

Task 1:
In order to design an activity contained within the CLT approach, let´s first reflect on
what communicative competence implies.
The primary goal of language instruction, namely, to go beyond the teaching of the
discrete elements, rules and patterns of the target language and to develop the learner
´s ability to take part in spontaneous and meaningful communication in different
contexts, with different people, on different topics, for different purposes, that is to
develop the learner´s communicative competence. (Celce Murcia, Dörnyei and Thurrell
1999:144)
Considering that the CLT approach involves learning a language through
communicating real meaning, it is important to expose the students to the content of
phrasal verbs by means of designing real life communication activities, such as
dramatization of typical situations in which the students may be using these new items
of vocabulary, phrasal verbs, at the same time as they acquire the knowledge
meaningfully, that is to say, being involved in a situation in which the target language
needs to be used. Given the fact that students belong to pre-intermediate or
intermediate, this context facilitates the context for applying a communicative activity.
The situations devised for the students to begin talking will be directly related to their
daily lives in order to get them fully engaged in the activity, for example: “looking after a
friend after a disco night”. In this sense, conversation is promoted and will be the centre
of the task.
The procedure of the task will be to get them in pairs or small groups. The Teacher will
ask them to pick a card (see appendix 1) which contains a situation in which one of the
target phrasal verbs will be included. In this way, the context will also help them clarify
the concept and meaning of the target vocabulary.
To make sure the students are using the language appropriately but at the same time,
they feel at ease, the teacher will move around from group to group checking they
make use of L2 and even participating in the different conversations, managing to
appear as incidental, so that students will not feel the pressure of being observed by
the teacher. “Every fact that students learn need not be explicitly taught — students

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can learn facts incidentally. Incidental learning refers to learning that occurs when you
are not specifically trying to learn” (Willingham, 2006)

TASK 2:
Description of the task.
Students will be exposed indirectly to the target vocabulary (input) by means of the
context in which the situations about which they will have to talk about will be
contained. Indirectly, they will be receiving meaning unconsciously along the process of
communication. The outcome will be productive since they will be producing
utterances, opinions, sentences and dialogues which will contain the target language in
“real world” situations.
Planning the Evaluation:
The teacher will evaluate the task during the process, that is to say, together with the
interactional analysis and observation of the task performance. Later, the teacher will
ask the groups to share their outcomes with the other groups and will be able to test
whether the whole class have acquired the target vocabulary.
Collecting information:
The teacher will evaluate how the task has been performed paying attention to key
factors such as: motivation, interest and engagement, which are all interrelated. Also,
the teacher will pay attention to what other indirect instances of learning have taken
place, for example, grammar structures that may have been required during the
process of conveying ideas within the groups. Finally, the teacher will ask the students
whether they understood and felt motivated by the task and why.
Analysis of information collected:
With what the teacher has gathered from the collected information, she will be able to
analyse whether the task fulfilled its purpose or not and whether it is worth repeating it.
In the case of the phrasal verbs communicative interaction, it is expected that students
will enjoy it and consider it meaningful for their learning process.
Conclusion
Considering the level of language of the students, this task is probably appropriate for
teaching the content of phrasal verbs to this group, since it promotes participation and
involvement and the centre of the task is the student while the teacher remains
incidental

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REFERENCES:
 CELCE-MURCIA, M., DÖRNYEI, Z., AND THURRELL, S. (1997). “Direct
Approaches in L2 instruction: a turning point in communicative language
teaching”, in TESOL Quarterly Vol.31, No.1, Spring 1997. Pp.141-152.
 Willigham, Daniel (2006) “Knowledge in the Classroom”

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APPENDIX 1 Cards

Speak about the The last gadget, Have you run into
last time someone machine, etc that school friends
backed you up in a broke down in your recently?
project, decision, house
etc
Who do you take Somebody you Do you like people
after in your family would like to bump calling on you at
in terms of into. the weekend?
personality? Why/Why not?
Something old and Something you can The last time you
useless you would ´t do without. had to dress up for
like to do away a party.
with.
Something wrong The last time you An occasion on
you have done and had to give which you had to
have got away something back. give in.
with.