One of the course books that I use for
my conversation classes has really simple paragraphs and dialogs, and
I think that it's a little boring to read them out loud in class.
However, the information that they present is really helpful for
solidifying the lexical terms in the chapter.
So, with this in mind, I decided to try
an activity based on the “Predicting the Original Text” activity
on page 58 of Teaching Unplugged. The text was a collection of three
short monologues, where people were talking about their pay and
benefits at work. I wrote the first sentence of each (something like,
“Hi, my name is John Smith, and I work at a bank”), just to give
students an idea of what type of person was there, and then I told
them that the text was a short paragraph where the person talked
about his or her pay and benefits. I also wrote some helpful
vocabulary words on the side, and told them that these words were in
the text somewhere. We quickly talked about the meaning of the words,
and then they were off.
The activity went pretty well, and
since the texts were so simple, the students were able to predict
them fairly accurately. We took a minute at the end to look at the
differences between the student guesses and the real text, and to see
if the difference were “wrong” or just “different.” With a
different text, the activity could have been more interesting, but
all in all, this activity met the goal I had for it: to present a
more interesting way to deal with the text containing the chapter
vocabulary.
