Level: Focus on Specific Areas
ISBN-10: 0-8384-4725-2 | ISBN-13: 978-0-8384-4725-3
Buscapé results | DISAL | SBS
Let me explain. Our WebQuest this month was presenting a grammar topic from The Grammar Book and we got chapters 34 and 35, on Comparatives, Equatives and Superlatives. I knew I had a lot to learn about the topic, but going through all those details and information and also doing all the extra reading for the discussions in class with professor Fortes was tough. We managed somehow and here is the report on the work Maira and I did to create our presentation. Enjoy!
Initially, we scanned chapters 34 and 35 of The Grammar Book to find out what its basic structure was. We could easily pinpoint the three main aspects presented by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman: the form, meaning and use of comparatives, equatives and superlatives.
Initially, we scanned chapters 34 and 35 of The Grammar Book to find out what its basic structure was. We could easily pinpoint the three main aspects presented by Celce-Murcia and Larsen-Freeman: the form, meaning and use of comparatives, equatives and superlatives.
Our first impression
was that the structures presented were much more complex than we imagined.
Besides, we both teach at language schools, use didactic material produced by
the franchise, and follow a more or less strict method, so we found interesting
that the authors propose a different order of presenting the structures to
students as well as more detailed definitions.
As our next step, we
decided to choose how we would prepare our slideshow presentation: What is
going to be our focus? What can be
interesting for our classmates to reflect about? We first selected the authors'
suggestions for ESL/EFL teachers, because those seemed logical choices. We also
highlighted structures that seemed interesting to us as students, teachers and
simply as curious non-native speakers of the language. The challenge, however,
was to summarize a complex and rich grammar resource like this one in a few
slides to be discussed under 15 minutes.
The presentation
itself was supposed to be clear and appealing. Our experience in the classroom
was an advantage since we enjoy standing in front of the class, sharing
information and bringing up topics for discussion. Personally, we would like
some more time to hear our classmate's opinions.
In conclusion, we
could realize that most of the doubts concerning exceptions are common for both
teachers and learners and it is our job to provide reasonable answers to these
apparent unsolved problems of form, meaning and use.
Goodbyes! :(
Goodbyes! :(
I want to take this moment to say goodbye to our dearest friends Mariana Malaquias and Sandra Costa. They are going to take a break from the course and I just want to thank them for all the great moments and for all the help. I hope you keep in touch (say hello through the comments in the blog, at least, OK?). See you guys soon!
