Techniques for form focus after reading
Submitted by
Dave Willis
on 30 April, 2008 - 16:46
The four stage cycle
The opening and closing sentences in each paragraph are very important in
creating a text that hangs together properly. Try giving learners a version of
the text from which these sentences have been removed. See if they can work in
groups to reconstruct the text, then read out the full version of the text to
help them. Finally ask them to check their reconstruction against the full text.
If one of these sentences is very long, like the final sentence of the shark
text, you can cut only a part of it.
Running dictation and communal memory
Vanishing word
Even before dinosaurs roamed the earth there were sharks swimming in the sea.
would be a good one. The word even is a very important connector. It has the
very useful phrase there were and this is followed by the -ing form swimming.
This is a very frequent pattern as in: There was someone watching us or There
were a few people waiting for the bus.
Write the full sentence on the board and ask one or two students to read it out.
Then rub out a few words, replacing them with blanks to represent the letters:
- - - - before dinosaurs roamed - - - earth there - - - - sharks swimming in the
- - - .
Ask one or two students to read out the full sentence, remembering what goes in
the gaps. Then remove some more words and repeat the process:
- - - - - - - - - - dinosaurs roamed - - - earth - - - - - - - - - sharks
swimming - - - - - - - - .
Finally see if learners can remember the full sentence:
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - -
The importance of pair/group work
There may be difficulties organising group work in your classes. Perhaps the
desks are immovable. Perhaps learners are not used to this kind of work. But the
benefits are such that it is certainly worth it. If you can't move learners into
groups of 3 or 4 they can simply work with the person next to them. They can get
lots of good practice by working in pairs.
Reasons why learning from texts is more effective
One final word. In these four articles I have been talking about written text.
But all the techniques described here would work just as well with spoken texts
so long as you have the transcript of the recording. You can use the four stage
methodology to treat things like lectures and radio programmes - in fact
anything you do under the label ‘listening comprehension'.
The approach recommended here is a task-based approach. Click
here
for more on task-based learning and teaching.
For more ideas on form focus activities see:
Scott Thornbury (2001) How to Teach Grammar. Longman.
In my earlier articles
Reading for information,
Form focus and recycling,
and
Techniques for Priming and recycling,
I set out a four stage cy
TOMESPORT
Tú web de Fútbol Sala en Tomelloso
Some of the techniques described for recycling, such as, running dictation and
the communal memory task can be used for form focus. These work well as form
focus because they require recall of the exact wording of the text.
There is an exercise which I called progressive deletion and which Scott
Thornbury calls vanishing words. For this activity you take a sentence which has
some phrases and grammar in it which you think will be useful for your students.
The sentence:
All the activities I have set out in these four articles would work with the
teacher leading the class and the learners working as individuals. But almost
all of the activities would be better done in pairs or groups. In priming
activities group or pair work will make sure that the language to be used in the
text is covered in group discussions. In recycling activities learners will
prompt each other and help one another to remember things. All of this involves
language use. Different learners will offer different possibilities. This
obliges all of them to think things through carefully. The same applies to form
focus activities. And working in pairs or groups gives learners so many
opportunities to use language.
Throughout these articles I have stressed the importance of text. I have argued
that it is important for learners to remember texts and to study the language of
those texts in detail and try to recall it. Much of the grammar work suggested
in course materials is based on isolated sentences. But language in use is not a
series of isolated sentences; it is composed of texts. Sentences are shaped by
the way they occur in text, so grammar should focus on sentences in texts or
should enable learners to relate sentences to their original texts.
Dave Willis (2003) Rules, Patterns and Words. CUP
Dave Willis and Jane Willis (2007) Doing Task-based Teaching. OUP (See Chapter
6)