“What saint patrick's day Parade is about?”
he purpose of this task is to show students a little bit more about the English speaking world and their traditions that might be eccentric to the students and give them tools to learn some slang and not formal language used by teenagers. To achieve this purpose the activity uses the Audiolingual Method in a second year high school class. The topic is taken from the text called “NYC Saint Patrick’s Day Parade” from the Unit 6 “Traditions, traditions” from the textbook “Looking Ahead” given by the Government. The objective is togive the students the chance to use the vocabulary from the text, in context and practice their pronunciation in front of their classmates.
The class starts talking about traditions from the world and particularly from the English speaking countries, which might not be known by the students. Then, the teacher explains that there some activities that, even though have their origin in some place, they can also be representative from some other part of the world due to immigration. They proceed to read the text about Saint Patrick’s Day Parade in New York and how popular is this celebration nowadays. Afterwards, they read a short dialog between two fictional teenagers and how they take part of this festivity and, more important, what it is about. After this, the students are going to be organized in pairs and each pair, will read, rehearse and present the dialog. Finally, the whole class will discuss what they have learned from this celebration through the use of the vocabulary from the text and the dialog.
The materials needed to achieve this activity are just the text from the textbook “Looking Ahead”, the dialog with the information of the celebration and a pencil and a copybook.
What we learnt through this activity is that pronunciation is one of the most important aspects of the process of learning a language and this specific skill goes along with the listening, which is also very important in order to acquire a language.
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Audiolingual Method (Dialogue)