Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 10
and then they continue using their own imagination. This activity serves as an incentive for
describing food and for introducing adjectives and idioms related to food. It could be also
instrumental in initiating discussion on healthy versus unhealthy food, food preferences,
dishes. At the same time the short note model can be transformed into a short letter of
apology for an event related to food (a cooked meal that did not rise up to the recipient’s
expectations or related to a date at a restaurant) (Spencer 48).
Using an excerpt from Isaac Asimov, “I, robot” (Spencer 75), the teacher initiates a
debate on whether the students consider that a robot living in their house and doing all the
chores their parents urge them to do would be a good idea. During the discussion the word
“housework” is highlighted. Teacher hands out a copy of Philip Roth’s The Plot against
America, page 3, in which the students have to identify the chores enumerated there.
Scanning these household activities may help to consolidate vocabulary connected to daily
cleaning-up.
Holidays also provide excellent occasions to familiarise students with literary works.
Halloween is definitely an American holiday which is largely embraced by many students
and teachers consider it a great opportunity to introduce students to some cultural
background and vocabulary related to frightening aspects of existence. I also consider it
appropriate to use literary texts that can help students to consolidate tenses (the use of the
past simple and past continuous, the past perfect / past perfect continuous), to teach them
ways of creating suspense in a story, developing and practising the writing of narratives.
Reading is also the main focus of interest with excerpts from classic texts such as Oscar
Wilde’s “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”, Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories, Robert Louis
Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
To conclude, literary texts (poems, excerpts from short stories), quotes belonging to
famous novelists/characters/people) may be adapted both to the objectives of the
curriculum and to the needs or the level of the students. Class motivation plays an
esse ntial part in the positive outcome of the learning process and may influence the
success of the lesson itself. These aids represent effective tools for creating classroom
interaction and interest in the lesson.
Bibliography:
Baxter, Alison The USA. Oxford Bookworms Factfiles. Oxford University Press, 2010.
Groom, Winston. Forrest Gump. Level 3. Retold by John Escott. Harlow: Pearson Books,
1996.
Harmer, Jeremy. The Practice of English Language Teaching. Fourth Edition, Pearson,
Longman, 2010.
Haycraft, John. Longman Handbooks for Language Teachers. ed. Byrne, Donn. An
Introduction to English Language Teaching. Harlow: Longman, 1986.
Kincaid, Jamaica, At the Bottom of the River. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Spencer, David. Gateway B1+ Student’s Book. Macmillan, 2011.
Vizental, Adriana. Metodica predării limbii engleze. Strategies of Teaching and Testing
English as a Foreign Language. București: Polirom, 2008.
Williams, William Carlos. This is just to say. www.poets.org last accessed 10 April 2017.
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