- Details
- Written by Birute Sprauniene
- Parent Category: Danish
- Category: Danish 25+
- Created: 14 August 2013
When making this sentence building task, I had two aims in my mind: to focus on word order in Danish main and subordinate clauses (we had worked on it before with the student) and to focus on some new glosses/phrases which the student wanted to include in her active vocabulary (she had formulated senteces with some of the glosses before in order to practice them).
The task proved to be difficult for the student, mainly because she wasn't able to identify the glosses (many of them are phrasal verbs, and she couldn't remember the prepositions etc.). Apparently, formulating sentences with the new words is never enough to actually learn them. Another difficulty was that many sentences consisted of both main and subordinate clause, the student had doubts which words belong to which clause.
With my help the student managed to build the sentences. Some senteces admit variation in word order, so we formulated both variants.
I think that the benefits of the task were that we activated the new vocabulary and reinforced and practiced the word order rules. I kept asking questions: why is this word order not possible? What could the alternative word order be? and so on.
I think it would be best to give this task as a home task so that the students could do more thinking on their own and consult the dictionary if they had forgotten (or don't know) the glosses. The task can also be made easier by grouping some of the words in phrases in advance.