Working with TA Text: Jonathan Seagull (IV)

Details
Written by Renata Jonina
Parent Category: English
Category: English 16-19
Created: 02 March 2013

Lesson 3. Dealing with Ideas

This is one part of the reflection on the lesson “Working with TA Text: Jonathan Seagull”

Jan 21
Aim: to discuss the main ideas of the text
Material: cards with students favourite quotations from the text

  1. Students were invited to sit in a circle and put the cards with their favourite quotations in the middle of the table. 
  2. One by one, students were asked to take one card (the one which did not belong to him), read the quotation, comment on it and say if s/he would add it to his favourite quotations or not and why. Then the person whose quotation was read had to comment why he chose it.
  3. Students were eager to comment on the quotations explaining the ideas behind them and giving their reasons for picking these ideas as their favourite ones.
  4. I did not deal with comparing students reasons for selecting the specific quotations since I was not sure how to organise it. 
  5. Home assignment for the next lesson was Task 8.2 from the system of tasks: Find at least 20 different words and expressions used in the text to describe Jonathan. I also asked students to mark those passages where Jonathan’s flights were described.

 

Go to "Lesson 4: Dealing with Language of Description"

Comments  

# Alexander Sokol 2013-03-05 11:38
Here again I am unhappy about the way the aim is defined. A mere discussion of the main ideas is not very useful in most cases. We always discuss for some purpose. So what was the underlying purpose here? For example, one of the reasons would be to understand how similar / different we (students in class / group) are in terms of our text preferences. It should be possible to compare the parameters according to which the quotations have been selected and see if it's possible to generalise from them. This task could also have a follow-up, inviting students to check their hypotheses by selecting 3-5 favourite places from other texts they like. For those who don't read, films could be used and again the parameters could be checked. This is just a possible idea.
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