Activities for Mainstream Lower Secondary Schools
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ACTIVITY 2: SCHOOL LIFE AROUND THE WORLD Strategy name: guessing intelligently/making inferences (compensation) (inspired by Sailing the 5 C’s with strategies strategy: 6 ‘One big (or small) happy family’ Chamot, A. U., Meloni, C. F., & Bartoshesky, A. (2006). Sailing the 5 Cs with Learning Strategies. A Resource Guide for Secondary Foreign Language Educators p. 66.) Assisting strategies: reasoning inductively, analysing contrastively across cultures (cognitive) Language level: B1 Skill practised: speaking Time of activity: 15 min
Description of the activity The activity can be taught before any unit talking about different cross-cultural habits and can be used to get learners to make inferences about school life and education in the countries depicted in the photos. The teacher can explain to learners that making inferences is a very useful strategy in learning a foreign language, or a foreign culture, by observing, forming inferences (guesses), then verifying or correcting them. Preparation The teacher explains that the learners will look at photographs of classrooms from different parts of the world. They will describe them and then form inferences about the quality and variety of facilities, the teacher/learner ratio, and learner attire. It would be convenient if it followed a unit on school life (e.g. Unit 4, lesson 10, Unit of Think Teen workbook for the second grade (2nd Grade of Junior High School, textbook advanced), then learners would be familiar with the relevant vocabulary for the discussion.