|
from Hands on English
The first part of this book has 12 sets of picture cards for practicing sound distinctions (minimal pairs) such as pen/pan, gem/jam. You can use these cards for a variety of simple games that require the students to both make and hear the distinction between the sounds. The author suggests "Sort 'n Stack" in which the students group the cards with the same sound, "Four of a Kind", "Bingo", and "Go Fish." All of these will provide a low-stress environment for practice on tricky sound.Because the students have to understand the sounds in order to succeed, these games are self-correcting. This is much nicer than other exercises that rely on the teacher modeling the sounds. The second part of the book has what we think are much more interesting activities that help students to hear sentence stress, word stress, and syllables.Using a set of cards with simple geometric shapes, for example, students play a game called "Liar" to practice emphasis. Describing their cards, students say, "It's a small heart in a circle" and "It's a BIG heart in a circle," depending on which feature they are contrasting. (This is actually a fairly tricky logic game!) You can also use these cards to play a form of Dominoes, also to practice emphasis. Another set of cards shows the U.S. states and Canadian provinces. These are used in two clever ways; one in a game to match the names with the same number of syllables, and the other to match the names with the same stress pattern. Native speakers of English probably take hearing the number of syllables for granted, but for many ESL students this is something that has to be learned. For more advanced students, there is a game to match the names of U.S. Presidents (or other famous people) with a diagram of the stress pattern for each name. And finally, a clever (but not simple) game in which students create a sentence from picture cards, then form a contradiction for practice in using emphasis. For example "Didn't he DRIVE to the office?" No, he WALkED to the office." As the author points out, most of the games can be played either
competitively or not, making them useful for beginners just learning
as well as for more advanced students as review. Hands-on-English
|
