Practice Activities – M&R

SUBJECT PRACTICE ACTIVITIES:

MATERIALS AND RESOURCES

GENERAL INFORMATION:

The subject practice activities consist of doing individually three short exercises. The
document must fulfil the following conditions:

- Length: 3 pages (without including cover, index or appendices –if there are any-).
- Type of font: Arial or Times New Roman.
- Size: 11.
- Line height: 1.5.
- Alignment: Justified.

Besides, the activities have to be done in this Word document: leave the activities’
statements where they are and just answer below them. In order to make the correction
process easier, please, do not write the answers in bold, and it will then be easier to
distinguish between them and the activities’ statements. On the other hand, the
document must still fulfil the rules of presentation and edition, and follow the rubric for
quoting and making bibliographical references as detailed in the Study Guide.

Also, it has to be submitted following the procedure specified in the “Subject

Evaluation” document. Sending it to the teacher’s e-mail is not permitted.

In addition to this, it is very important to read the assessment criteria, which can be
found in the “Subject Evaluation” document.

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 Practice Activities – M&R

Name and surname(s): Rashmikabahen Shailesh Macwan and Victor Julio Medina
Silva
Group: 18th
Date: July 31st

Practice Activities

Do the following exercises below:

Task 1 - (1 page)

Read chapter 4 and design a communicative task for the following educational
situation below:

You are an English teacher who’s teaching the content of phrasal verbs to your pre-
intermediate to intermediate students.

Introduction
This communicative task is designed for pre-intermediate to intermediate students to
learn to communicate in a second language using phrasal verbs.

Topic: Business meetings

Objective: By the end of this task, students will be able to use phrasal verbs to talk
about business meetings.
Language Focus: Phrasal verbs

Warm up!
Ask students to study the sentences and discuss the meaning of the following
phrasal verbs in pairs, and join each one with its corresponding meaning.

Phrasal Verb Example Meaning

1. Deal with The management failed to deal with _____Handle
widespread problems within the
company.
2. Deal with We’ll continue to deal with the Russian ____Cover, be concerned
government. with
3. Deal with The guidelines deal with topics such as ____do business with
sales and marketing.

Phrasal Verb Example Meaning

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1. Set up He set up a meeting with his boss to _____build/put up a structure

discuss his ideas.
2. Set up The company wanted to set up shop in ____start or establish a new
London and New York office or business
3. Set up The Red Cross set up a temporary ____make plans/establish
shelter for the homeless. something

Phrasal Verb Example Meaning

1. Come in I come in every week for my paycheck _____ enter
2. Come in The new data coming in looks good ____Email/calls/faxes come
in
3. Come in We need to prevent drugs from coming ____come in to work/the
in at the border. office enter, arrive, be
introduced (data/results
come in)

Phrasal Verb Example Meaning

1. Work on The company will work on reducing _____ try to persuade
debt. someone to do something
2. Work on She has been working on me to join ____spend time on
her volunteer group something

Once students have finished the warm up activity, check answers with the whole class.

Language Focus: Phrasal verbs

Teach the student that phrasal verbs consist of a verb and one or two particles, such
as with, up, on, in etc. and that they have a meaning that is different from the meaning
of the individual words combined.
E.g Come: venir, llegar. In: dentro. Come in (=enter, in a business situation
context)

Ask students to choose the phrasal verb that best completes the sentences.
1. A fax from X ________ this morning.
(a) worked on (b) came in (c) set up (d) dealt with

2. Please ___________ a meeting with Larry for Thursday at 9 a.m.

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(a) come in (b) set up (c) work on (d) deal with

3. We're __________a couple of deals right now.

(a) working on (b) coming in (c) setting up (d) dealing with

4. Some companies only _______________ very wealthy people.

(a) come in (b) set up (c) work on (d) deal with

5. There are discussions __________ with Enron about the use of the money.
(a) coming from (b) going on (c) working on.

Read the statements and decide which use of deal with is illustrated in each of
the following examples:

Handle / do business with / cover, be concerned with

1. We’d prefer to deal with a single supplier. _____

2. Her advice column usually deals with interoffice problems and how to solve them.
_____
3. The company will have to deal with several contaminated sites. _____

Ask students to work in group and write their own short conversation including
the phrasal verbs studied in this lesson. Eg

St 1. Hello Mark. What about today’s meeting?

St 2. Hi Peter, the secretary set up the meeting with the boss to discuss his ideas.
St 1. why?
St 2 because he wants to work on us to be better sellers.
St 1. Any other topic to be discussed?
St 2. Yes, the new data that is coming next week from different companies.
St 1. Thank you

Task 2 - (1 page)

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Evaluate your own task by explaining each step proposed for Ellis in Tomlinson
(1998) to evaluate a task:

1. Description of the task:

2. Planning the evaluation:
3. Collecting information:
4. Analysis of information collected:
5. Conclusions and recommendations:

The evaluation in language teaching has been primarily concerned with the macro
evaluation of programs and projects (Ellis, 1998), and most evaluation studies have
been conducted in order to measure the extent to which the objectives of a program
have been met, and to identify those aspects that can be improved.
Ellis (1998) proposed a model that identified five basic steps of task evaluation. Each
of the steps includes several components or dimensions that need to be considered.

1. Description of the task: (task that involves the analysis of contents and task
objectives,)
The input to teach about phrasal verbs in the lesson designed in task 1 will be
presented in the reading of an authentic material which is adapted with procedures that
facilitate both pedagogical and the real-world task.

According to Brown (1995) and Mishan (2005), materials is a term used to encompass

both texts and language learning tasks : the texts presented to the student in paper,
audio, or visual form, and / or the activities built around such texts. This definition
includes the two basic elements around which a class generally develops. The
materials include not only the texts, but also tasks built around those texts

The task (activity) starts with the prior exploration of students' knowledge on the
subject to be dealt, with a matching exercise and will be finished with oral and written
production applied to the context or real world. Students will complete some gaps given
in paragraphs, listen and make the correct pronunciation of fragments and write texts
and dialogues applying what they learned in the lesson.

The task aims for students to study the statements and become familiarized with it
before working with the target language. Then, the students are to use the context of

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the story to deduce the meaning of the phrasal verbs. Finally, using the model,
students are supposed to come up with their own story using the phrasal verbs the just
learned.

2. Planning the evaluation:

The evaluation of teaching materials may be done before they are used in the
classroom in order to determine whether they suit the needs of the particular group of
learners (predictive evaluation), or after the materials have been used in the classroom
in order to evaluate their effectiveness and efficiency, and teachers’ and learners’
attitudes towards them (retrospective evaluation).
Step 2 (planning the evaluation) encompasses seven different dimensions of
evaluation: approach, purpose, focus, scope, the evaluators, the timing and the type of
information, and each of these dimensions has two or more subcategories.

The evaluation is presented in terms of the knowledge demonstrated by the student to

communicate orally or in writing way, using the phrasal verbs when talking about
business; in this context, the evaluation will assess the activities according to the
appropriation and good use of the sentences in situations that the student may
encounter in his/ her professional life.

3. Collecting information:
Tomlison explains that “the materials can be informative (they inform the student about
the language goal), instructions (guide the student in the practice of the language),
experiential (provide the student with opportunities to explore instances of language in
use and to use the language in a significant way), and exploratory (help the student to
make discoveries about the language. ” (Tomlinson, 2012, p. 143)

The collection of information to assess the learning achieved with the proposed
activities for teaching the phrasal verbs will be done before, during and after the
application of the activities through the presentation of tests and observation of the
students’ work development when joining words with respect to vocabulary, completing
blank in paragraphs, writing texts and in the staging of dialogues

4. Analysis of information collected:

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While records on task performance are an important element in the process of material
development, they are clearly a part of retrospective evaluation. Although task
evaluation should ideally incorporate both predictive and retrospective elements,
teachers in practice often have to make decisions about the pedagogical value of a
specific task before they meet the learners and thus before they have any information
about their intelligence, motivation or attitudes.

The analysis of the information collected will be done through a qualitative assessment
which will be provided in the work of observation and reconstruction of knowledge
through interaction with the teacher and other classmates. In the same way, in the
analysis of the information a quantitative evaluation will be given that arises when
evaluating the production of texts and dialogues presented by the different groups.

5. Conclusions and recommendations:

Furthermore, some learner factors such as motivation, anxiety and confidence, are
likely to be less stable and, to a large extent, reflect learners’ perceptions of task
difficulties. They may be very hard or impossible to diagnose in advance. This means
that prior to the implementation of the task in the classroom the teacher should collect
baseline information about the cognitive factors in the task design that may affect
learners’ performance. In other words, complexity differentials should be the major
criteria for proactive pedagogic task sequencing (Robinson, 2003).

Having as input the result of the different evaluations carried out before, during and
after the shared knowledge in relation to the phrasal verbs. Conclusions will be made
about what the students achieved and the difficulties evidenced by the group. Likewise,
recommendations on future teaching proposals related to the use and applicability of
phrasal verbs will arise.

Task 3 - (1 page)

Read the comic presented below and answer:

In case you would have to work with mixed-abilities, describe what kind of
activities you would propose for intermediate and advanced level, using the
same comic as an input.

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For example, for beginner level:

Read the story in the comics and underline the words you do not know. Then, search
these words in the dictionary and read the text again.

Justify your answers.

Mixed ability or ‘heterogeneous’ classes are terms used to describe classes made up
of students of different levels of proficiency. These terms are misleading as no two
learners are really alike and ‘homogeneous’ classes do not actually exist (Ur, 1996). All
classes are to some extent made up of learners who differ in many ways. They may
have different strengths, weaknesses and approaches to learning. They may respond
differently to various teaching methods and classroom situations.

Taking that into account, I will design two activities based on the level of the classes
stated as follows:

1. Intermediate:

I would ask my students to summarize the story told in the comic. I’m convinced
that having my students become familiarized with the content of the material where the
new language is presented is very useful and makes them feel more confident. Then, I

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would ask them to focus on the comic again and identify the word that repeats in every
frame and I would use that opportunity to introduce the topic of phrasal verbs with “put”.
After that, I would have my students do a matching exercise for them to use the context
of the comic to identify the meaning of each phrasal verb. Next, I would ask them to
work in pairs to come up with examples using the phrasal verbs. Finally, I would divide
the class in two teams and run a competition on the board to determine which group
can provide more correct examples.

2. Advanced:

I would provide them with the comic without text in the speech bubbles. Then, I
would encourage them to come up with the speech in pairs. After that, we would
compare their stories with the actual one, and I would use that opportunity to elicit the
meaning of each phrasal verb. At this point, I would use a Powerpoint presentation to
confirm their guesses about each phrasal verb as some students might be visual
learners. Next, I would ask them to come up with a conversation in pairs and get ready
to act it out at the front.

Bibliography

Brown, J. D. (1995). The Elements of Language Curriculum: A Systematic Approach to

Program Development. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.

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Ellis, R. (1998). The evaluation of communicative tasks. In B. Tomlinson (Ed.):

Materials Development in Language Teaching (pp. 217-238). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Freda Mishan, 2005: Designing authenticity into language learning materials. Intellect.

Robinson, P. (2003). The cognition hypothesis, task design, and adult task-based
language learning. Second Language Studies, 21 (2):45-105.

Ur, P. (1996). A Course in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

www.ccsenet.org/elt English Language Teaching Vol. 4, No. 1; March 2011

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