{"id":5011,"date":"2016-06-28T13:50:52","date_gmt":"2016-06-28T09:50:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/?p=5011"},"modified":"2016-06-28T13:51:50","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T09:51:50","slug":"a-lesson-around-a-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/englishbookgeorgia.com\/blogebg\/a-lesson-around-a-text\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lesson Around A Text"},"content":{"rendered":"

Textploitation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mark Heffernan and David Byrne make full use of texts- and save paper at the same time<\/strong>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is always a lot of chat on internet forums and in school staffrooms about reducing the amount of paper we use and about teaching materials-light or paperless lessons. This has long been a concern o ours; not just because of the obvious effect on the environment and because it contributes to our school\u2019s CSR (corporate social responsibility) initiative, but also because\u00a0 for years we\u2019ve seen teachers carrying piles of paper, resource after resource, into the classroom and bombarding their students with one handout after another, often with no direct link or context. So we posed ourselves a question: Could we take one text and use it to teach an entire two-to three-hour lesson? And not in lazy \u2018I can get three hours out of this\u2019 way but teaching a quality lesson, which addresses both skills and systems and keeps our learners\u00a0 engaged throughout. The answer, thankfully, was yes.<\/p>\n

And, because nobody can resist a good pun, we called our strategy Textploitation.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Why base a lesson around a text?<\/strong><\/p>\n

If we use texts to teach the language, gradually our students will see that they can also do this in their own time- that language learning doesn\u2019t just happen within the four walls of the classroom, but that they can be analyzing and learning every time they open a newspaper, turn on the television or speak with another person.<\/p>\n

What types of texts should we use?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There is absolutely no limit to the types of texts you can exploit in the classroom. Whether it is text messages, fliers, posters, advertisements, short stories, extracts from novels, articles, menus, charters, mission statements, reports\u2026 the options are endless. And that doesn\u2019t even take spoken texts into account. Once you start thinking about TV advertisements, interviews, TED talks, recorded conversations and songs things really get interesting.<\/p>\n

How can we exploit these texts? <\/strong><\/p>\n