Oral, writing and pronunciation development - teacher Leila Janice Maxwell (UNIUBE - Uberaba)

Teacher Leila working with English sounds board by Paul Seligson, which helps students a lot with pronunciation. She compared and contrasted the different sounds in English language. I had an awesome experience with the whole English File series. I feel very comfortable working with these materials. You can see me at the bottom left hand corner.


In this photo, I'm backwards, beside Leila, on the left.

Some of the tasks we had during Leila's lecture

In the first production, we were supposed to produce, in different groups, three different activities based on a picture ranking a tortoise (1st position), an elephant (2nd position) and a fox (3rd position). One group was reponsible for a piece of news, another for a play (my group) and the last one for a jogral. The activities were based on "The Hare and the Tortoise", an Aesop's Fable, whose moral can be "Slow but steady wins the race" or "When you take it easy because you think you have an advantage over someone, you may be surprised".

To be honest, I'm not good at roleplays, maybe because of my shyness, but it was a cool activity.

The second step in Leila's lecture was the presentation of the English sounds, which can be found in English File series. She gave us a nice activity in which she gave words for a group, with a sound highlighted. The other group had the phoneme and was supposed to perform the sound. So the groups were supposed to match the sound contained in the word with the phoneme.

It will be worth taking advantage of this website for the English sounds: http://www.oup.com/elt/global/products/englishfile/elementary/c_pronunciation/

Another interesting activity used by Leila was the one known as "hot potato", in which she put some questions in a box. Students were in a circle. A song was being played. When the song stops, the one with the box picks up a question and asks another one to anwer it.

In the following activity we were supposed to repeat some texts miming then with a certain tune. One example was the one below:

"Thirty days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have thirty-one. except February,which has twenty-eight. And every Leap Year one day more".

The last and the most interesting activity for me, which I didn't know, was the one in which a river was drawn in lines. Half of the group was on one the river's bank. The other half, in the other. One was supposed to be Mr. Crocodile. The ones on the river bank were supposed to ask "Please, Mr. Crocodile, may we cross the river?", and then Mr. Crocodile replied "Yes, if you are wearing ... (red, for example). Mr. Crocodile was supposed to catch people crossing the river. The one caught was the next Mr. Crocodile.

It was a nice afternoon. Opportunities to enhance our classes.