by Rosa Remolí
This unit includes, firstly, narrative text. In this case, it is developed the main characteristics and the structure of this kind of text. In other words, students learn the parts that a narrative text has to have, tenses that appear frequently, the different types of narrator. Secondly, they work the news. This is an example of narrative text and it is also an important resource to know the most relevant facts that happen in society. The narrative text is a good tool for students to work on reading comprehension and written expression. Apart from this, students develop oral expression through oral presentations.
We have chosen news for this unit because, on the one hand, it is a narrative text, someone tells an event that has happened somewhere. On the other hand, news serves to reflect on the society in which we live. To understand the narrative text, it is necessary to learn its most important characteristics and the parts that form the text, in other words, its structure. In addition, students must learn how to structure a news, what parts it has, what type of information it should contain.
The chosen materials to develop this unit are power point presentations to explain the content, some photocopy with examples of narrative text, newspaper. They also use computers to look for news in some digital newspapers or watch videos about news.
The final task consists in doing an oral presentation imitating a news programme. In this task, students must explain some news in their own words. Before the oral presentation, students have to write the news and deliver them to teacher to correct them. To prepare this task, the teacher divides the class in groups into three or four students.
To sum up, this unit can help students to improve their written and oral expression in English. They also can improve their reading comprehension. In addition, they learn to look for information, summarize them and transmit this information in their own words.
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