Philadelphia: reading and vocabulary activities about the City of Brotherly Love

LESSON OVERVIEW

TOPIC

This lesson helps students to learn more about Philadelphia. The specific skills include: reading, listening, simple past and the pronunciation.

DESCRIPTION

Students have already studied the past simple. They will read and listen to a passage about Philadelphia. Besides they will play a vocabulary card game. It is a 90 minute class.

STUDENT CHARACTERISTICS

STUDENT GROUP

High Schoolers, 11th graders.

SKILL AND LANGUAGE LEVEL

Basic users of English.

        CURRICULUM ALIGNMENT WITH LEARNING OUTCOME

SUPPORTED OUTCOMES

Students will develop strategies to read and understand vocabulary in EFL context.

STUDENT LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Student will be able to:

• Match vocabulary and pictures;
• Recognize cognates;
• Find keywords in the text;
• Identify verbs in the text
• Understand the meaning of the verbs from the text;
• Pronounce the verbs in the past correctly;
• Comprehend verbs in the base and past form.

MATERIALS

TEACHING MATERIALS

Worksheets, board, chalk, vocabulary cards, projector and sound system.

STUDENT MATERIAL

Worksheets and vocabulary cards.

TECHNOLOGY REQUIREMENTS

Voice of America podcast about Philadelphia

LESSON PLAN

KNOWLEDGE CHECK (5  minutes)

1. The teacher asks students if they have heard about Philadelphia;
2. The teacher asks: “Where is Philadelphia?”;
3. Students are supposed to find Philadelphia in a map of United States of America.

INTRODUCTION/ WARM UP (10 minutes)

1. Students have to match pictures related to Philadelphia to the vocabulary that will be appear in the reading passage.

GUIDED PRACTICE (25 minutes)

1. Before listening to the text, students skim it;
2. They listen to the Voice of America passage;
3. Students have to fill in the gaps with the given words;
4. They have to identify cognates, key words and words the understand the meaning in English;
5. The teacher helps students have to make inferences about the words they don`t know;
6. Briefly they have to make a mind map with the main ideas of the passage.

INDEPENDENT PRACTICE (30  minutes)

1. The teacher give a vocabulary card for every student;
2. The vocabulary card contains verbs from the text and it presents the following information: base form, past form, meaning and an example;
3. Students are supposed to work in pairs. Every student have to know the base and past form of the verb, its meaning and an example;
4. After having some time to read and memorize the card, students change cards.
5. Taking turns, the partner has to hide the card information and to ask the classmate questions about the verb, such as: “what is the verb?”, “what is the past of this verb?”, “what is the meaning of this verb?”, “could you give me an example?”;
6. When they finish the questions, students have to change pairs.

FEEDBACK (10 minutes)

The teacher identify the errors during the game and reading activities and elicits the correct form from the students by asking questions.

CLOSING ACTIVITY/ WRAP-UP (10 minutes)

Students have to highlight the verbs in the past in the text.

EXTENSION AND/OR DIFFERENTIATION

1.The student can change partners many times;

2. The teacher can focus more on the mind map activity after reading.

ASSESSMENT

ASSESSMENT METHODS

The teacher will observe,  analyze the students performances and  examines items and skills drawn from the lesson. Considering the results of the assessment,  the teacher tries to diagnose the needed areas.

GRADING, CRITERIA AND/OR RUBRICS