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Delta Module One: Syllabus area 5

resources

Knowledge of resources, materials and reference sources for language learning
Examination practice tasks


resources

Your knowledge of this area is specifically tested in one task in the examination – Paper 2, Task 2.  Task 3 in Paper 1 asks you to look carefully at some materials and suggest what learners would need to be able to do successfully to complete a task or two so that is also relevant.

Tasks Examples
p2t2
Paper2, Task 2
In this task you are given an extract from a coursebook.
Your mission is:
to work out what the purpose of the activities and stages in the material are and how they combine and then to figure out what the author(s) believe.  In other words, what the assumptions about language and learning are that underlie the design of the material
Clearly, question setters have lots of data to draw on for this task.  You need to make sure you have looked at a wide range of published materials and practised applying the concepts we have covered so far in this section.
There's little point in selecting one bit of material to prepare here, because the range of possibilities is so wide, so this is a selection of possible types of material and tasks.
Read the descriptions of the tasks on the left and then make some notes about:
  1. The purpose of each activity
  2. How the activity combines with the next / previous one
  3. What the authors assume about language and learning.
When you have done that for each task, click on the eye open to reveal some suggestions.

 

angrycoffe shopExtract 1
Task 1:
Picture of two people in a coffee shop.  The woman looks angry.
The tape script contains language such as
"This really isn't good enough!"
"I've been waiting ages!"
"I'm sorry, I've had a terrible time getting here."
"I've had lots of problems at work and couldn't leave on time today."

The instruction is to listen to the dialogue and answer four questions:
What is Mary’s problem?
How does she state it?
What is John’s excuse?
How does he sound?
Task 2:
Isolated examples of the text are played and the learners must listen and repeat, paying special attention to tense and tone.
eye open
Task 3:
The next task consists of role cards setting out a parallel situation with one person angry and the other making excuses.  The reason for anger and the type of excuse are on the cards.
Students do this orally in pairs.
role play cards
eye open
santorinipostcardExtract 2
Task 1:
Students are presented with a postcard (as above) and asked to read it and answer:
Where is the writer?
What is she doing?
Who is she writing to?

eye open
Task two:
Learners are asked on a worksheet to make a list in two columns:
Column 1: adjectives
Column 2: nouns.
They do this in pairs, looking up any unknown words in the dictionary or asking for help.
For example:
list

eye open
Task 3:
Learners are given a blank postcard and a range of pictures of holiday destinations.
They are asked to:
  1. Select a destination they would like to visit.
  2. Imagine they are there.
  3. Think of 4 nouns for what is there and 4 adjectives to describe them.
  4. Deliver the postcard to another learner of their choice.
eye open

Notice that in all these examples, there is explicit and consistent reference to purposes, combinations and assumptions.  If you do that, you won't miss out on answering the task in full.
You may have thought of other issues, of course.  Good if you did.


ideas

Some more ideas to prepare for this area of the syllabus:

index small
course index