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Life in the Australian Outback: Sentence Ordering Exercises
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Introduction
The purpose of the following sentence reordering exercises
is to develop an ability to listen for "discourse markers"
in a debate or an argument.
(Rost, 1991, 106)
The student must find ways to
create continuity between disconnected pieces of dialogue.
In attempting to create this continuity, the student has
to derive meaning from the lexical phrases that are used
to agree, disagree, and make points,
to relate one utterance to the next in an argument,
thereby raising their awareness of these lexical phrases and
how they are used.
What follows are cards which are meant to be cut out,
shuffled, and given to the student to sort with
accompanying listening.
An attempt has been made to divide the cards into groups so that
they print out without breaking a card in the middle.
Correct orderings are given in the "Key" at the end.
The letters in brackets on the cards (e.g. "[A]") are
used to indicate correct orderings.
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Exercises
Ordering 1
Ordering 2
Ordering 3
Ordering 4
Ordering 5
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Lesson Plan:
Using a movie dialogue to draw students attention to discourse markers
in conversation
Students listen to a scene from a movie and put the sentences in the right order.
- Level
- Intermediate and Advanced
- Time
- 30 minutes (or more depending on how much of the material is used.)
- Aim
- Use a scene from an interesting movie to build learner awareness
about the ways in which discourse markers are used in conversation.
- In-brief
- Students are given a movie dialogue that has been cut up into
pieces and asked to pu them in the right order.
An audio tape of the movie dialogue is played to help them do this.
This task is used to draw their attention to the lexical phrases
that are used to agree, disagree, and make points in a debate or an argument.
- Language
- Discourse markers in informal debate or arguments.
- Organization
- Pairs
- Preparation
-
- Count how many pairs there will be when the class is divided into pairs.
- Make one copy of sentence reordering cards for each pair.
- Cut out the cards. (Note: To keep the cards in separate sets
it is useful to label each set on the back with a letter or a number,
e.g. set "A", Set "B",... )
- Download the RealAudio files
with the audio recording of the movie scene (
Part 1 (342KB),
Part 2 (469KB),
Part 3 (105KB)
) to your computer.
(Note: you can save these files
to your computer to your computer using the browser by
right clicking and saving or by selecting record on the RealAudio
player if you have this capability.)
- For higher quality play the recording directly from your computer or
record it onto a cassette tape first.
To record onto a cassette tape, perform the following steps.
- Plug your tape recorder into the audio-out jack on your computer.
- Turn your tape recorder on.
- Play the computer recording on your RealAudio player.
- Now you have a tape recording of the movie scene which
you can use like you would use any recording for listening
practice. The tape recorder will allow you to rewind and fast-forward
to appropriate places on the tape which you want to the students to
focus on. This capability is available to a limited extent on the
RealAudio player, but is not well-adapted to a teacher's use
with language students in a classroom.
- Procedure
-
- Divide the class into pairs.
- Handout one set of cards to each pair.
- Warm-up: Describe the setting of the conversation for them
- Describe the setting of the conversation for the students
using a few key words from the conversation that you write
down on the board and clarify the meaning of.
- Ask to the students to have a look at the cards
to see if they can put some of them in order without
even listening to the recording.
- Listening
- Tell the students to focus on the recording and to
disregard the cards for a moment.
- Play the recording for the first time.
- Have the students work together with their partners
trying to arrange the strips in the correct order.
Have them try to recall what they have just heard in addition to using
the language on the cards as sequence cues.
- If there are alternative orderings possible point this out to them.
More advanced students might be challenged by finding them.
- Ask them to listen for a second time and to try to
confirm the orderings they have just made.
- Play the recording for a second time.
- Go over some of the language that is used to disagree
or make points in the argument.
A copy of the transcript with
discourse markers highlighted
is provided to help the teacher do this.
The idea here is to draw students' attention to the way that
discourse markers are used in an argument in a manner similar
to the way that Nattinger and DeCarrico (1992, 59-80) do in their
ground-breaking book on lexical phrases in language learning.
- Follow-up:
- Discuss with the class how they went about ordering the
cards. What clues, sequence cues, anaphora, or
pronouns, words or phrases that are repeated from one sentence
and card to the next.
- Ask them who they think provided the better argument.
- Use the role-plays and discussion questions on the
main page.
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Key:
The following are correct answers.
Other answers might be reasonable,
so the teacher should encourage students
to propose alternative orderings and, of course,
to supply reasons why their orderings are reasonable.
- [B,F,G,A,J,C,H,I,D,K]
- [F,A,J,B,H,D,I,C,G]
- [B,D,F,E,C,A,G]
- [E,A,G,F,D,B,C,O,K,H,I,M,L,N,J]
- [E,F,D,A,H,B,C,I]
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Bibliography:
- Nattinger, J.R. and DeCarrico, J.S. (1992) Lexical Phrases and Language Learning.
OUP.
- Rost, M. (1991) Listening in Action. Prentice Hall.
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