2 Unit development

will simplify any phrasing that contains grammatical areas beyond KET level. We must pay special attention to verb tenses, modals and clause types, as these are the areas that introduce the higher level of difficulty. The number of occurrences won’t be a high figure.

Again, following the plan outlined above, every classroom period will follow the same scheme or

time schedule: morning meeting → literacy development → unit development →plenay.

2 UNIT DEVELOPMENT

In this section we will describe the activities for a period, the first with the parable of the Good Samaritan. For the rest of the lessons we will suggest some activities without further development.

We will open every teaching period with a morning meeting, i.e., worming up activities. After greetings and notices, an introduction of the work for the next days will be made. Children are told that a new story will be the focus of attention for the coming lessons.

For this parable we will write on the board two words that will give a hint of the value we will be dealing with the following days: neighbor and solidarity. We will ask a few students what the meaning of this words is. We have to go beyond the first meaning of neighbor as one who lives close to us. Children will quickly say that a neighbor is a person who lives next to you; we will show them the reciprocity of neighborhood with comments like “well said, but then you are his neighbor, aren’t you?” Later, we will try to let them see that, in some sense, any human is a neighbor since we all live in the same ‘house’: planet earth. Following on to the second concept, they will immediately relate it with some campaigns for raising funds or meals in the school, and we will agree with them. Later, we will make them some questions like: “Do you think neighbor and solidarity have anything to do?”

Literacy is the second part in a period. We’ll continue with pair-group; each will be given a set of words taken from the simplified version of the parable that they will have to classify: common nouns, proper names, verbs: lawyer (n) / stand up (v) / inherit (v) / reply (v) / Lord (n) / God (n) / soul (n) / strength (n) / neighbor (n) / Jerusalem (n) / Jericho (n) / attack (v) / robber (n) / clothes (n) / beat (v) / dead (n-adj) / priest (n) / pass by (v) / Samaritan (n) / pity (n) / bandage (n) /oil (n) / wine(n) / donkey (n) / hotel (n) / take care (v) / look after (v) / return (n) / pay (v) / mercy (n).

All words will be printed on a sheet from which children will cut off the words using a scissors and array them in three columns. We will ask them to say out loud the words in each category and we will write them on the board.

Later, they will point out words in the list of which they do not know the meaning. Anyone in the classroom, raising up his hand, will attempt a meaning for the word; from time to time, we will ask a children who rarely takes part to try out with a word we guess he may know. We won’t intend to have a perfect definition, just take an idea. At the beginning of the lesson, we will appear with a bandage, but no explanation should be given despite inquiries. This bandage will be displayed in a visible place

in the classroom during the days we work in it. It will be like a ‘sacrament’ of solidarity (this could be explained later on if chances are given).

Next step will be dialogue in pair groups following a model conversation between the teacher and a student. We will select one or two verbs to make a dialogue in pair groups. For this first teaching period, we will use the verb look after (included in KET lexis). We tell them to ask each other following a model we will write on the board:

- “Pupil 1: Who looked after you when you were a baby?”.

- “Pupil 2: When I was a child, I was looked after my mum and grandmother”.

We will give them a wait time of 1-2 minutes and later the teacher will ask some pairs in the following way: pupil 1 will be asked about pupil 2, and the other way round. This mechanism gives the dialogue an end-result that motivates. Teacher will ask one of them to report him what the other said. Again, a model for reporting must be offered:

- “Pupil 1 says that his mum looked after him when he was a child”.

We will ask them to follow the pattern in order to learn to use the reported speech scheme.

Now, we will progress to the passive voice, using a model once more. This time we will ask them to retell the answers of his mate in the passive voice in this way:

- “Pupil 1: you have told me that you were looked after you mum. Were you ever looked after by a nanny?”

- “Pupil 2: same question.

Teacher will walk around and help if any difficulty arises. We will repeat the same questioning to children (if possible involving all them during the activity) about his mate, giving them a model:

“Pupil says he was looked after his aunt when his mum was out”.

Next step will be unit development. In this stage, we will use the overhead projector to display a map of the holy land in the times of Jesus Christ. It must contain the roads, in particular that from Jerusalem to Jericho, a scale (to guess the time it takes from one city to another) and North signaled. We will ask children calculate the kilometers from that the Good Samaritan rode (Mathematics at stake: this is a content they have already covered). Later we will point to the land of Samaria, Galilee and Judea. Later, a small copy of the map will be delivered to each pupil, who will glue it to a notebook or collect it in a file. We will ask them to color those three regions and mark with a green thick line the route of the parable. This task may well be left for homework.

Now, we will tell them that the parable we will read takes place in the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. This story was told by Jesus to his disciples to teach them what a neighbor is and what solidarity consists in.

Teacher will read it aloud for the whole class. Mimic and facial gestures are for themselves explanatory and help children catch the meaning of vocabulary and the message of the parable; this mimic should be prepared by the teacher beforehand, i.e., he must rehearse for the storytelling (Wright, 2009). Next step is delivering the text of the parable to the whole classroom. During reading, we will ask them to:

- Circle the characters.

- Underline places.

We will let them make any question they do not understand. Now we will work on the parable and the passive voice (in this we are following Thornbury, 1999: 77-79). While they do this, we will write on the board next questions that probably will make them come back to the text:

Who asked Jesus? What did he ask Jesus?

Who was attacked? Where? How badly?

Who was the attacker?

Who helped the man who was attacked?

Where was the man taken? Who took him?

Now the teacher can let them answer or tell them to copy the questions and write down the answers.

After that, the teacher writes these two sentences on the board:

1. Robbers attacked a man on his journey.

2. On his journey a man was attacked by robbers.

He tells the class to turn the text over and asks if they know which of the sentences is taken from the parable. Now he will elicit the difference in form between the two sentences, pointing out that in the first the subject of the verb is the actor while in the second the subject is the man who suffered the attacked. Now we write the structure: subject + to be + past participle. We invite them to guess why the second sentence was chosen instead of the first, and explains that it is because the man is the important character, not the robbers, and usually themes or important things go at the beginning of

sentences.

Now we invite them to take one of the sentences in verse 30 and transform it from active into passive, using the model written on the board. We can also do the reverse, i.e., write a passive sentence that corresponds to an active one on the parable and ask them to find it.

After that, we will ask the children if they have ever known of a similar experience of if they have been told. It could be a car accident, a bicycle crash or any other person who was badly treated (it could be a pupil in the school) and different reactions took place: some people passed by but somebody arrived who helped to he who was in need.

At this point, time will be over (¡And probably we didn’t do it all!). A plenary or summing up of what has been learnt should be done.

For the rest of the lessons, writing should be introduced extensively. Children should complete the story map (See the Anexxe III) and, using the same pattern, write the story map of a real or imagined situation. This takes time and reflection. Teacher must use correction marks and encourage rewriting when necessary.

Another ideal activity with this parable would be the use of minimal pairs for working the difference between past simple and present perfect, following the sample lesson by Thornbury (1999: 63-65). In this selection of sentences context is essential. For example, we can offer three minimal pairs with a context. For the first, we imagine a policeman or soldier who has learnt about the attack on the man, questions the priest and he answers: (a) I have seen that man sometime; (b) I saw him this morning. For the second minimal pair, we imagine the same policeman questioning one of the robbers: (a) Have you ever been on the road to Jericho? (b) Where you on the road to Jericho this morning? And the third, the policeman questions the innkeeper, who says: (a) Many injured people have come to my inn since I own it; (b) this morning, a man arrived half dead.

Now the teacher elicits the structure behind both verb tenses, and explains that the present perfect is used when something happened in an unspecific moment in the past. When we use the simple past, we refer to a concrete experience in a specified past time. We can offer them a scripted dialogue with gaps to be filled with the correct verb tense; we correct it for the whole class and later it can be performed in pairs.

Gap activities can be introduced at any time for content and language. Children are quite used to then, they are easy to do and correct and with immediate reward. Freer activities involve for many students more stress.

Work with the authentic text must be introduced in the following lesson. Listening activities with gaps to fill in are an appropriate technique. Later, in the last/s lesson/s with the parable a full watching of a DVD will be offered. We have already talked about it in this paper. Film watching can be used for didactic purposes in different ways (Harmer, 2007).