Teach English in TuojiAng Zhen - Yongzhou Shi

Lesson Objectives Students will practice recognizing homophones and will practice the correct use of definite, indefinite, and zero articles. Summary of tasks / actions Warm Up: Vocabulary Review (10 minutes) Tell students that they are going to play a game to review some of the words that they talked about last week. Divide the class into two teams. One person from each team stands at the back of the room and one person from each stands by the board. Divide the board into four parts. Label each part the following: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Explain to students that the students at the back of the room must repeat a word that you tell them (or read what you write down) to their team mates at the board. The words will all have suffixes attached to them, so students need to pay attention to what the suffix is in order to determine the part of speech.The team mates must then write the word under the correct section. The first team to get the word in the correct section gets a point. Repeat for several rounds, changing the readers and writers every round. Grammar (15 minutes) Board the following: a/an the Ask students if they know how and when to use these two types of articles. Ask them how many things they refer to (they both refer to one thing). Ask them if they know the difference between the two. Ask them if they can describe the difference between the two articles. If students are stumped, explain: a/an -We use these when we don’t specify the things or people which we talk about. Ex. I met a friend. (We don’t know who the friend is) -We use a before a consonant sound. Ex. a dog, a pilot, a university (note: although ‘university’ starts with the letter ‘u,’ it is not pronounced as such) -We use an before a vowel sound. Ex. an engineer, an elephant, an athlete -We also use these: -after what, such, and quite with a countable noun Ex. What a great photo! It’s quite a small house. He’s such a good friend. -to describe jobs and identity Ex. She is a doctor. He is an American. -with a possessive Ex. He’s a friend of mine. -before an illness (exceptions: the flu, etc.) Ex. I’ve got a headache/a cold. the -We use this when we talk about a specific object that both the person speaking and the listener know. Ex. The president is giving a speech tonight. -When we speak of something or someone for the first time we use a or an. The next time we repeat that object we use the. Ex. I live in a house. The house is quite old and has four bedrooms. no article -We normally do not use an article with countries, states, counties, provinces, lakes, or mountains, except in special circumstances. Ex. They climbed Mount Everest. I live in Vietnam. She has been to New York. -We do not normally use an article with plural nouns and uncountable nouns, . Ex. He writes books. Do you like jazz music? Now tell the students that you will read them some sentences. Tell them that the sentences might be missing an article, and they need to listen carefully and decide if the sentence needs: a, an, the, or no article. Read: 1. I bought __________ pair of shoes. 2. I saw __________ movie last night. 3. They are staying at __________ hotel. 4. Look at __________ woman over there! She is a famous actress. 5. I do not like __________ basketball. 6. That is __________ girl I told you about. 7. __________ night is quiet. Let’s take a walk! 8. __________ price of gas keeps rising. 9. John traveled to __________ Mexico. 10. Juan is __________ Spanish. 11. I read __________ amazing story yesterday. 12. My brother doesn’t eat __________ chicken. 13. __________ love is such __________ beautiful thing. 14. I live in __________ apartment. __________ apartment is new. 15. I would like __________ piece of cake. 16. I was in __________ Japanese restaurant. __________ restaurant served good food. 17. Sarah can play __________ guitar. Key: 1. a 2. a 3. a 4. the 5. no article 6. the 7. the 8. the 9. no article 10. no article 11. an 12. no article 13. no article; a 14. an; the 15. a 16. a; the 17. the Pronunciation (15 minutes) Board the following: there their they’re Point to these words one by one and elicit their pronunciation from students. Make sure students understand that these words are pronounced the same (be careful with they’re, for some reason a lot of students refuse to pronounce it as the contraction and always say the extended form, they are). Explain that these are examples of homophones, or words (or combinations of words) that have different spellings and meanings, but the same pronunciation. Read and board some more common homophones: • two/to/to • piece/peace • whose/who’s • genes/jeans • board/bored • you’re/your • there’s/theirs • knew/new • whether/weather • I/eye • wear/where • its/it’s After students have had a chance to review the words, erase the board. Now tell the students that you are going to play a game. Break the class into two teams again and invite two volunteers to come stand by the board. Explain to the class that you are going to read a sentence with one homophone in it and then repeat the homophone at the end. The two students at the board must decide which spelling of the homophone is being used in the sentence and write it on the board. Their team mates are allowed to help them. The first person to write it down gets a point for their team. Repeat with two new students. At the end, tally up the scores and reward the winning team. Example sentences for you to read (feel free to come up with more as you see fit): 1. Where is my class? 2. Who’s going to the party? 3. It’s 12 o’clock. 4. We are going to England. 5. I don’t like fish. 6. Can you give me a piece of cake? 7. Are you new here? 8. She sometimes gets bored in class. 9. It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose. 10. We studied about genes today in biology. 11. There’s a good restaurant nearby. 12. Do you like your class? Cool Down (5 minutes) With the remaining 5 minutes of class, go over any confusing grammatical aspects covered today (if you noticed that some students had trouble with them) or review vocab from last week. If you want, you could play another short vocab review game.