Collections of Professor Dr David Ngin Sian Pau

Another exercise worth recommending in fixing stage is a cloze test. Working on such exercises is associated with two aims, by which is meant, communicative and linguistic.

Music for English

We can do lots of things with the song lyrics. My students will be asked to do the following activities in the class after or while listening a song.

1.Fill-in blanks,
2.ask and answer questions about the lyrics or about the different situations or characters in the song,
3.write a letter to one of the singers,
4.send an answer to the person referred to in the song,
5.rewrite it as a story, write a story which began before the story in the song and led to it,
6.write story which will continue after the song, change words ( adjectives, adverbs, names, places,
   feelings, etc.),
7.invent new lyrics for the melody, "draw" the different stanzas and of course enjoy listening to it or
   singing it.

I will have to write up a set of questions around the topic and let students ask each other the questions. For more advanced students, I will choose two songs of a similar theme(or first and second half of the song), and split the class into two teams. After that I will have each group listen to their part and make up questions. Finally students will sit in pair with a member of the opposite team and have them take turns asking their questions.

Or students will put the title of the song on the board that students in pairs make guesses about what the song is about and write them down in a piece of paper. Then students will pass their papers a group to the left and have them read them. Students must guess if the other students guess is the same or different than theirs.

Grammar

Advance level English learners need not learn simple English grammar any more as they began learning it since many years or months ago. They must be able to use simple sentences using simple present, past and future tenses correctly and suitably. Therefore, teaching them correct syntax, and advance grammatical drilling will help them improve their English knowledge further.

Let’s say I want to teach grammatical order “it would have been if” to advance students. I will collect some sample sentences first using British National Corpus or Web Corp Search Engine and print it. And then I will cut out each sentences into pieces word by word and put each sentence(pieces of words) together in a small plastic bag. In the classroom, give each plastic bag to every pair and ask them to assemble words to make the original sentence. Checking assembled sentences if they are correct will help students a better understanding of the sentence pattern. Finally, I will give the class 5 to 10 ten minutes to create a very short story to tell it in half a minute in which a sentence, using the sentence pattern they learnt, must be inserted. And let every student starts telling the story one after another. The short story telling should be over in 15 to 20 minutes and everyone in my class should do it.

Sample sentences will be like these below:
1. History as it would have been if we had the left's view prevailed.
2. Can you imagine how it would have been if EPCOT had been built as a city of Tomorrow and failed?
3. Your driving habits forced the price of fuel higher than it would have been if you had driven like a
    responsible, intelligent adult.
4. What a loss it would have been if they'd never existed.
5. My life has been greatly improved over what I envision it would have been if I had not been under his
    gentle tutelage.
6. I wonder how funny it would have been if someone had been trampled to death by this idiotic stunt.
7. Our patent attorney was able to write the claims in such a way that it made our patent much stronger
    than it would have been if we had done it ourselves.