INTRODUCTION TO THE TEACHER

The goal of this book is to take the student from the mechanics of basic sentence writing to the ability to construct a simple paragraph. The vocabulary and the structures have been planned chapter by chapter, from simple to more complex, and the lessons build on each other. For this reason, the students will probably benefit the most if they do the exercises in each chapter in the order they are presented. The same is true of the order of the chapters: information presented early in the book will be helpful for the writing tasks in the later chapters. The amount of time needed to work through a chapter depends on the level of the students, the length of the class period, and the teacher’s decision about homework. Some groups may finish a chapter in two hours, with two hours of outside work. Other groups may do all the exercises in class in four or five hours. Two sample lesson plans are suggested at the end of this section, one with homework assignments and one without homework. Each chapter includes some of the following exercises: 1. Text The text is a reading selection that contains the model structures upon which the chapter is based. There is a variety of styles and registers of English. Some of the texts are descriptions; some are narratives; some are newspaper articles; some are dialogs; and some are letters. The teacher may read the text out loud, or he may ask the students to read it silently. The texts in dialog form (chapters 3,10 and 20) are suitable for dramatic reading in pairs. After the first reading, the teacher may want to clarify new vocabulary words and ask a few comprehension questions.