How to Teach 'Going'To'

Once you start teaching, choosing a suitable approach is one of the challenges you will certainly face. I have been teaching for two years now and I have tried out many different strategies for teaching 'going to'. I would like to share my view of how 'going to' can be taught.

I tried this activity out a week ago with a group of eleven-year-olds, and they liked it. My goal was to engage them as much as I could, and, guiding them through the activity, teach them 'going to' for plans and intentions.

Activity goals: presenting 'going to' (the focus is on the affirmative form, along with the use of this grammar item) , revising days of the week

Timing: app. 20 munutes

Material: board, chalk , possibly a picture of a boy

Age: 11

Procedure:

The teacher draws a figure of a boy on the board, or shows a picture of one (it can be a stick man) and gives him a name (John, for example) . The teacher then introduces John to the class: "This is my friend John. He is a pupil, he is eleven years old and he has got a week off. John is very happy and has made some plans for the following week." The teacher writes the following construction on the board:

John's plan:

- I am going to play in the park next week.

- I am going to visit my grandmother next week.

The teacher now elicits more possibilities for the plan and the students are encouraged to use the new construction for completing John's plan. After adding five or six more sentences to the list, the students are asked to do a follow-up exercise.

The exercise: The students have to write seven sentences, including seven days of the week, and plan John's week off. The teacher writes a sentence on the board and provides an example.

On Monday, John is going to play in the garden.

Each student should now write his/her own list of the things John is going to do. Constant repetition of the 'going to' form, as well as repeating that all these things are parts of a plan should make the students aware both of the form and use of this grammar item.

Finally, the teacher nominates several students to read what they have written, thus correcting possible mistakes.

As for the interrogative and negative form, my original intention was to introduce them during the same lesson, but then I realized that it was too much for them. This activity proved to be just enough. After this, we moved to another activity, and continued with 'going to' the next time we met.

This activity was a success in the classroom I tried it out in. I hope that it will also be a success for many other teachers who can build it up and modify it for their classroom needs. :)

Tongue Twisters

Do you remember the famous professor Higgins and his 'student' Eliza Doolitle? Can you remember the phrases he makes her repeat all the time until she gets them right?

“The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain”
“In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly ever happen.“

Can you pronounce them easily? Well, some people can, but other people struggle to do it. Why is that so? The answer is that these two sentences belong to the group of the so-called tongue twisters. A tongue twister is a phrase/ sentence/text specially designed for practicing pronunciation of certain consonants, vowels or consonant clusters. I consider them a very powerful 'teachers' tool' for enabling students prunounce whatever they want. And, above all, it's fun! Isn't that what all teachers want: both fun and learning for their students? They are suitable for learners of all ages, especially for children, because of the 'fun' effect they bear. Here are a few more examples of tongue twisters :

Picky people pick Peter Pan Peanut-Butter, 'tis the peanut-butter picky people pick.

If Stu chews shoes, should Stu choose the shoes he chews?

Through three cheese trees three free fleas flew.
While these fleas flew, freezy breeze blew.
Freezy breeze made these three trees freeze.
Freezy trees made these trees' cheese freeze.
That's what made these three free fleas sneeze.

Whether the weather be fine
or whether the weather be not.
Whether the weather be cold
or whether the weather be hot.
We'll weather the weather
whether we like it or not.

And, finally, a brilliant one:

If Dr. Seuss Were a Technical Writer

Here's an easy game to play.
Here's an easy thing to say:
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!
If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
And your data is corrupted 'cause the index doesn't hash,
then your situation's hopeless, and your system's gonna crash!
You can't say this? What a shame, sir!
We'll find you another game, sir.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house,
Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
That's repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
Then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
'Cause as sure as I'm a poet, the sucker's gonna hang!
When the copy of your floppy's getting sloppy on the disk,
And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
Then you have to flash your memory and you'll want to ram your rom.
Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!


These tongue twister poems can inspire you to come up with dozens of new activities for your students. They might make up their own tongue twisters according to what they need to practice or make chain tongue twisters ( each student contributes with the words he/she needs to practice ). Be as it may, this type of exercising can make a language classroom a room full of laugh, fun and creativity.



The examples were taken from: http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/en.htm