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Teaching students to identify functional groups

Teaching students to identify functional groups . Karen Margetts Native-speaking English Teacher Cheung Chuk Shan College. Functional Grammar. Not a set of rules Looks at the choices we make according to: purpose social activity roles and relationships between participants

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Teaching students to identify functional groups

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  1. Teaching students to identify functional groups Karen Margetts Native-speaking English Teacher Cheung Chuk Shan College

  2. Functional Grammar • Not a set of rules • Looks at the choices we make according to: • purpose • social activity • roles and relationships between participants • nature of text and role of language in it

  3. Useful for all levels & abilities • S1 & S4 Creative English • S4 General English • Reading of textbook, newspaper articles, SBA texts and test papers • Writing of compositions - narratives, letters of complaint, expository and argumentative essays, problem-solution essays, etc. • Speaking / Oral S4 – S7 • S7 UE Reading passages

  4. Identifying Functional Groups • Processes (Green) – ‘the goings on’ • Participants (Red) – nominal groups • People, things, issues, concepts or phenomena involved in the processes • Circumstances (Blue) • Give information about the ‘environment’ in which the process occurs • When? Where? How? what with? Why? How? whom for? who with?

  5. Processes - Green • Actions • Walk, give, move, ride, pick up • Mental • See, hear, like, love, think, believe, want • Saying • Say, tell, ask, reply, suggest • Relational • Be, have

  6. Circumstances - Blue • Time – When? How long? • Place – Where? How far? • Manner – How? What with? What like? • Cause – Why? How? What for? Whom for? • Accompaniment – Who with?

  7. Participants - nominal groups • Pointer – the, those, this, a, that • Numerative – three, second, million • Describer(s) – pleasant, difficult, most precious • Classifier(s) – Form 4, business, indoor • Thing – student, meeting, plant • Qualifier – with brown hair, we had last week, that’s in the bathroom

  8. Expanding nominal groups • Shehelda bag. • Shehelda small, black leather bag with a gold strap. • Theyatesome cakes. • Theyatehalf a dozen delicious cakes filled with cream and strawberries

  9. Increasing complexity of texts • Less spoken - more written • Human and concrete participants to more specific and abstract participants • Highly nominalised texts (longer nominal groups) • More relational processes (be, have); fewer action processes • More clauses in each sentence

  10. Outcomes - reading • When students are taught how to identify functional groups, • Processes GREEN • Participants RED • Circumstances BLUE they are immediately able to read much more complex texts with greater ease • UE texts are highly nominalised and grammatically complex

  11. Outcomes - writing • Improved mastery of the clause and sentence structure • Nominal groups are expanded with more frequent use of qualifiers, especially relative clauses • Improved ability to write more ‘formal’ texts such as argumentative essays

  12. Outcomes – Speaking & Listening • Increased use of nominalisation in group discussions and individual responses • One of the advantages of having a class websitewould be…. • The main difficulty faced by those students sitting public examsis … • Improved stress and intonation patterns

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