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Classroom lesson plans and interactive smart board activities.

Phonetics and phonology - Starter

Group discussion questions

You could start the lesson by asking students questions such as:

 

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Phonetics and phonology - Terminology

What do phoneticians and phonologists do?

Phonetics and phonology are the branches of linguistics that deals with speech sounds. This broad ranging definition is indicative of the broad type of work that phoneticians/phonologists do:

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Phonetics and phonology - The sounds of poetry

Looking at the importance of sound in a literary text

Sound patterns in poetry

Here are two extracts from the poem Digging by Seamus Heaney. In the poem, a son talks openly about his perceived failures in following in his father's footsteps, namely because of his lack of skill with a spade and as a farmer.

Read them out loud:

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   
My father, digging. I look down 

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Phonetics and phonology - Transcribing spoken language

Transcribing sounds

In this activity, you'll be using your knowledge of articulatory phonetics to transcribe spoken language. To do so, you'll be using the phonetic alphabet - a system designed by linguists to represent speech sounds on the page.

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Phonetics and phonology - Vowels

In the starter activity, we asked the question 'How can we write down speech sounds? For example, how can we capture the difference between a northern British accent saying bath and a southern British accent saying bath?

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Phrases: coordination

In this lesson, students look at phrases conjoined by coordinating conjunctions.

Goals

  • Identify different types of phrases which have been conjoined with coordinating conjunctions.
  • Consider the effect of conjoining more than one phrase.
  • Consider the effect of omitting coordinating conjunctions.

Lesson plan

Click on the interactive whiteboard icon (top right) and work through the following slides with students.

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Playing with person

In this exercise, students make changes to pronouns in texts, and evaluate the effects of those changes.

Goals

  • Identify first, second, and third person pronouns, and practise switching from one to another.
  • Evaluate the effects of writing using different personal pronouns.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will make changes to existing texts by changing the personal pronouns in those texts.

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Playing with person: Activity

I’m sitting here looking out of the window. Nothing’s happening; it never does. I sit here every day for hours on end, just looking. Looking for what? I don’t know. They never told me what I should be looking for. And I’ve never found out.

I once thought I’d found something, but I couldn’t be sure. It might just have been a trick of the light. How was I to tell?

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Polysemy (Stein)

Plan

Activity 1

Explain that the word polysemy refers to the idea that words can have more than one meaning

Ask the learners to think of more than one meaning for the words football and mouse and discuss with a partner or small group. Show the next slide to reveal some possible answers.

As an extension, see if learners can come up with any other words with multiple meanings. 

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Polysemy (Stein)

Lesson

Objective

To understand how polysemy applies to different word classes.

Activity 1

Some words may have only one meaning, but most tend to have more.

Let's take for example the words football and mouse

How many meanings can you think of for each? 

football can mean:

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Pragmatics and turn-taking

Goals

  • Identify the place of turn-taking in spoken conversation.
  • Analyse some examples of turn-taking in real spoken conversation.

Lesson Plan

The Activity pages appear in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. Each Activity page includes a video interview. If you like, you can try this lesson with any other interview or dialogue you would like to use.

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Pragmatics and turn-taking: Activity 1

Stacey Solomon TV interview

Pragmatics and turn-taking: Activity 2

Russell Brand TV interview

Pragmatics in a political interview

Goals

  • Identify some elements of spoken dialogue in an interview setting.
  • Analyse some features of colloquial language, specifically the kinds of words and phrases that are used.

Lesson Plan

The Activity page appears in the menu entitled 'This Unit' in the upper right corner of this page. It includes a video of an interview between Russell Brand and Ed Miliband, recorded just before the UK General Election in May 2015.

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Prefixes in adjectives

In this lesson, students will look at some common prefixes that can be added to adjectives and see how they change meanings.

Goals

  • Identify some common prefixes in adjectives.
  • Describe the meanings contributed by common adjective prefixes.
  • Experiment with acceptable and unacceptable prefixes for particular adjectives.

Lesson Plan

The teacher explains that today, we will look at adjectives with distinctive prefixes.

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Preposing

In this exercise you can see what happens when you move elements, particularly Direct Objects, earlier in the clause.

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Preposing: Activity

Some things I can remember without writing them down. → I can remember some things without writing them down.

Hardbacks I wouldn’t lend to anyone. → I wouldn't lend hardbacks to anyone.

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Present participles in composition

This activity involves working with nonfinite clauses to do some sentence-splitting and sentence-joining. The purpose is to develop your awareness of the different kinds of structures that are available to you as a writer.

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Present participles in composition: Activity 1

Returning to the area after the War, Pissaro largely retained the same fiction about Louveciennes. →

Pissaro returned to the area after the War. He largely retained the same fiction about Louveciennes.

Having fallen completely from view since May, he finds another window suddenly beckoning. →

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Present participles in composition: Activity 2

I arrived just before lunch. I looked for Harry Frampton in the dining room. →

Arriving just before lunch, I looked for Harry Frampton in the dining room.

The ZR-1 looked little different from the normal Corvette. It performed like a Ferrari or a Lamborghini. →

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Register and vocabulary

This lesson invites students to explore the differences and similarities between vocabulary pairs like make and produce, take and transfer, and give and provide.

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Register and vocabulary: Activity

It's very difficult to produce any form of art unless you are driven.
It's very difficult to make any form of art unless you are driven.

The way oceans take heat from the equator to the poles is different for two reasons.
The way oceans transfer heat from the equator to the poles is different for two reasons.

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