It is relatively easy to create good, purposeful controlled activities to practice a given structure or lexical area (check out this book if you have the time), but it is very hard to devise communicative tasks that naturally “trap” the language you want to focus on. So what’s plan B?I still remember reading about a study Dave and Jane Willis conducted back in the 90s, in which they recorded dozens of native speakers doing a task involving asking for and giving advice. As it turns out, there was not a single occurrence of phrases like “I think you should…”, “If I were you…” etc. Instead, all the speakers used mostly the imperative form. But I digress. My point is that it is difficult to impose any degree of control to students’ verbal behavior during a task that is truly meaning-focused.
Input flooding: expressing contrast
The good news is that, receptively, we can expose them to authentic texts that, because of topic and/or discourse structure, contain several examples of “the structure of the day.”
If you’ve been reading this blog since its infancy (i.e., four months ago!), you might recall examples of input-flooded texts you can use to expose students to the present perfect, passive voice and the “second” conditional.
Well, this week, I happen to have stumbled upon a site in which a number of experts compare and contrast… well, anything under the sun, really. Look at some of the language I have found:
1.The iphone 5 and 5s are more or less identical when it comes to the aesthetics.
2. Both ‘Diet Cokes’ and ‘Coke Zero’ are low calorie soft drinks compared to regular coke.
3. Coke Zero has 0.5 kilocalories per 100ml while Diet Coke contains 1 calorie.
4. Cute people are relationship material whereas hot people are not.
5. The main difference between LCD and Plasma is the refresh rate.
The site is definitely worth a visit if, for any reason, you want to expose your intermediate and advanced students to lexical phrases like the ones above and perhaps even propose a writing task along these lines. The poor things do deserve a break from letters of complaint, essays and narratives, don’t they?
Thanks for reading.
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Dear Tavinho,
Great site! Interesting to analyse the language that is used to compare. Liked 'travelers vs. tourists'. Interesting for a class.
Thanks and um abração
Cris
Cris,
It IS great, isn't it?
This is definitely a site I'll be referring to when I write my best-seller. AHAHAHHAHAHAHAH. Yeah, right, dream on.
I love this blog, Luis! There's always sth I've always wanted to hear!!! rsrsr
It is so true! We can never control what students use… and sometimes I'm not really sure abt what to do: I'm teaching a certain structure and, when production phase starts, they use sth different (but sth that makes sense…)… do you understand what I mean? what do you think is better to do? bc I want them to use the new structure, but they can get what they want by using sth different…
tks!
bjos
oh, there's sth weird about the blog, I can only post from certain computers, not all of them… why? rsrsr
Laís,
That's very sweet of you, thanks.
If you don't mind, I'm going to use your question as an agony column question so that more people can see it, ok?
And I have NO idea why the blog is behaving erratically…