The Standby Book [antikvár]

The Standby Book in a nutshell This boolc describes 110 different classroom activities, most of which can easily be adapted for use in teaching any foreign language. Some of the activities are intended to make up just part of a lesson. Others (see especially some in Chapter 7) are prefabricated chains of activities which make up a complete lesson, or even two - depending on how long your lesson periods are. Virtually all the activities have been written for adult and older teenage general English classes. There is a chapter of activities for business and professional groups but these too are usable with some general English classes. There are also several activities which work admirably with young learners. (See the Index.) We believe you will find most of these activities substantially new and unrepealed elsewhere. Where more or less familiar language teaching techniques and activities do appear, it is generally because they have been extended or varied in an interesting way or because their underlying rationale might be unexpected. The Standby Book is intended to be a bank of activities which can be used to supplement a coursebook on a longish non-intensive course, regardless of whether the course is exam-oriented, specialised (e.g. for business people or literature students) or not. That is, the activities here can be accommodated within syllabuses of various kinds (structural, notional/functional, lexical, thematic, etc.). The activities can also be used to create a short intensive course whose participants' principal aims are to become more fluent, to enlarge their vocabularies on a broad front and to have an interesting, lively time with plenty of opportunity for social contact. That is, this book includes activities which could figure in a 'communicative activities syllabus' (Stern 1992:177-204). The Standby Book does not present activities in the order you are supposed to do them. Some do dovetail nicely in this or that sequence (as will be noted in the text), but none is absolutely necessary as preparation for any other. Books like this one have a number of features in common with the average cookbook, which is why they are sometimes called 'recipe books'. For example, they contain step-by-step outlines of procedure; 1