Chapter 22: Distinguishing Monolingual and Multi-lingual Classes 329
- Students watch a video of other students taking the exam, assess these
other students and give feedback. (15 minutes) - Students practise asking and answering a few questions each for Part
3. on the topic of reading. (5 mins) - Give students an envelope full of questions typical of Part 3 but on
various topics, one for each pair. Together they practice asking and
answering the questions using the phrases on the board. (5 minutes)
The English class in Italy
The students in this class are all Italian and vary in age from late teens to
mid- twenties. They are generally quite communicative and tend to focus
more on getting their message across than accuracy. As I speak their language
to upper-intermediate level, I can anticipate some particular difficulties.General skills
Ask students to pay particular attention to accuracy when they speak and
also in the examiner role. Make sure that they don’t interrupt when someone
else is speaking. It’s more acceptable for speakers to do this in Italian culture
but it would be a disaster to do so in the exam. Use a ‘wait’ gesture to remind
students about this throughout the lesson.Vocabulary problems
The course book discusses different kinds of reading material but there are
two words which might be false friends:✓ The Italian romanzo is very similar to ‘romance’ but means novel.
✓ Magazzino means warehouse, not magazine, which is actually scomparto
in Italian.
Pronunciation problems
In Italian, most words carry stress (emphasis) on the penultimate (the
second-to-last) syllable. Students tend to use the same stress patterns when
speaking English, which makes it more difficult to understand the accent. On
the list of reading material, get the students to mark the stress for each word.There is usually some confusion with the correct stress on compound nouns
such as different kinds of books. Drill several examples with students making,
sure they stress the first noun –sports books.Science books are on the list of reading material. The letters sci are pronounced
/ʃi/ as in ‘ship’ in Italian so students are very likely to mispronounce science.
Be sure to drill it.