Crappy Chapters

Lessons this week have been irritating and not very helpful.  I am wed to the book, so there are specific things I have to do and the students have to know, but the chapters we are using this week are incoherent and lack any real practical use or meaningful significance for the students.

For the lower level students the chapter is "Good Mood Foods".  This makes little sense to me.  Apparently, different foods make you feel differently.  The book establishes this in a very confusing way and is very inconsistent.  Most of the pictures that connect an emotionally state to a food are unclear or inconsistent and the activities are confusing to me.  I've adapted them as best I could, but I am not very good with discussing things like emotions This chapter is also almost entirely about listening and reading.  I have been using more extensive activation to warm up for the listening and generating prediction questions, as well as having them come up with things they would like to have answered, and that seems to be useful.  This takes up a lot of time, and the class does very little production. 

The higher level class has an even worse chapter.  The focus of the chapter is different dialects and accents.  It is almost entirely about listening to different accents.  This chapter is confusing to the students since they have a lot of trouble following standard English.  I have tried to do the exercises using my accent with a lot of extra MIC to guide them through listening and to try to pick up meaning.  This seems more useful since they can begin to understand, but the class becomes teacher-centric and all about me putting on a show for everyone.  Otherwise, the whole chapter is one long listening exercise, and not a good one either.

Today I play to have my own lesson for the higher classes using the distinction between formal English and slang, and to go through settings where each is appropriate.  I have made a sheet with common slang, contractions and this like that as an aid to appropriate use and pronunciation.  This addresses a need the students have since most of them can and do use words like "wanna" and "gonna" but do so incorrectly.  Some even slip these constructions into writing. I plan to have them produce through role playing or skit making to create English appropriate to the setting.  I have no idea how well this will work and am terrified that it will leave me a day behind with nothing to show for it.