Practical Activities HELP!

[celinehoran]

Hi there,

I need to design 3 to 4 activities or exercises to use in class to help my students practice and understand the two usages of the word "fast".

I've been instructed to start simple/restricted then get freer with each exercise.

My students are beginners.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Lorikeet]

Er...which two "fasts" are you talking about?

[Lliana]

Fast as adjective/adverb you mean or when we abstain from eating certain foods (or anything!) ?

[celinehoran]

Yes. I need to design 3 to 4 practical activities to help my students understand the two usages of FAST i.e. in its adj. and adv. forms.

Nothing to do with fasting, as in not eating for a while. More like, he has a fast car and he drives fast.

I need to design exercises for my class, so they get a complete understanding of both forms.

Any ideas?

Regards

[Lorikeet]

I guess I still don't quite understand. It seems you could teach the adverb/adjective usage such as:

He sang beautifully. She has a beautiful dress.
They walked quickly. This will be a quick test.

However, "fast" is actually one of the so-called exceptions, since the form is the same for both the adjective and adverb. It seems students will easily be able to know which one to use, since they are both the same. Therefore, I don't quite know what you want them to do.

[EFLwithlittleones]

This would be applicable with any age at any level of competence;

A grammarian might suggest an approach which highlights contrasts in the two meanings of the word ‘fast’ you want to explore, through three stages: (1) Syntactic, (2) Phonetic and (1) Semantic.

(1) Design lessons around the way the word is positioned in a sentence depending on which meaning is intended.

(2) Design lessons around the differences in pronunciation depending on the meaning intended…

By this point students should be quite aware of contextual differences for the word 'fast' so for (3) Design lessons which place the two different forms in strongly contrasting contexts.

I’d use a ‘test’ ‘teach’ ‘test’ approach to enable students to predict all of the above as well.