'Occupations' theme to lower-level middle school students

[Cannibal_Clown]

I'm just after a few words of wisdom in here.

I have tried making an activity out of using visual aides to get students familiar with occupation terms (mainly animated, to maintain interest...nothing that is too difficult for them so as to scare them off), sentence structure and the drill method of using the correct article for each job (a/an), followed by an acting scene where students are given a picture of their job, and other students guess the job type.

In the few lessons I have tried this, success has been lukewarm at best.

I am leading to article and conjunction use and incorpate job types as part of the exercise.

A game I have devised is using 3 boxes, placing the name of famous people in Box A, their correct occupation in Box B, and a "pretend dream job". The process is as follows:

- the student draws out a name of famous person drawn out at random from Box A,
- the student tries to match it with the correct occupation in Box B, and finally
- a 'dream job' is drawn from Box C. The end result is something like as follows, for example:

"My name is ____________"
"I am a/an____________ but I want to be a/an_____________"

The students read out the sentences in class. The emphasis is on getting the articles to use the right article and familiarise with conjunctions, which I get into in greater detail the following week. I also want the students to come out of their shell, and I devised something like this for the purpose.

Thanks.

David, Incheon, South Korea.

[Sally Olsen]

I think their interest might depend on whether you chose people who they are really interested in. I can see that you are trying to control the input so they are concentrating on one thing that they then might get right forever. I am afraid that I have found that it doesn't always work or just works for the situation I have devised for them and not on the exam or in their conversation. I wonder if you broadened the task so that it was really interesting to them if they would learn more and different things and at some point also get a/an. Unless you have pictures of the jobs and the people, I think some students might be confused about the vocabulary. If you really want to control the situation I suppose that could you post a row of pictures of famous people and then a row of pictures of jobs with everything named under the picture and then get them to add a/an. That would be a lot of work for you though. I would rather find a source to get some free magazines with pictures of famous people and have them cut out the pictures and write a story about the person showing their favourite food, job, transportation, house, sport, etc. and post those around the room for the students to read. You can get them to do a draft and deal with errors before they put them up for the public. That will help the slower students realize that some students are better in English and usually brings up the class level dramatically.