A puzzle for learners of English

I hope that this video demonstrates the potential of book covers for teaching specific words, phrases and structures. All of the images were obtained from Amazon.co.uk by typing the key word (’Where‘) into the search window and then scrolling through the results. Although the images that you will see are thumbnails (i.e. small), they can be enlarged by clicking on them and then saved onto a hard disk. I wrote an article on this for English Teaching Professional which can be downloaded here.

The grammar point in the clip looks at the difference between question forms (’Where am I?‘) and noun phrases involving question words (’Where I am‘). Perhaps an understanding of this is necessary if learners are expected (for exam purposes, for example) to produce the dreaded ‘Indirect Question’:

• Do you know where Timbuktu is?
• Do you know where the garbage goes?
• Do you know where babies come from?
• Do you know where you’re going to?

Equally relevant is any negative which begins “I don’t know where …“:

• I don’t know where Timbuktu is?
• I don’t know where the garbage goes?
• I don’t know where babies come from?
• I don’t know where I’m going to?

You can use make use of the clip at the top of this page with your students: Just turn the sound down, give them your own instructions and make good use of the <pause> button.

A good follow-up activity would be to ask students to convert all of the questions to non-questions and all of the non-questions to questions. For example, ‘Where the heart is‘ becomes, ‘Where is the heart?‘ and ‘Where does the garbage go?‘ becomes, ‘Where the garbage goes‘.

Click here for more lesson plans which use images of book and DVD covers.

Posted by admin on Tuesday, December 9th, 2008 at 1:43 am.