Group Work in Oral and Written Activities: an Interactive Approach to English Language Teaching

Students are made aware of the importance of verbal and non-verbal communication in conveying or interpreting oral messages, and the necessity of analyzing the written texts for context clues to be able to understand new vocabulary. This is reflected in the designed activities in which the students have to use their reading/listening abilities to understand, analyze and report on authentic English texts. All the tasks included in this work are strongly related to the input and include clear rubrics. To avoid any type of deviation from the main aim of the tasks, which focus on developing the student?s ability to read/listen, analyze, organize and share the deduced information with the whole class orally and in writing. Another main point that was taken into consideration in these teaching units was the importance of including moments of revision and recapitulation of some previously introduced grammatical points so that the students would practice what they had already learnt. Moreover, as the themes of the teaching units suggest there is a tendency to ?educate? and teach at the same time. The actual work also makes the students recognize themselves as part of a whole community.