Damietta TEFL / Saturday / 3rd day / Clarifying language (text-based)

With the TBP (Text-based presentation), we usually start by giving the students something to read or listen to, it’s imbalanced to ask them to completely ignore or skip the content of this text and jump right to the grammar instead. The students first need an opportunity to understand the main idea of the text before they’re ready to analyze the language within it. So first, give the students a simple (gist) task that will help them understand just the gist of what they’re reading or listening to. For example, you could ask them to read or listen to the text and choose the correct title from a shortlist of options. If the text is a dialogue, you could ask a few general questions about it, such as “What is the relationship between the speakers? How do you know?” There are many options here; the point is that you allow the students to first focus on general comprehension of the text before bringing up the grammar at all.