GVD Catch-up

With all sorts of testing, marking, and moderating going on, I neglected this blog for the final two weeks of Pre-sessional GVD classes. I'm therefore trying to stuff lots of materials and links into this one post.

So what did we do? Well, most recently, we reviewed complex sentences and vocabulary strategies using two Saudi-themed stories from The Economist - Clash of the Saudi Titans (handout here) and Mecca versus Las Vegas (handout here). Notes made in class, including student-written versions of the latter text are available here.

Following complex sentences, we had a one-lesson review of linkers. There is a handout available here, although most of the content was specific to the students in attendance...

Another overview lesson took place in the penultimate week of period 2 when we looked at the simple (honestly) combinations of tense and aspect occuring in English verb phrases. After considering tense and aspect through the examples featured in this grid, we looked at this article from the Asian EFL Journal and analysed how and why certain combinations were used within it. There's a powerpoint file here which reviews tense and aspect together with voice (passive or active), which is another factor we considered in our analysis of the Asian EFL Journal text.

In the middle of all this there was a test and a poorly-attended trip to the library, but I think that covers the gist of two weeks' worth of classes...let me know if you have any questions.