English Proficiency Programme

Practice Session

Practice sessions in the schedule typically make reference to word families. These are needed to keep the words delivered in bunches (called 'families') in currency in the classroom and also to promote the feeling among students that learning the words on a regular basis has a payoff.

The process:

Call a student (in turn) to the board and dictate him/her four or five words (mixed in difficult level) of the current word family to write on the board.
Others are expected (and asked) to monitor and correct, if necessary.
Then the student is asked to make a sentence with any one of these words. Let him/her choose the word.
Next, others in the class are asked if the sentence is correct. If correct, they are to interpret its meaning. If wrong, they are to advise correction.
During the exercise, you get ample opportunity to contribute in several aspects of learning - cursive writing, spelling, pronunciation, meaning, usage - at a light level.
Once this is over, get the whole thing erased from the board, send this student back to his/her seat and continue the exercise with another student and another fresh set of words from the family.

For these sessions, focus is on words, specially spelling and pronunciation - and clear writing style. The sentences are mostly to give a medium to the words to come into play. Grammatical points need to enter only to the extent of correcting the sentences. These sessions are supposed to be light, student-friendly. So, do not pressurize students to produce impressive sentences. Those who can will try that anyway.