German Sentence Builders - TRILOGY - Part III (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder)

This book has been designed as a resource to use in conjunction with our E.P.I. approach and teaching strategies. Our course favours flooding comprehensible input, organising content by communicative functions and related constructions, and a big focus on reading and listening as modelling. The aim of this book is to empower the pre-intermediate to intermediate learner with linguistic tools - high-frequency structures and vocabulary - useful for real-life communication.

TERM 1
1 Talking about a past holiday: where we went & stayed
2 Talking about a past holiday: what we did & our opinion of it
3 Back to reality: describing a typical day in the present, past & future
RP Midpoint retrieval practice – Term 1
4 Describing a typical day at school
5 *OPTIONAL: Talking about when I went to the Rosenmontagszug in Cologne
QS End of Term 1: Question Skills
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER AND FLUENCY GAMES

TERM 2
6 Talking about yesterday after school
7 Talking about what I did last weekend
RP Midpoint retrieval practice – Term 2
8 Talking about a recent outing to the cinema with friends
9 Talking about a birthday party we went to
10 *OPTIONAL: Making plans for next weekend
QS End of Term 2: Question Skills
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER AND FLUENCY GAMES

TERM 3
11 What jobs my family & I do, likes and dislikes
12 My dreams and aspirations: my life plans
RP Midpoint retrieval practice – Term 3
13 Talking about celebrities & role models: their journey to success
14 My summer holiday & back-to-school plans
QS End of Term 3: Question Skills
BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER AND FLUENCY GAMES
* Units marked with an asterisk are optional

It contains 14 macro-units which concern themselves with a specific communicative function, such as ‘Saying what you and others do in your free time’, ‘Describing our daily routine in the past tense’, ‘Talking about a recent cinema trip’, or ‘Talking about our dreams and aspirations’. Each unit includes:

• a sentence builder modelling the target constructions;
• a set of listening activities to model and input-flood the target language
• a set of vocabulary building activities which reinforce the material in the sentence builder;
• a set of narrow reading texts exploited through a range of tasks focusing on both the meaning and structural levels of the text;
• a set of translation tasks aimed at consolidation through retrieval practice;
• a set of writing tasks targeting essential writing micro-skills such as spelling, functional and positional processing, editing and communication of meaning.
• a “Bringing it all together” section to recycle and interleave the target language seen in previous units

At the end of each term, there is also an End of Term - Question Skills unit. These units are designed to model asking and answering the key questions which have been studied throughout the term. This is also an additional opportunity for structured production as students move towards routinising the language and producing spontaneous speech by the end of the term.

Listening files
These can be accessed by going to language-gym.com/listening – access is free, and you can also share this link with students if you want to set a listening homework.