German Sentence Builders Trilogy

The book contains 15 macro-units which concern themselves with specific communicative functions, such as ‘Describing people’s appearance and personality’, ‘Comparing and contrasting people’, ‘Saying what food you like and dislike’ or ‘Saying what you and others do in your free time’.

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.

Each sentence builder at the beginning of a unit contains one or more constructions which have been selected with real-life communication in mind. Each unit is built around that construction but not solely on it. Based on the principle that each E.P.I instructional sequence must move from modelling to production in a seamless and organic way, each unit expands on the material in each sentence builder by embedding it in texts and graded tasks which contain both familiar and unfamiliar (but comprehensible and learnable) vocabulary and structures. Through lots of careful recycling and thorough and extensive processing of the input, by the end of each unit the student has many opportunities to encounter and process the new vocabulary and patterns with material from the previous units.