Spanish Sentence Builders - Primary- Part I - SPEAKING BOOKLET (The Language Gym - Sentence Builder)

Spanish Sentence Builders - Primary Part I - SPEAKING BOOKLET can be used as an accompaniment to the main Spanish Sentence Builders - Primary Part I book, by Simona Gravina, Stefano Pianigiani, Gianfranco Conti & Dylan Viñales. It can also be used as a standalone volume for any teacher wanting to stage speaking activities on the covered topics.

The topics included are:

1.Me llamo - I can say my name & age
2. El Alfabeto - Alphabet and phonics / decoding skills
3. ¿Cómo estás? - I can greet and express how I am
4. Mi cumpleaños - I can say when my birthday is
5. Mi mascota - I can say what pets I have
6. Mi mochila - I can say what’s in my schoolbag
7. ¿De dónde eres? - I can talk about countries and languages
8. ¿Qué tiempo hace? - I can talk about the weather
9. Mi ciudad - I can talk about where I live
10. En mi pueblo - I can say what is in my town


This book has been designed as a resource to use in conjunction with the E.P.I. approach and teaching strategies in a bid to scaffold oral communication by gradually moving from highly structured tasks (e.g. ‘Oral Ping Pong’, ‘No snakes no ladders’, ‘Communicative drills’) to semi-structured ones (e.g. ‘Surveys’, ‘Things in Common’, ‘Detectives and Informants’).
The activities in this book should be carried out after an intensive listening and reading phase, in which the students have been flooded with highly comprehensible input containing the target vocabulary and grammar structures, thereby processing them receptively many times over.

What’s inside
Each unit includes a sentence builder with the target constructions and vocabulary followed by a series of tried and tested Conti E.P.I. speaking games sequenced so as to pose a gradually increasing degree of challenge. The speaking games included are:

• Oral Ping Pong
• Find Someone Who
• No Snakes No Ladders
• Staircase Translation
• Faster!
• Fast & Furious
• Communicative Drills
• Fluency Cards
• Trapdoor
• Things in Common
• Detectives & Informants
• Information Gap Tasks

As already noted, the above games are sequenced in ascending order of linguistic and cognitive challenge. The focus is on gradually building up students’ fluency and autonomous competence. These games fall in the ‘Structured Production’, ‘Routinization’ and ‘Spontaneity’ phases in Dr Conti’s MARS EARS pedagogical cycle, which is central to his E.P.I. approach.

Many thanks for reading this. We hope that both you and your students will find this book useful and enjoyable.
Gianfranco, Dylan, Aurélie, Ryan & Victoria