Ćwiczenia w stosowaniu przedimków

This lesson is suitable for students at a pre-intermediate or intermediate level attending upper secondary school who need more practice in using articles.

Aims:
• to experiment with grammaticization tasks
• to practise using articles in context to manipulate the meaning
• to consolidate the students’ knowledge of various uses of articles
• to develop the students’ communicative skills

Materials:
1. Tasksheet with examples of dialogues for the students to write
2. Slips of paper with utterances which form halves of two-utterance exchanges
3. Slips of paper with words and articles to use in a story

Anticipated problems
• the students may have too little time to finish writing stories
• there may be more than one matching possible in the dialogue – matching activity
• matching activity may cause mess and discipline problems

Staging
Warm-up
Step 1
This can be done on the basis of any reading passage containing countable and uncountable nouns as well as adjectivals. The students collocate the words they learnt during the previous lesson. The words are in column A (Adjectivals) and B (Nouns), eg. muscular physique, dark complexion or unhygienic conditions (Matura Success Intermediate Longman, p.96)

Step 2
The students make up four sentences with the word “egg”, but using different articles, i.e. the indefinite article, the definite article, “zero” article and plural form.

Task 1
The students work in pairs and write three pairs of dialogues following the example given below with the words and articles given by the teacher. The words are “a/the table”, “a/the car” and “a/the clock”. They have to use the word with the indefinite article (“a table”) in one dialogue, and the same word with the definite article (“the table”) in the other.

An example of the dialogue (with “a/the dog”)
a) Have you seen a dog?
b) A dog? No, I haven’t seen any in this area.

a) Have you seen the dog?
b) Yes, it has been sitting in your armchair since the morning

Task 2
The students receive slips of paper with an utterance, which is one half of a dialogue. They try to find the person who has either the beginning or the continuation of their dialogue.

Examples of dialogues
a) Look! I’ve found a key!
b) Oh! What a beautiful shape it has.

a) Look! I’ve found the key!
b) Thank God! I thought we we’ll never get into the house ...