This should be done as a matter of convenience to teachers and the children. It should be done especially as a matter of protection to parents in the purchase of books for their children. We heard of book dealers charging parents more for the books than the contract price. This could not be done if the teachers had the list published on stiff pasteboard andhung up in each school-house, because the parents, as well as teachers and children, would know just what the price of each book is, and could not be imposed upon by the dealer or any one else as to prices of books.
new headway pre intermediate teacher book 23
There are numerous text-books on Civil Government. The ones most largely used in our State are, perhaps, Peterman's Elements of Civil Government (N. C. Edition), and Finger's Civil Government. Finger's Civil Government was written especially for North Carolina teachers and schools.
It may be well for you to examine the record of books in the office of Register of Deeds of your county. If a text-book on Government was adopted in your county on the first Monday in June, 1896, this book must be used for two years by your teachers; if no book was adopted then your teachers may use whatever book they wish.
I think it would be well to have this list of books, together with prices, published on good card-board' and placed in each school-house of your county. In this way not only the teacher would know what books he is required to use, but the children would also know what they must pay for them.
The most of our teachers sadly need a course of professional reading, and a little money judiciously expended would be productive of much good. Our Association meets every other month with the exception of July, and a teacher takes a book at one meeting, keeping it till the next.
Abstract--Task-based language teaching (TBLT) can provide learnerswith more authentic communicative activities, particularly in foreignlanguage context, where learners may experience few such opportunities. Fromthe perspective of sociocultural theory (SCT), scaffolding is a process ofsupportive interaction that occurs when learners are communicating with eachother. There are situations in which the mediation of the teacher as anexpert is necessary in the scaffolding process to advance the learners'zone of proximal development. The present study sought to extend the scope ofTBLT through SCT. More specifically, it was an attempt to investigate theeffects of teacher-led whole-class scaffolding as pre-task on the writingproficiency of EFL learners. To this end, fifty Iranian female learners ofEnglish at intermediate level of general English proficiency took part in thestudy which was based on post-test only equivalent groups design. Theparticipants were asked to evaluate some ELT textbooks based on a checklistand write a report respectively. The control group did not receive anypre-task activities; however, the experimental group participated inscaffolding as a pre-task. The results revealed that the trial of pre-taskimproved the writing performance in such areas as content, organization,grammar, and vocabulary.
Fifty senior (i.e. fourth year) female students of TEFL took partin this study. Their age ranged from 22-28 years old. Persian was thelanguage they spoke as their first language. Based on the results of oxfordplacement test, their level of general English proficiency was intermediate.They attended 'Textbook Evaluation' class which was one of therequired courses to get their Bachelor degree in TEFL. They were randomlyassigned to two groups, namely, the control and the experimental group.
The fifty TEFL students who had enrolled for the 'TextbookEvaluation' course were randomly assigned to the control andexperimental groups that is there were twenty five people in each group.Participants in both groups were supposed to write an evaluative report (i.e.the main writing task) analyzing a set of ELT materials based on theevaluation checklist during the class time in one session. The control groupreceived no pre-task activities; where, the students were supposed toevaluate the books and write their reports individually. The cycle ofactivity lasted for three hours in the control group. However, a teacher-ledwhole-class scaffolding activity was carried out as a pre-writing task in theexperimental group that is the students were supposed to have a whole-classdiscussion of their findings which were the results of textbook evaluation.The discussion was led by the teacher as an expert, but it was mainlystudent-centered. In other words, the teacher took part in the discussionwhenever the students failed to express their ideas or anytime theydidn't do the activity correctly. More importantly, the focus was on thecontent not form. After the pre-task which lasted two hours, they wereallowed to write down their reports based on what they had discussed.Regarding the extra time needed for the pre-task, the whole cycle of theactivity took five hours. Finally, the reports collected through the mainwriting task were rated blindly by two raters based on the writing scale byHedgcock and Leftkowitz (1992). The raters discussed and resolveddisagreements and reached a high level of congruity after rating 10 reports;so that, the inter-rater reliability of .81 was obtained. Finally, a seriesof independent sample t-tests were applied to compare the two groupsstatistically.
The findings are therefore in line with the sociocultural theoryof learning, which views language learning as socially constructed. Morespecifically, the results support the claims of Anton (1999), Ellis (2003),and Mercer and Fisher (1997) that dialogic interaction, in this caseteacher-led whole-class scaffolding, assists the teacher to create a contextin which learners can participate actively in their own learning, and theteacher as an expert can modify the support that learners contribute to. Onthe other hand, this study goes in for the suggestions proposed by Van Lier(1988) and Verrity (2005) that emphasized the importance of thestudents' centrality in scaffolding. In this regard, Balegizadeh et al.(2011), and also Bernard and Campbell (2005) claimed that students should notbe spoon-fed with too much hints. In other words, they should not be deprivedof free exploration while performing a task; so that, the teacher do not needto provide the students with too many guides during writing activities. As itwas explained before, in this research the participants were not provide withany hints during the writing task; so, the better writing performance of theparticipants in the experimental group can be attributed to the pre-taskwhich was a whole-class teacher led scaffolding in which the students playedthe central role in the oral discussion of the content of their findingsregarding textbook evaluation.
In conclusion, this study indicated the pedagogical efficiency ofteacher-led whole-class scaffolding as a pre-writing task. Teachers canbenefit from this technique in that they don't need to put a lot ofenergy and efforts to guide the students during the writing task by preparingthe students with an advanced organizer of what they will be required to do.Definitely, this study was not without its limitations. The results werelimited to the female students at the intermediate level of general languageproficiency, and it just investigated a special form of scaffolding. Furtherstudies in this regard may focus on other forms of scaffolding and comparethem to find out the most effective activity. It is also possible toinvestigate how different components of writing are influenced by differentforms of scaffolding as a pre-task. Another option is to test the efficiencyof this technique in other contexts with students at lower or upper levels ofgeneral English proficiency. Finally, it is suggested to carry out a genderstudy to see if males are different from females in performing scaffolding orcompare them with mixed gender groups. 2ff7e9595c
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