Introduction

Texts and dialogues, dialogues and texts. Both the Tieng Anh and English series are full of them. Teachers and students spend a huge amount of their time in upper secondary school classes dealing with them. But what can they be used for apart from straight reading practice? And how can they be used apart from in the traditional ‘read aloud and translate’ way?

These were the two big questions facing VTTN trainers at the workshop planning meeting in Hanoi in June this year. What resulted from this meeting and a lot of careful planning afterwards was a series of workshops entitled, “What’s in a Text?”

These workshops took place in 10 Vietnamese provinces, involved 15 co-ordinators, 34 VTTN trainers, 6 British Council trainers and 400 upper secondary school teachers. The purpose – to see how texts can be used to develop the four skills of reading, writing, listening and speaking.

“WHAT’S IN A TEXT?”

Content

• Thinking about teaching and “What can a text be used for?”
• Demonstration lessons
- a traditional teacher-centred lesson
- a video of a text-based lesson in a ‘live’ classroom
- an integrated skills-development lesson
• Building your ‘repertoire’ of teaching activities
- sharing activities and testing them out
• Putting it all together
- adapting and supplementing existing textbook materials
• Peer-teaching – demonstrations and evaluations

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