Skills and Meanings

MARIO PAPA

SKILLS AND MEANINGS

An integrated functional / structural approach

Zanichelli, Bologna, 1986

Skills and Meranings is an English language course addressed to secondary school students. It can be used by complete beginners because the course has been designed so that it offers practical language activities which can be carried out at a very simple level by the students who are beginning their study of English. At the same time, it can also be used by “false beginners”, because the course contains activities which are a bit more complex and can be carried out by those students who already have a some experience of the foreign language.

The course contains linguistic materials which are varied and motivating and they can be immediately used by the students for communicative aims both in oral and written activities. The material was organized and graded according to functional criteria, without neglecting an accurate progression of the grammatical structures. The students practise important communicative functions like, for example, describing, narrating, telling stories, giving instructions, explaining, contradicting, in addition to practising the organization of written and spoken discourse within the most common situations of communication.

Skills and Meanings is made up of 31 learning units. Each unit is divided into five sections (Dialogues, Communication activities, Homework, Language development, Grammar Notes) and it aims at the integrated development not only of the main language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing), but also at the development of other skills such as note-taking, summing up, preparing questionnaires, etc. The communicative functions and the grammatical structures presented in the dialogues are practised in the Communication activities. In this section there are also some activities that the students should carry out in pairs (pair work). The characteristic of these activities is that between the two students who form the pair there is always an information gap. This device allows the students to carry out the activity in a situation that is similar to a real situation of communication.

Detailed grammar notes and a large number of written exercises complete each learning unit.

Skills and Meanings is accompanied by:

* a detailed Teacher’s Guide which allows the teachers to fully exploit the possibilities offered by the course;

* a Test book

* a series of audio cassettes containing the recording of all the dialogues, the listening comprehension activities and the open dialogues;

* 1 audio cassette for the students containing the recording of all the dialogues, both at normal speed and with pauses.