4 E
Elicit from students what a topic sentence is. SKILLS BANK
4.1 Understanding text structure
Refer students to Skills Bank 4.1 at this point. 4.2_E
Assign the task for individual work. Ask students to highlight the topic sentence in each paragraph and to identify what the topic of the paragraph is. You could hand out copies of the text as provided in the PDF for students to mark up.
Feed back visually. (The topic sentences are highlighted separately in the PDF.) Identifying the topic sentence of a paragraph is often not clear-cut. A case can sometimes be made for more than one sentence; sometimes there is not a clear topic sentence. In the text here, the suggested topic sentences are:
• paragraphs 1–6: the first sentence of the paragraph
Do not provide feedback on the actual topic/comment of each paragraph at this stage, as students will read the whole text and check their predictions in Exercise F.
Encourage students to write down their predictions.
Suggested answers Paragraph Topic sentence 1
2 3 4 5 6
4.2 Reading
You can use questions about possible topics from the earlier discussions in Exercises A and B to help them, but avoid providing too much information about the text.
F
Set for individual work. Encourage students to make notes on what is similar and what is different to the predictions they made.
G 4.2_G
Feed back visually, using the text to highlight the answers. You could use the PDF provided.
Answers Student notes
1. Storing and accessing data is a relatively new activity for humans.
2. Early computer storage was limited and expensive.
3. Database management systems (DBMS) are only used by database administrators.
4. Each field in a database table can contain many different types of data.
5. Using database schema in planning can help to reduce unnecessary data duplication.
6. Databases had an important role in the growth of the internet.
7. High-quality databases are always expensive.
8. Designing databases to manage unstructured data is a major challenge for database developers.
9. Free database technologies have been used by large e-commerce companies to deliver their services.
For humans, the challenge of storing and accessing data existed long before the development of digital databases.
On early computers, data was limited and expensive, generally stored on printed cards, which took up as much space as paper storage and needed as much time to access.
The introduction of relational databases using Structured Query Language (SQL) in the late 1970s and early 1980s was another major step forward.
The introduction of MySQL as an open-source database was another major development in the way databases were used.
Ongoing developments such as cloud computing created additional challenges.
Since the 1960s, database technologies have completely changed the way in which data is stored and accessed.
74
10. An important challenge for database development is designing databases which contain large amounts of data.
H
The purpose of this exercise is for students to try to identify the information structure of each paragraph and to see how a new step in the progression of ideas may be signalled by a rhetorical marker or phrase.
SKILLS BANK 4.1 Understanding text structure
Refer students back to Skills Bank 4.1. Elicit more examples of markers from the text, and suggestions for how they develop the topic. In this text, as in many academic texts, discourse markers are used far more frequently than stance markers.
Writer’s stance disagree
agree disagree disagree agree agree disagree agree agree agree
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