6
6.2 Reading
Encourage students to think about how eff ective these drugs are and how safe.
3. Visually display the word pharmacology. Elicit the root of the word (pharmaco~) and the meaning of the suffi x (~logy), if anyone knows them. If not, explain the two parts: pharmaco~ is the root of the word from the Greek pharmakon, meaning drug; ~logy is from the Greek logia, meaning knowledge/study of. Remind students that they have already seen how suffi xes can help them to understand the meaning of words.
Other words students might know with the same root include:
pharmacy · pharmacist · pharmaceutical C
Remind students that this activity is designed to help them practise the skill of predicting what they are likely to read.
1. Set for pairwork or small-group discussion. Encourage students to share their ideas, but do not confi rm or correct. Elicit the reason for looking at the fi rst sentence of each paragraph (it is likely to be the topic sentence, containing the main idea of the paragraph).
2. Set for pairwork, and encourage students to identify and write down some questions that they feel the text is likely to answer.
Depending on the class, these could be shared visually with the group before students go on to read the text in Exercise D.
D
Set for individual work and pair or small-group checking. Feed back as a class. Encourage students to discuss whether their questions have been answered. Would they still like more information on some points?
E
Explain to students that this exercise will help them to understand the structure of complex sentences.
Elicit (or remind them of) the standard subject–verb– object structure of a sentence.
Tell students that in academic writing, sentences are often not very complicated in essence: the verb is often in the present simple or the past simple, and a typical SVO structure is used. However, the subject and object of a sentence can be challenging, often consisting of multiple clauses or complex noun phrases.
Elicit the subject, verb and object of the fi rst sentence. You could use questions to elicit the diff erent parts of the sentence:
118
subject What is the
verb What do the students do?
object What do they examine?
Students of
sentence about? pharmacology examine
the diff erent ways in
which the biochemical, physiological and psychological processes of the body are changed by drugs.
SKILLS BANK 6.1 Finding the main information in a sentence
Refer students to Skills Bank 6.1 at this point, and go through the example given. T e explanation provides a relatively straightforward approach to analyzing sentences, without going into a lot of grammatical detail.
LANGUAGE NOTE Is there always ‘main information’? The idea of the ‘main information’ of a sentence is only relative, not absolute. Often, fi nding the main grammatical parts of a sentence can aid understanding. But as the sentences in this exercise show, sometimes the grammatically ‘obscure’ parts of the sentence – such as a dependent clause of a dependent clause of the object – are essential to the meaning. Reducing a sentence to its grammatical ‘essence’ is not always useful.
Given this ambiguity, you can choose your approach to the activity depending on the class. Two approaches are given below. In the fi rst approach, students fi nd the main subject, verb and object, and any information directly related to them, as in Skills Bank 6.1. This may be the most useful approach for many students. The second approach pursues a fuller grammatical analysis. The advantage of this is that students will better understand the complexity of noun phrases in academic writing, and they will also get a clearer idea of the possible limitations of analyzing the grammar in order to understand the meaning.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196 |
Page 197 |
Page 198 |
Page 199 |
Page 200 |
Page 201 |
Page 202 |
Page 203 |
Page 204 |
Page 205 |
Page 206 |
Page 207 |
Page 208 |
Page 209 |
Page 210 |
Page 211 |
Page 212 |
Page 213 |
Page 214 |
Page 215 |
Page 216 |
Page 217 |
Page 218 |
Page 219 |
Page 220 |
Page 221 |
Page 222 |
Page 223 |
Page 224 |
Page 225 |
Page 226 |
Page 227 |
Page 228 |
Page 229 |
Page 230 |
Page 231 |
Page 232 |
Page 233 |
Page 234 |
Page 235 |
Page 236 |
Page 237 |
Page 238 |
Page 239 |
Page 240 |
Page 241 |
Page 242 |
Page 243 |
Page 244 |
Page 245 |
Page 246 |
Page 247 |
Page 248 |
Page 249 |
Page 250 |
Page 251 |
Page 252 |
Page 253 |
Page 254 |
Page 255 |
Page 256 |
Page 257 |
Page 258 |
Page 259 |
Page 260 |
Page 261 |
Page 262 |
Page 263 |
Page 264
