Group Work and Choral Reading
The benefits of group work Whatever form the group work takes on your course, the opportunity to work with others, rather than on your own, can provide distinct benefits. 1. Increased productivity and performance: groups that work well together can achieve much more than individuals working on their own. A broader range of skills can be applied to practical activities and sharing and discussing ideas can play a pivotal role in deepening your understanding of a particular subject area.
2. Skills development: being part of a team will help you develop your interpersonal skills such as speaking and listening as well as team working skills such as leadership, and working with and motivating others. Some of these skills will be useful throughout your academic career and all are valued by employers. 3. Knowing more about yourself: collaborating with others will help identify your own strengths and weaknesses (for example, you may be a better leader than listener, or you might be good at coming up with the 'big ideas' but not so good at putting them into action). Enhanced self-awareness will both help our approach to learning and will be invaluable when you come to write your CV or complete job application forms. In order to maximize these benefits, you will need to manage your group work effectively.
GOAL A presentation that informs, inspires, motivates
Hints for a Successful Presentation Plan carefully Do your research Know your audience Time your presentation Practice your presentation Speak comfortably and clearly
What is Choral Reading? Choral reading is an interpretive reading of text, often poetry or songs, by a group of voices. Students may read individual lines or stanzas alone, in pairs, or in unison. Choral reading, sometimes called “unison reading,” requires repeated readings of a particular passage and it gives practice in oral reading. It is especially well suited to rhymes, poetry, and lyrics. The poems or passages can be “performed” for other students. Ultimately, though, enjoyment and learning should come out of the process of figuring out HOW to perform the poem rather than the performance itself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp-VTHGIKWA
What reading skills does it help students learn and master? It helps students learn to decode. It develops effective and fluent read aloud skills. It improves sight vocabulary. It helps students learn to pronounce new words by hearing others reading aloud at the same time. It helps students understand rhythm, meter, patterns, rhymes and characters of a poem. It demonstrates the importance of oral tradition.
Variety is achieved through combining tone, volume, rate, and pitch: TONE: Tone refers to the emotional content carried by our voices. It is not the words themselves, but 'how' we say them. To speak expressively, is to fill or energize our words appropriately. VOLUME: How loudly or quietly you speak is called volume. When examining a poem, what volume would be appropriate in the reading of the poem? Will the volume vary during different parts of the poem? Where would it vary? WHY would it vary? RATE: The term rate refers to speaking pace. How fast or slow do you speak? Can you vary the rate? Do you know the effect of slowing deliberately? Speaking rate matters because how fast or how slow you speak alters the listener's perception of your topic. PITCH: To understand pitch, think of music. It has high and low notes as do people's voices. Everyone's voice has a natural pitch. Women's tend to be higher than men's and everybody has a pitch range: the number of notes we habitually use. When that range is very small, the effect is monotonous.
Key Terms Pronunciation: The way in which the words of a language are made to sound when speaking. Articulation: Use of tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs to make a sound. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants, Intonation: The rise and fall of the voice in speaking. Some texts use “inflection” instead of intonation to indicate change in pitch Enunciation: The act of pronouncing words from the Latin word enuntiationem, meaning “declaration.” (antonym: mumbling)