Russell Stannard gets to grips with country matters.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/country_ profiles/default.stm
I have been looking for a site like this for ages. I love doing things about countries, facts and figures, but all the sites I have tried before were too hard. Then one day I stumbled across this one. The information is organised by continents. For each continent, you can choose a country from a list, and all sorts of data about that country come up, all nicely laid out in charts and in texts. Here are three simple activities that I have done using information from this site.
Idea 1
This activity worked well, though I admit I did it with a small class. I put the students in groups, gave each group an empty template and told them to choose a country and simply fill it in. They then had to stand up and present the information about their country to the rest of the class. We had a projector, so the students presented their templates to the rest of the class on an OHP, but it could easily have been done with the board. You can vary the information to make it more or less difficult. Make sure you include a variety of things so that the students have to skim and scan around the text to find the information.
I must say this was very successful. There was lots of sifting through information to find the answers. When we did the presentations, we started by talking as a class about a particular country and saying what we knew about it, and then got the relevant group to present their facts. Some of the countries were ones the students hardly knew anything about, so my advice is to choose better-known countries, one from each continent.
Idea 2
I took several facts about three countries and put them in jumbled order onto one sheet of paper (see above right). I also printed out from the website the texts from which these facts came. At the top of the list of jumbled facts I wrote the names of the three countries. The students had to read each of the facts and decide what country it referred to. I put the students into groups to do this activity, but you could easily have them do it in pairs or individually. For homework you could get them to make their own information sheets. One tip is to choose countries that are quite varied to help the students to guess correctly which country each piece of information relates to.
This produces lots of reading as the students normally read the sentences several times. However, in my all classes with Chinese students, the students broke into their mother tongue a lot to discuss the answers. The main thing was that there was lots of processing of information. My students found this hard because they knew very little about Kenya or Uruguay, not because the language was difficult. To correct their work I gave each group a copy of the full information sheets and let them go through, read the texts and correct their work. This last part worked really well.
Idea 3
This activity wasn’t as quick to do as the others. I took the facts page of one country (this is one of the sections within the country profiles). I simply copied the facts into a Word file, enlarged the size and then deleted all the answers and put them at the top in a box. The students, working in groups, had to use the information to complete the sections. I then got them to compare their answers with another group.
Again, my students tended to talk in Chinese, but there was lots of processing and using of the information going on. Afterwards, I got them to close their books and tell me what they remembered about Kenya. For homework, I told them to go to the website and find out ten more facts about the country to present in class the next day
Russell Stannard is a senior lecturer in ICT and course leader for MSc Multimedia at the University of Westminster, UK. He has an extensive publishing background in ELT and is currently working with BBC Worldwide on various CD-ROMs, and with Macmillan Hong Kong on a primary course. He also teaches English and Spanish at Sutton Adult Education College, UK.
This article first appeared in English Teaching Professional, Issue 46, 2006