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Appendix 5

 

Documents


21st  February 2002:  Electronic Systems / English lesson

 

Activity 1 (speaking)

You have read the text about hard disks and magnetic tapes at home (I hope!!!!!!). Now let’s try to put together everything we know about this storage devices. Use the information from the text and all the other information you have. Let’s follow this scheme:

 

Hard disk’s definition, description and location

 

Hard disk’s types

 

How information is stored in a hard disk

 

 

 

Activity 2 (speaking)

Now we’ll speak about magnetic tapes. What do you know about them?

 

 

Activity 3 (speaking)

Think of what you can do with the following storage devices. Give one appropriate use with clear justification  for (think of their capacity, their characteristics, and their….price!):

 

a)      floppy disks

b)      hard disks

c)      CD-ROMs

 

 

Activity 4 - pair work (reading and writing)

 

Read the paragraph “CD-ROM”  and find:

 

-         What is the storage capacity of a CD-ROM?

 

 

-         Which are the types of files it can store?

 

 

-         Which is faster in transferring data, a hard disk or a CD-ROM?

 

 

-         What does the name CD-ROM suggest?

 

 

-         Do  CD-ROMs have many tracks like magnetic tapes?

 

 

-         What is the function of the laser beam?



19thst  February 2002:  History / English lesson

1)      Brainstorming                                                                      

Say all the English terms you know related to the word “RELIGION”

 

 

2) Match these terms with their definitions taken from The Oxford Talking Dictionary

 

Religion      Christianity      Paradise     Hell      Judaism  Gospel   Koran    God   Islam      Bible    

    

a)      A superhuman person regarded as having power over nature and human fortunes; a deity.

b)      Belief in some superhuman power or powers, entitled to obedience, reverence, and worship

c)      The religion of the Jews, with a belief in one God and a basis in Mosaic and rabbinical teachings.

d)      the Christian sacred writings collected as the Old and New Testaments

e)      Heaven, in Christian and Muslim theology.

f)       The infernal regions regarded as a place of torment or punishment

g)      The doctrines of Christ and his disciples

h)      The religious system established through the prophet Muhammad; the Muslim religion.

i)        The sacred book of Islam, believed by Muslims to be the word of God as revealed in Arabic to Muhammad

j)        The record of Jesus' life and teaching, contained in the first four books of the New Testament

       

 3) Pair work. Write a definition of:         a) Monotheistic religion           b) Polytheistic religion

 

a)_____________________________________________________________________________

 

b)_____________________________________________________________________________

 

4)      These are some keywords referring to three important monotheistic religions; Insert them in the right column (some of them can be inserted in more than one column)

 

synagogue / Old Testament / Jesus Christ / Allah / God / Bethlehem / New Testament / imam /            rabbi / mosque / church / Jerusalem / Mohammed / Abraham / priest /

 

Judaism

Christianity

Islam

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

5) Observe the chart you have completed in activity 4); Are there any key words repeated in the three columns? If yes, what does it mean?

At home have a look at your history book and find some information about the three religions; we’ll speak about them next time.



 

CLASS IV (Electronics course)

 

Teaching plan: English and Information Technology module

 

Duration: this is a course of 14 hours that will be carried out in the second school term (February-June) for one hour a week. The lessons will be held by the two teachers of English and Information Technology who will be co-present in the class.

 

Description: this module is based on an approach according to which some school subjects (or parts of them) can be taught in English so that the students can use the foreign language in the same way they use their mother tongue at school, that is to say with the purpose of learning. Such an approach is often defined CBI (Content Based Instruction).

The characteristics of the module will be essentially three:

1)      the Information Technology content will be the focus of the lessons

2)      the content will be presented through authentic materials developed in English

3)      the students’ language and content learning needs will be the focus of the teaching actions.

The module is composed of units on topics concerning what the students have already learned in Italian, even if partially. The lessons in English will be concerned in deepening and developing some of their relevant items, so that the foreign language will be used by the students both to get to know new information and to acquire further knowledge on them.

English will be the language used during the lessons with the purpose of directly acquiring new knowledge about the contents related to the subject matter and indirectly improving the language mastery. The only person in class who is allowed to  use Italian will be the subject matter teacher, who will have the role of the content expert. Obviously, since the students’ mastery of the English language is limited, the use of Italian will be tolerated in some points of the lessons, especially when the purpose is task explanation or work organization. In conclusion the objectives are using English during at least 80% of the lesson and reducing the use of Italian as much as possible .

 

Language objectives

  • using English as a real means of communication in the school context with the purpose of learning

  • analysing and comprehending authentic texts about the chosen topics

  • acquiring the specific lexis related to the themes and the types of communication to be produced

  • oral production: presenting the topics in form of oral  presentations or interviews with the help of         schemes or other presentation materials

  • written production: reporting the topic in form of essay or article.

Information Technology objectives

  • Acquiring new knowledge concerning the topics by using a language other than Italian, but maintaining the awareness of the function of the verbal code in general as the way to communicate about it

  • Developing the capacity to resolve problem situations by using a foreign language


Cross-curricular objectives

  • Developing the capacity of autonomously organizing one’s learning paths by devising personal strategies and creating effective study materials (notes, schemes, graphic representations, etc.)

  • Improving the research skills through analyses and comparisons between different types of information sources, with the purpose of detecting new information and discovering analogies and differences both from the language and the textual point of views

  • Developing the capacity of discriminating the relevant information, classifying them, and finding out the relationships between them

  • Potentiating the capacity of automously processing the topics  in oral and written forms of production which respect the main characteristics of the type of communication chosen.

  • Acquiring the capacity of trasferring and re-using information, procedures and the abilities acquired during this module also in analogue situations, even if developed in Italian

  • Strengthening the capacity of co-operating both with the teachers and with the other students in order to achieve a common result.

Pre-requisites

  • Basic grammar structures which are recurrent in the scientific and technical texts, already learned and practiced in the previous years (e.g. to be, to have, simple present, passive form, relative pronouns, principal sentence connectors, comparatives and superlatives)
  • Some previous knowledge about the contents

 

Students’ outcomes

At the end of this module most of the students will be able to analyse authentic textsconcerning a scientific and technical topic of which they already had some previous knowledge. They will be able to find the key-points and the framework of the argumentative text in with the points are organized and the key-words necessary for the personal processing of the information. Finally they will be able to produce oral and written work in which they autonomously will reorganize all the information in a coherent and quite correct form.

 

Some students will not be able to do all this, however they will be able to comprehend the essential information contained in the materials, to find the key-words, and to produce study documents on which they will base their personal re-elaboration in form of oral or written reports, simple but coherent.

 

Some students will have furtherly developed these skills and will be able to: analyse authentic texts about the topics of which they had some previous knowledge. They will be able to find the key-points and the framework of the argumentative text in with the points are organized and the key-words necessary for the personal processing of the information. Finally they will be able to enrich all this with personal contributions derived from the study of the topics in other disciplines or from other personal experiences.

 

Formative assessing

The students will actively take part in the lessons in activities of preparation and presentation  (brain-storming,  making hypotheses about the content of the materials presented by observing the graphic format of the texts,  hypotheses on the necessary lexis and grammar structures, etc.), analysis/comprehension os the materials ( gist, key-points, specific information, key-words,  transfer from a kind of language to another, etc.), activities of re-eleboration /expansion/ productione/presentation(written and/or oral) carried out individually, in pairs or in group..

In these activities, that will be extremely interactive (teachers-students, student-student) both the teachers and the students will get the necessary feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of one’s teaching or learning, and negotiate, from time to time, the necessary changes.

Final assessment

 

The final assessment will have the double purpose of evaluating the content acquisition and the language improvement.

At the end of each unit the level reached by each student will be measured through the evaluation of the presentation of the topic the students will carry out, individually or in group, according to the type of communication they will produce (written text/oral presentation/interview/article for the school journal, etc). 

 

Materials 

The material will be authentic, that is with an original communicative purpose and not designed for language learning (Web pages from educational or commercial sites, monolingual dictionaries, textbooks, encyclopaedias, newspapers and magazines, CDROMs, videos, recordings, etc.), that result suitable with respect to both the content and the language levels of knowledge. They will be presented  through graded activities that will respect the level of the students’ language mastery.

 

Units

Unità 1 : Computer’s storage devices and internal storage of data

Unità 2 : Computer’s input and output devices

 

 


   

Some written texts produced by the students about different topics

 

Class IV  Electronics        age: 17-18

 

Characteristics of the reign of Louis XIV in France

 

“In France Louis XIV founded the absolute monarchy. He continued the work of his father, Louis XIII. He was helped by Cardinal Richelieu because when he ascended to the throne of France he was only five years old. When Richelieu died, Cardinal Mazarin became the king’s right hand. When Louis XIV was a child, some nobles organized an open rebellion, called Fronde, so when he became king, Louis XIV ordered the construction of the Palace of Versailles and took all the nobles to live in this palace for controlling them”.

 

“When Henry IV was murdered, Louis III became king. Louis XIII entrusted the government to the Cardinal Richelieu. When king Louis XIII died, his son Louis XIV succeded to him. Louis XIV was only five years old when he succeded to his father. Louis XIV establishe an absolute monarchy. When he was a child some nobles organized a rebellion. This rebellion was called the Fronde. Louis XIV decided to make the centre of his absolute monarchy in the palace of Versailles, because in this way he controlled the nobles who lived there. He said a famous sentence: “I am the state” Louis XIV was called “the king sun”. This name indicated his important power.”

 

“Louis XIV was the son of Louis XIII, who had become king after the assassination of Henry IV. Louis XIII was supported by Cardinal Richelieu, who controlled many activities in France. After the death of Louis XIII, Louis XIV became king at the age of five. During Louis XIV’s youth, in France there was a rebellion of the nobles, called the Fronde. This episode changed his life, in fact he decided to control the nobles with his eyes. He moved his court from Paris to Versailles, where he lived with all the nobles. In this way, he could control them and founded a strong absolute monarchy. The life at court was magnificent, there were games, plays and dances and Louis XIV did not have problems of rebellion from the nobles.”

 

 

Class V Electronics         Age: 18-19

 

Semiconductor materials

“A semiconductor is a chemical material, that can be an insulator or a conductor, so, when it behaves as an insulator the current doesn’t pass, while when it behaves as a conductor the current passes through it. A semiconductor, at a very low temperature, behaves as an insulator. On the contrary, at room temperature, it behaves as a conductor. Silicon is the most used semiconductor in electronics, because it is less expensive than other semiconductor materials and, since in nature we can find  big quantities of it. The crystal structure of silicon consists of a regular repetitions in three dimensions of a unit cell having the form of a tetrahedron with an atom at each vertex. When a semiconductor has the pure crystal structure, it’s called intrinsic semiconductor. On the contrary, when a semiconductor has the doped crystal structure, it’s called extrinsic semiconductor. Semiconductors are doped for increasing their conductivity”.

 

“A semiconductor is a particular material, because it has particular electrical characteristics. In fact in nature there are three types of materials with respect to conductivity:

-         conductors: through wich the current passes easily;

-         insulators: through which the current doesn’t pass;

-         semiconductors: that can be insulator s or conductors.

When the semiconductor’s temperature is very low every covalent bond in their atoms is complete, so there aren’t free electrons and there can’t be the phenomenon of conduction.

On the contrary, when the semiconductor’s temperature is high, the heat energy breaks some bonds and the covalent bonds are incomplete, so there are free electrons for the conduction. Silicon is the most used in Electronics because it is presents in big amounts in nature and because it is cheap. It has a crystal structure composed of a repetition of tedrahedrons. At every vertex of each tedrahedron there is an atom with four free electrons, so this material has valence electrons; in fact this materials are called tetravalent.There are intrinsic and extrinsic semiconductors: a semiconductor is intrinsic when it is used pure, and extrinsic when it is doped. The semiconductors are doped to increase the conductivity. A p-type semiconductor is doped with trivalent material or impurity, while the n-type semiconductor is doped with pentavalent impurity”.

 

 

Class I Liceo Scientifico Tecnologico             age: 14-15

 

Write a text in which you describe the planet Earth for a scientific magazine of the planet AzmarX210:

“In the solar system there are 9 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, but life is only on the Earth. The inside of the planet Earth is divided in: inner core, outer core, lower mantle, atmosphere, upper mantle and earth’s crust. On the Earth’s crust there are oceans, seas and continents. The continents are 5: Europe, America, Asia, Africa, Oceania. The big oceans are three: Atlantic, Pacific, Indian. The sun is the star of our solar system and it gives the light and the heat to the Earth and life depends on the sun. The Earth has a natural satellite and its name is Moon. The Moon has an influence on the tides. The tides are movements of the sea.”

 

Write a text in which you describe the planet Earth to convince the inhabitants of the planet AzmarX210 to visit our planet:

“Dear people of AzmarX210, have you ever visited the planet earth? No???!!!! And then? Why don’t you come? It is FANTASTIC!

There are a lot of amazing landscapes: high mountains, big oceans, seas, jungles and forests, deserts and glaciers and they are all wonderful. The people of the earth are very friendly with tourists! Do you like eating metals? No problem, we have got a lot of types of metal! And we cook them very well. On the Earth there are a lot of metal restaurants. Come to the Earth!!!!!”

 

 

Class I Liceo Scientifico Tecnologico             age: 14-15

 

Translating mathematical equations into words

Invent a situation that can be mathematically expressed by this equation: t + 3 = 8

 

“In a castle there are 8 monsters. 3 are vampires and the others are zombies. How many are the zombies?”

 

“This afternoon the temperature is 8° C and it is 3° C more than this morning. Which was the temperature of this morning?”

 

“Yesterday in the camping site there were 3 tents. Today there are 8 tents. How many new tents have arrived?”