A Guided Discovery Approach in Coursebooks

In this extract from Face to Face Pre-Intermediate, the coursebook writer takes a guided discovery
approach to the language (subject questions). The classic way this works is that first students read
text (Super Commuters) with some comprehension work, then in ex. 7 they would work in pairs of
groups on the guided discovery tasks, which use examples of language from the text. This focusses
on ‘use’ (a and b) and ‘form’ (c) - then they can check their answers in the coursebook on page 120,
although probably the teacher, having monitored the pair/group work would do whole class feedback
and at this stage check understanding a bit more. The concept questions or timelines you might use
for work on tenses would also be in this Guided Discovery section. Ex. 8 is controlled practice of the
question forms (a) and (b) the focus is on pronunciation. There’s more practice in 9 and 10.
In the extract above, students have listened to a conversation between Tim and Mia. After
comprehension has been checked, they get into pairs or groups and work together on Tasks
4 and 5. This is a guided discovery approach to the use of auxiliary verbs. The examples all
come from the listening text. After learners have worked on these two tasks, monitored by
the teacher, there would be whole class feedback to check they have the correct answers -
at this point the teacher can expand on the answers with more examples and deal with
students’ questions, but there is no overt ‘teaching’ of the rules of auxiliary verb use, and
learners would go straight into ex. 4 after the answers to the recording have been checked. .
For Ex. 6 which looks at pronunciation, the teacher takes a deductive approach initially by
telling students about contractions. Then ex. 6a is a discrimination exercise where students
have to see if they can hear the difference - this is a practice exercise to see if students can
hear the rules when they are put into practice, and differentiate between contracted and
non-contracted forms. There is no productive practice here although the teacher might go on
to include that.

Both extracts come from the Face2Face coursebook series published by Cambridge.