Cross-translations

These are very fruitful easy-to-prepare exercises - with one block of text you can get a lot of speech and writing training.

The idea is to use some language material in students' groups (basically in pairs) so that some of the students practice one kind of language skills and the others - another kind of language skills. Then they change places and repeat the training. Thus:

-   everybody is involved into all the types of language training supposed to be done at the lesson;

- the students drill a lexical topic intensively, observing it from another point of view every time

- they have a good chance to control each other and reach  a higher level of digesting the material while the teacher becomes a bit less busy with paying attention to each separate student and can focus him (her) self on 'hot spots'.

Practice patterns:

Pattern one.

1) The group has a short written translation into English at the lesson (7-12 sentences) - variant A and variant B (which are not the same, but similar in lexics and grammar). The teacher can correct the writings looking through the children's papers as soon as they have some of the sentences ready (to save  the time for communicative activities).

2) The teacher gives out correct English translations for everybody to check his (her) work.

3) The students give back the task papers (with the sentences in their mother tongue).

In pairs: variant A read their sentences in their mother tongue to variant B (translating their written work or using the correct English translations given by the teacher). Variant B interprets the sentences into English orally. Variant A corrects. And vice versa.

4) At home they do the other variant of translation in writing.

The exercise takes from 15 to 25 minutes of classroom time and drills oral and written translation from and to English.

Pattern two.

After having their current "Language Record" done (yellow pages in "Cambridge English for Schools") students are divided into pairs and the stronger student reads the sentences from the Record in the mother tongue to the weaker one to interpret them back into English. A great revision!

There is, of course, a world of cross-activities except these patterns and the best are waiting for you to invent them.

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