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Lesson 02

PowerPoint Presentation no. 3: English vocabulary: animals

Juan Ráez Padilla

Juan Ráez Padilla, PhD. Teacher trainer at the English Department of the University of Jaén, Spain. E-mail: jraez@ujaen.es 

This is the last of a series of three original PowerPoint presentations for the English classroom. For more information on PowerPoint and ESL / EFL see Ráez Padilla, Juan, “More power to PowerPoint: ideas, examples and resources for the ESL classroom”, Humanising Language Teaching, Year 8, Issue 3, May 2006. 

The level of this PowerPoint presentation is that of Primary Education. Its main objective is to actively involve students in the learning process and to foster interactive and collaborative attitudes on the part of the students. 

In this presentation I made use of the numerous multimedia material resources online, some of which can be found in the section “Bibliography and resources for the ESL teacher” in the article above. The process is simple: you only need to download the material you need for your presentation from a clip/sound gallery section that fits into your topic. If you cannot find any material which satisfies your needs, you can always draw your own designs, scan them, and transfer them to your presentation. As for sounds, you can also record your own material, transfer it digitally to your computer and use it as your own self-made sound library for your presentations. 

In this activity PowerPoint multimedia resources (especially sound) have been exploited with a view to elicit, learn and/or revise vocabulary related to animals. There are two types of slides: 
1) Slides 1-15 contain an audio file reproducing the sound made by an animal. After it has been played, students must agree on the animal, give the corresponding English word and —once the basic notions of spelling have been assimilated in the two previous PowerPoint presentations— spell the word before the teacher offers the final version in order to correct possible mistakes. The teacher should go through the different stages in each slide (initial interrogation mark-sound file-picture-word-spelling) as students accomplish them. Suggestion: we can divide the class in two or more groups and carry out the activity as a game-competition between dogs and cats, cows and birds,… rather than simply group A and B.
2) Slides 16-30: the initial and final letter of the word referring to the animal are given (in our activity, as a rotatory clip art element), and the students proceed as in the previous case. This variant with initial/final clue may prove more useful for the presentation of animals (or the vocabulary we may want to learn/revise) that students may be less familiar with, or whose word in English we may think is more complicated for them. 

I hope this series of PowerPoint presentations may have contributed to expanding the resources and techniques available for the English teacher and teacher trainer. At any rate, they have helped me create a much more relaxed atmosphere in the English classroom and, most importantly, encourage my university students (future teachers of English) to acknowledge the possibility of creating our own teaching material.