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Teaching MaterialsEnglish Horizons Student's Book

English Horizons Student’s Book

English Horizons Student’s Book

General overview

Horizons has been specifically designed for Grade 7 in the National Curriculum. It has four aims: (1) to help the learners to develop such competencies as interpersonal communication, interpretative communication, presentational communication, and crosscultural communication, (2) to contribute to reinforcing values about character, civility, and citizenship, (3) to raise their consciousness as to global issues and (4) to give them a feeling of success and achievement in language learning.

The competencybased approach to language teaching

Horizons uses a competencybased approach to language teaching. It focuses on the competencies that are required in (i) interpersonal interactions, such as using greetings,
farewells, and expressions of courtesy giving personal information (ii) interpretative situations such as demonstrating understanding of spoken and written words in a variety of texts (e.g., rhymes), (iii) presentational situations such as naming people, places and things using simple words, phrases and formulas, and (ivcrosscultural communication; that is, comparing their language( s) and culture(s) with other languages and cultures. It is hoped that Horizons will reflect the view that sees culture as being a way of looking at the world and that no culture is superior to anotherThe principles underlying the methodology that Horizons adopts are as follows:

  • Language learning is holistic in nature;
  • Language acquisition is fostered by engaging in real
    tasks
    (e.g., projects, surveys, etc.);
  • Learners need an acquisitionrich environment in
    which they receive comprehensible input(clear
    messages) in lowanxiety situations.

This communicative methodology is manifested through listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities whereby the students apply competencies in a variety of modes and meaningful and realistic situations. Throughout Horizons, the learners have the opportunity to put language to immediate use in both speaking and writing.

The gains of adopting a competencybased approach to language learning are worthwhile in themselvesHorizons views the classroom as being a real-world context, where language in use is to be prioritized and banks on the students transferring competencies they
acquire 
in the classroom to the world outside.

Organization of the Student’s Book

The Students Book consists of 14 units. Each unit centers on a set of competencies. The topics and subtopics, language functions, grammatical structures, and vocabulary areas are all a means to an end; that iscompetencies development (see Map of the Book)One of the distinguishing features of each unit is that it integrates the four skills. The high priority given to both listening and speaking is pedagogically justified at this stageEvery two units are followed by a review, the aim of which is to give the students further practice in languageskills, and strategies.

Listening
The listening component aims to train the students to extract both the gist and specific information from spoken texts. Great care has been taken to adjust the language to the student’s linguistic ability. Spoken texts are also used to give the students practice in pronunciation, stress, and intonation.

Speaking
The speaking component aims to train the students for ‘real-life’ communication. The speaking activities incorporated in Horizons are all fluency-basedReading The reading component aims to help the students develop skills and strategies that will enable them to
extract the message of the written text.

Writing
The 
purpose of the writing component is to train the students at this stage to write simple texts following model. The projects give them further practice in writing. However, it is left up to the teacher to apply process writing and to set more demanding written assignments

If you are looking for the Teacher’s Book here it is: English Horizons Teacher’s Book

Click here to download English Horizons Student’s Book

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