IRISH GCSE REVISION – SELF, FAMILY & FRIENDS, LEISURE & DAILY ACTIVITIES (The Language Gym – Sentence Builder Books)

This book is meant as a revision resource for GCSE Irish. It can be used independently by students as well as for teacher-directed classroom practice. It contains 16 units which focus mainly on the themes: myself, family and relationships, daily activities, my role model, hobbies and leisure.

Each unit consists of a knowledge organiser recapping the target sentence patterns and lexical items, a series of receptive vocabulary building activities; a set of narrow reading texts and activities; a set of translation tasks. The tasks are graded in order to pose an increasingly demanding but manageable cognitive load and challenge and are based on Dr Conti’s P.I.P.O. framework:

Pre-reading tasks (activation of prior knowledge and pre-teaching)
In-reading tasks (intensive exploitation of texts)
Post-reading tasks (consolidation)
Output (pushed-output tasks)

Consistent with Dr Conti’s E.P.I. approach, each of the 16 units in the book provide extensive recycling of the target lexical items both within each unit and throughout the book, across all the dimensions of receptive and productive processing, i.e.: orthography (single letters and syllables), lexis (both words and chunks), grammar/syntax (with much emphasis on functional and positional processing), meaning and discourse.
The recycling occurs through input-flooding and forced retrieval through a wide range of engaging, tried and tested, classic Conti tasks (more than 20 per unit). These include student favourites such as slalom writing, faulty translation, spot the missing detail, sentence puzzles, etc.

Table of contents
1 Introducing myself
2 Describing myself, my family and friends
3 Talking about my hobbies and interests
4 Describing a typical day in school
5 Describing what I do after school
6 Talking about a typical weekend
7 Talking about what I did last weekend
8 Talking about when I was younger
9 Discussing the qualities of a good friend
10 Describing the qualities of a good partner
11 Saying why I don’t get along with people
12 Saying why I get along with people
13 Saying why I argue with my parents
14 Discussing why couples break up
15 Talking about a person I admire
16 Bringing it all together – Parts 1-5

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