Lebensmittel-Ampel°
Einheit 32
TEACHING TIPS
About the Unit
This Einheit helps students to be comfortable with difficult texts. Emphasis should be on figuring out the answers to the questions rather than understanding every detail. The lesson here should be that even authentic texts can be tackled early in their language learning career if they focus on what they need to get out of the text. This means: what they understand matters, what they don't understand, does not. Make sure to not do any translation for the text, neither for individual words, nor for a line-by-line walkthrough of the text. It is very important that students can engage in reading without becoming frustrated about what they don't understand. This is one of the places where you can guide them through such a text and show them that they can make sense of it without any translation tools.
Aktivität 100: EU-Parlament stoppt Lebensmittel-Ampel
1) This first part is mostly recall of different categories of food, which leads into a brief discussion of what food could be labeled as healthy, moderately healthy and unhealthy in 3).
If you think it would be helpful or necessary, talk briefly about the EU and in what way the EU makes legislation (most legislation is proposed by the European Commission and then approved by the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. The European Parliament is directly elected by all the people with EU citizenships).
4) The instructions here mention the reading strategies that were introduced in LERNEN. Students can pull them up on their devices or you can project them on the screen. Tell them also to read the question in 5) first so that they can already read with their goal in mind.
You can allow students to look up words (give them a specific number if you do or make sure it's key words and discuss how to identify key words) If you decide to work with online dictionaries, use this as a teaching moment. Discuss how to pick the best translation, which is not necessarily the first entry. Students should reverse lookup unknown words to better understand the context of the respective vocabulary word.
You could also lead students in small groups through some reading strategies such as 1) matching a topic with a paragraph, 2) underlining or identifying 2-3 important words or phrases in each paragraph, 3) writing a title for each paragraph, 4) writing one true/false question for each paragraph and then ask another group, 5) each group writes on discussion question and passes it to another group.
6) Since this is still early in the first semester, don't expect this to be a long discussion. However, you can help making the arguments by allowing students to say one word within the sentence in English. This may lower the threshold of getting their undoubtedly complex thoughts across with the limited vocabulary they have at their disposal at this point. You can then redirect them to the model of sentences listed here to show them that they can phrase these abstract points with the grammatical structures they already know.
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