![]() A Very Big Country reading package covers the topic of basic Australian geography: major land forms, climatic zones and states, territories and capital cities. It is suitable for use with adult immigrants who want to know something about the geography of their new country and for native-born Australians who have difficulty in accessing information of this type because of problems with literacy. It can also be used in primary and secondary schools to introduce topics in the SOSE area. The
reading texts are written at three successive levels of difficulty within the
one volume to allow flexibility to teachers of multi-level classes and to
encourage hesitant readers to progress from their decoding, vocabulary and
sentence structure comfort zones to a slightly higher level with the aid of the
scaffolding provided by similarity of content and identical illustrations at
each level. We use the terms Easy, Medium and Hard, rather than the more conventional professional terms to distinguish the three levels because students know these simple words and are not distracted from the text trying to work out the meanings of more difficult terms. Illustrations pp.9, 32 and 55: There is a lot of water Australia has a lot of salty water Australia has a lot of rivers but many are dry most of the
time.
In some places underground water is slightly salty but it is
An audio recording is available of the texts, read by Lyndal Reid, an extremely experienced Australian ESL teacher. There is also a Workbook with teachers' notes, photocopiable stimulus pictures and exercises with answers at the same three levels of difficulty as the reading texts. These include vocabulary, comprehension, phonics and pronunciation, sentence structure, writing and detailed listening to encourage improved auditory discrimination. A Very Big Country ISBN 0 9750668 3 8 A Very Big Country Workbook ISBN 0 9750668 4 6 A Very Big Country sound CD ISBN 0 9750668 6 2 (Also available audiocassette ISBN 0 9750668 5 4) For copies of package, see list of bookshops under Available from. |