* A Very Big Country


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:

 
 

 

Easy text
 

There is a lot of water
under the ground
but it is a bit salty.

 

Medium text
 

Australia has a lot of salty water
under the ground.
People can use this water
but in some places it doesn't taste good.

 

Hard text
 

Australia has a lot of rivers but many are dry most of the time. 
However, there is a lot of underground water.  The shaded area
on the map above shows one major underground water system,
which is called the Great Artesian Basin. 

In some places underground water is slightly salty but it is
suitable for animals to drink.  So farmers make bores which
provide water for farm animals.


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.






Subpages (1): * Gold!
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