Timing and the New Interchange series

Are you under pressure to teach the series in a severely limited number of hours? If you are required to cover a unit in 4 hours or less, you may find some of the following tips useful:

1 Assigning Homework

An obvious way to save time is to assign certain exercises for homework. Some activities, such as Word Power, Reading and Writing lend themselves well to homework. However, try to teach your students first to develop good reading skills (e.g. skimming and scanning) and pre-writing skills (brainstorming, organizing ideas) before assigning as homework.

2 Keeping to the objective

The Snapshot activity which comes at the beginning of most units is just intended to introduce the topic. It should take only 5-10 minutes. It is not necessary to go over the cultural information and statistics in detail.

3 Sharing dictionary work

With Word Power sections ask two or three students to look up a certain number of words each before coming to class. They should then present these words to the class.

4 Maintaining communicative principles

With the Grammar Focus try to maintain a deductive approach, i.e. encouraging the students to work out the rules for themselves. A lot of time gets wasted when teachers turn this section into a long, tedious grammar session and bogged down with rules. Instead, get the students using the language as fast as possible, by moving them on to the pair work, role play and Interchange activities. Only then will you see if they have understood and can use the new structure or function.

5 Reading

One of the biggest time-wasters is asking students to read the passage aloud. Most of the readings in New Interchange are there to improve the students' ability to skim and scan, therefore they are best read in silence and fairly quickly.

Reasons why it is not beneficial to ask students to read aloud:

• it is not natural. In reality we rarely read aloud. Your students will probably not need this skill outside of the classroom.
• it is difficult for students to focus on reading aloud, focusing on pronunciation and trying to understand the meaning of the written word at the same time.
• reading aloud encourages "tunnel vision". Reading aloud slows down the reader to such an extent that the words lose their overall sense.
• while one student is reading aloud, what kind of "model" are the others listening to? It is not usually a good model.
• all readers read at different speeds. By asking one student to read aloud, the others are forced to go at that speed. This means that either they are being rushed along (if they are naturally slow readers) or they are being held back. If you want to check your students' pronunciation, there are numerous speaking activities in New Interchange that provide the ideal time to check this.

6 Speaking and Listening

Where possible, keep classroom time for Speaking and Listening activities, while using time spent out of class to work on vocabulary and the receptive skills (reading and writing).