In this unit, the topic is Basic knowledge about earthquakes and How to protect oneself and help others in disasters. Specifically related to the causes and omens of earthquakes, the losses cause by earthquakes, as well as the emergency survival and post-earthquake rescue and other contents. Various language activities, such as language knowledge and language skills, revolve around these topics. This unit carried out listening, speaking, reading and writing activities around the topic and arranged six parts: "Warming Up", "Pre-reading", "Reading", "Comprehending", "Learning about Language", "Using Language".
The "Warm Up" part uses two pictures to introduce the topic "Once a big earthquake happens, what harm will it cause?
The "Pre-reading" section has two open-ended questions. Students are asked to describe and discuss topics related to the earthquakes. The aim is to increase students' knowledge of life and improve their resilience. This section sets the stage for the rest of the reading. Students can answer these two questions by discussing them and using some common sense of life.
The section of "Reading" is a news report, which details the warning before the 1976 Tangshan Earthquake, the damage caused to the city buildings, people and animals, and how people bravely faced the reality and carried out the rescue and reconstruction work in time after the earthquake. In this paper, there are a lot of words about earthquakes. Teachers can arrange students to find Chinese and English materials about Tangshan earthquake and related words before class. The article also mentioned the stories of children who lost their parents and became orphans, miners suffering in the earthquake, rescuers and soldiers of the People's Liberation Army fighting against their own safety. Teachers could use these stories as materials to design various tasks and carry out classroom teaching activities. In addition, there are a large number of attributive clauses in the text, which puts forward higher requirements for students' language reading ability. Finally, through the study of the article, to understand the characteristics of the news, for the following writing preparation. Key vocabulary and grammar can be learned in combination with the passage and with appropriate exercises.
The "Comprehending" section consists of five exercises: Exercise 1: Ask to link the correct parts of a sentence; Exercise 2: Make a list of what happened in the Tangshan earthquake and when. Exercise 3: Ask to write the main idea of the passage and summarize it. Exercise 4: Explain the title of the passage in your own words. Exercise 5: Ask the students to do an interview about a certain paragraph of the text. The main purpose of these exercises is to help students better understand the "Reading" section of the passage. In particular, Exercise 3 focuses on developing students' ability to grasp the passage as a whole.