This unit is the eighth unit of the first term of the seventh grade. It is in the PEP edition—Go for it! This unit takes “dates” and “school activities” as the theme. The materials are close to students’ daily life. It is convenient for students to study and understand. The purpose of this module is to enable students to communicate with others in the target language and to talk about dates and school activities. In Section A, students can learn some thematic activities, ordinal numbers and English words for the month. They can talk to others by using the key sentence patterns so that they can correctly communicate with others in their daily life and convey time-related information. At the same time, students can learn the usage of when, a special interrogative word, and the rules of changing cardinal numbers to the ordinal numbers. Some exercises in Section A are orderly arranged in order to make students master the grammar accurately. The reading part of Section B is a school notice. In this part, students can read to understand the general idea and details of the reading material and learn the useful words and sentences at the same time to prepare for the writing task. The writing assignment is to write a note to a friend to invite him/her to attend one of students’ school activities. Students can use the writing exercises in this unit to record their activities and their dates in their daily life. The theme of this unit is close to the daily life of students and it can promote mutual understanding among students. This unit is an interesting and useful one for students.
二、学习者特征分析
Although students are new to a middle school, they have already learned seven units of the new target language, so they have had some ideas of the course. They also have a certain basis for listening, speaking, reading and writing. The content of this unit is very close to students’ life. Students are very interested in learning. However, the vocabulary of this unit is relatively large, and it is difficult for students to remember those words especially those months. Some students’ English foundation is weak. Some students’ spoken language is not good. They are not able to grasp those long words and complicated expressions well. Thus in this unit, the teacher should pay attention to the interaction with students, focusing on students’ mastery of the vocabulary, grammar and useful expressions. The teacher should also set up a variety of activities to enhance students’ sense of participation.