A Teaching Plan for
“Chemical or Organic Farming?”
Module 4 Unit 2
Teaching aims:
1. Develop students’ reading skills by skimming for main ideas and scanning for details.
2. Have students learn and talk about disadvatages of chemical farming and advantages of organic farming methods.
3. Enable students to learn the use of some useful expressions.
Important and different teaching points:
1. Enable students to learn to use strategies such as skimming, scanning, and so on to do their reading.
2. Grasp some useful new words and expressions in this text:
chemical, production, cause damage to, bacteria, wash off, build up, lead to, in addition, fucus on, keep…free from/of, every few years, avoid doing, …
Teaching aids:
A multimedia project, a tape recorder, two different kinds of oranges.
Teaching procedure:
Step 1. Revision
1. Brainstorming
Revise the grammar in this unit. What is followed by these verbs or phrases, “to do” or “doing”? If both can be used, what’s the difference between them?
(Show some verbs or verb phrses on the screen.)
2. Translation
1). 出国旅行是很激动人心的。
2). 在这儿等是没用的。我们走吧。
3). 我记得在哪里见过他。
4). 我后悔没听你的劝告。
5). 帮助别人就是帮助你自己。
[设计说明] 这一步是为了复习上节课所学的语法：动名词作主语和宾语。
Step 2. Warming up
Show two oranges, and ask the students:
Which kind of oranges is more expensive?
What’s the differnnce between the two kinds?
Can you guess why?
Say: It’s difficult to tell the difference only by looking at their appearances. In fact, this kind is more expensive because they say the farmar grows it using natrual fertilizers, while the othe kind using chemical ones. (Show pictures of natrual fertilizers and chemical fertilizers.) Today we’ll learn the text “Chemical or Organic Farming?”.
[设计说明] 通过实物比较，引发学生学习兴趣，导出主题：化学耕作和有机耕作。
Step 3. Reading
1. Ask students to read quickly and find out:
1). What is organic farming?
2). What is the goal of using organic farming methods?
2. Skimming
Skim to find the topic sentence or main idea for each paragraph.
Para 1. Long-term use of chemical fertilizers can cause damage to the land and people’s health.
Para 2. Problems caused by chemical fertilizers
Para 3. Farmers and customers turn to organic farming.
Para 4. Other methods to keep the soil fertile.
3. Scanning
Scan to find details of chemical farming and organic farming by filling the charts:
1). What problems are caused by chemical farming?
2). How do they cause the problems?