Page 273 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Communication: Written English | 261

It is necessary, hence, to provide clear indications in a teacher’s handbook
about how to use it, about how it should supplement, and how to extend the
textbook.
It is essential to provide numerous graded activities listed out in detail.
These should make both teaching and reading enjoyable for the experiment-
ing teacher.
Your handbook should have clear indications regarding how to go about
the graded activities and how actually to use them.
Your units should not be too lengthy and should address a given point
through every possible related activity, e.g., if your handbook deals with
‘hotel management English’, there could be a unit on ‘taking calls’. List out
all possible responses; create situations to give your learners to actually try
them out.
Your handbook, which covers all related skills, should structure each
unit into ‘teaching points’, ‘expressions to learn’, ‘structures to practice’, ‘activ-
ities’, for example.
It helps your reader if you provide an answer key as well. Your handbook,
thus, becomes a self-instructional material.
Make your handbook very communicative and try to grade activities,
specifying the level and the stage when it should be introduced and how.
In other words, your fellow teacher staying miles away from you should
find in your handbook a friend, a guide, and a philosopher who encourages
him to think and experiment more, and on his own.
Students’ Workbooks are visually more effective. Often they are clearly
situation-oriented, even for content subjects. They provide a series of activi-
ties mostly with a key. As an author you are supposed to explain difficult
vocabulary, concepts, and structures as the pre-lesson preparation. Most
importantly of all, your student’s workbook must be photo-copiable. Students
require this kind of freedom. A big, fat bound book may terrorize them and
will dissuade them into thinking that it is yet another textbook. Content-rich
but entertaining is the nutshell definition of a students’ workbook that often
has many grids, tables as fill-in-the-blank activities.
Essentially a supplement to the course book, it reduces knowledge bits
into simple, suitable bytes. So make your instructions very clear and precise.
Give extra information, but as entertaining tricks of the trade.
Visually to be very appealing your workbook should have ‘multiple
choice’ type of exercises that are non-threatening in nature.

Structuring Reports for Different Academic Domains

If handbooks and/or workbooks are more narrative/imaginative types of
writing, reports, projects, agendas, and policy statements are more descriptive
in nature.

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