Page 422 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

410 | Model Question Papers

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 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’, ‘activities’, 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 exper-
iment 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 activities, 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 photocopying friendly. 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 informa-
tion, but as entertaining tricks of the trade.
Visually to be very appealing, your workbook should have ‘cloze’ or ‘multiple choice’
type of exercises that are non-threatening in nature.
c. Supportive intentions are the pedagogues underlying desires to provide aid or assistance
to students. Here, the most important aspect is the intention of the pedagogue to be
supportive. It is this intention that makes message supportive. The supportive intention
of the pedagogue has to be clear as the variation in the quality of the pedagogues’ inten-
tions that affect the pupil. Most of the time, the intentions are ‘read off” or inferred
from the behaviour of the pedagogue. However, pedagogues need to make their sup-
portive intentions explicit through overt statements of availability, for example when
the pedagogue says, ‘I am here for you’, or ‘I really want to help however I can’, ‘Don’t
worry I am with you’, and so on; these overt statements, enhance the pupil’s perceptions
of the clarity, intensity, purity, and sincerity of the pedagogue’s intention, and is, thus,
comforted, and opens up for further communication. It creates affiliation because of

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