M a education paper-v methods of teaching english

4.2.5. The steps involved in Teaching Prose : 
A prose lesson contains structures, vocabulary and ideas for comprehension. The 
students must have a mastery over the sounds, structure and vocabulary before reading the 
passage / lesson. The main objective of teaching prose is to help the students use the structures 
and vocabulary he can read with comprehension and write a few sentences about the lesson using 
the appropriate structures and content words . Therefore a prose lesson is not for memorizing 
question and answers but for learning a language. The steps for teaching of prose may be 
summed up as follows. 
1. Introducing the prose lesson
The introduction has two purposes
i. To bring the past knowledge to consciousness. 
ii. To win students attention to the new subject 

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English is a foreign language and India students find it difficult. So teachers should try to 
motivate students to study the lesson. All the efforts made by the teacher to attract students to 
learn the lesson. It includes the material aids, previous knowledge of the students and 
introduction.
The teacher can introduce the lesson through appropriate question or through showing 
pictures models etc. However he should not start the topic directly. The introductory question 
arouses curiosity among the students for the new lesson. Hence the teacher should first ask some 
question to test the previous knowledge of the students and then link that to the subject to be 
taught. 
2. Teaching Structures : 
When presenting new structural items, we should primarily achieve two things: 
a. To enable the students to identify the new structures. 
b. To make absolutely clear its meaning and use. 
To achieve (a) above, the teacher must supply clear models of the structures. Some believe that 
plenty of examples should be given bringing the pattern out clearly .In this connection 
substitution table is of great help as it highlights the elements of the pattern and their order and 
nature. 
One of the ways of achieving (b) is to present the structures in readily 
understandable situation. This helps the students not only to understand the meaning of the new 
item but also its use in different contexts. Later they are provided with opportunities to use the 
structures themselves.