[YKK]

Hi, I am looking for a communicative activity on practicing appositives. Please, help! Thank so much.

[susan53]

Apposition is a genre feature of written texts, so it´s difficult to find a communicative activity to practise them. For anyone who doesn´t know what apposition is - it´s the use of two adjacent noun phrases, each describing the same person, thing etc. You find it a lot in journalistic genres. Here´s an example from an article in today´s Guardian :



The Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, paid his respects to Karlov in Moscow. “Both sides understand that this low act will not harm our relations, we will do everything to make sure of that,” he said.

Turkish officials suggested Altıntas had ties to the movement led by Fethullah Gülen, a US-based preacher whose group is widely believed in Turkey to have masterminded a coup attempt in July.

The Turkish foreign minister, is in apposition to Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu,
Fethullah Gülen, is in apposition to a US-based preacher

You could turn this into a communicative activity by making it a pairwork information gap:

Student A has a copy of an article with half the appositives gapped eg :
.............................., Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, paid his respects to Karlov in Moscow. “Both sides understand that this low act will not harm our relations, we will do everything to make sure of that,” he said.
Turkish officials suggested Altıntas had ties to the movement led by Fethullah Gülen, a US-based preacher whose group is widely believed in Turkey to have masterminded a coup attempt in July.

Student B has a copy of the article with the other half gapped :

Turkish officials suggested Altıntas had ties to the movement led by Fethullah Gülen, .................... whose group is widely believed in Turkey to have masterminded a coup attempt in July.

They then have to ask each other questions to find the missing information - eg Who is Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu ?

Obviously, to make this truly communicative you´d need to choose an article where they really don´t know who the people, places, organisations etc which they´re asking about are. Also, you may need to rewrite the original article to include enough examples of apposition to make it worthwhile - and also possibly to make sure it was at the correct level for the learners. I might rewrite this one from the BBC with a bit of research from other sources added, as follows (I´ve underlined the bits that I´d gap - as I said, half of them for each student) :

The world´s second biggest carmaker, Volkswagen has struck a deal with the US authorities over some 80,000 VW, Audi and Porsche cars with 3-litre diesel engines.

The firm admitted in September 2015 to installing secret software in 475,000 cars to cheat exhaust emissions tests and make them appear cleaner in testing than they really were. The vehicles, all US 2-litre diesel cars, emitted up to 40 times the legally allowable pollution levels.

US District Judge Charles Breyer said owners of the 3-litre cars made between 2009 and 2016 would get "substantial compensation" for having them fixed or repaired.

Cynthia Giles, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s assistant administrator, estimated that the costs of buybacks, fixes and diesel offsets agreed to by VW in the new settlement amounted to about $1bn.

VW spokeswoman Jeannine Ginivan said the deal was "another important step forward in our efforts to make things right for our customers".

Robert Bosch, the German engineering firm that made the software for the VW diesels, has also agreed in principle to settle civil allegations at a cost of about $300m.