Phoning In (Student A)
Who? What? Pairs: Student A: Look at this page. Student B: Look at the next page. Student A: You are a newspaper reporter in Guatemala. You phoned in your report to the Press Center in Seoul yesterday, but the phone line was bad, and the editor couldn’t hear you very well. You will try again today. Dictate the news report to your editor (Student B). Use your cell phone for this activity. Here is some sample language you can use:
How?
Are you there? Can you hear me? How’s this? Do you want me to speak up? Shall I speak slower? Which words do you need? Did you get it? Do you want me to spell it? Have you got everything? Can you read that back to me?
( ) OFDA
parentheses upper case letters lower case letters
. ,
period comma
ofda
Huge fires again in Guatemala, due to slash and burn farming.
The efforts of over 1,700 civilian and military firefighters, with the support of the U.S. armed forces and the Office For Disaster Assistance (OFDA), have finally brought the fires in the Peten region of Guatemala under control. But the situation is still critical, with no sign of rain until the end of June at the earliest. The Ministry of Agriculture says the area of forest destroyed by fires in the Peten region is 150,000 hectares (580 square miles), but this may be conservative. 110 fires have been fought over the last six weeks. Ninety-two of these have been extinguished and eighteen are under control. With the Governor of the Peten department today accusing farmers of sabotaging the efforts of firefighting teams, and with the lack of rain forecast, the U.S. might well be called upon again to assist the Guatemalans in saving their rainforest. The culture of slash and burn agriculture is to be blamed, and farmers must learn to control their fires if they are to avoid this sort of disaster in the future.
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