Lessons have different objectives and take place in a wide variety of contexts and formats, involving a range of learner needs and abilities. This section addresses some of the most common of these variables, and outlines the options that teachers need to consider in order to ensure that learning opportunities are optimized.

• 32 Planning a focus on listening

• 33 Planning a focus on speaking

• 34 Planning a focus on reading

• 35 Planning a focus on writing

• 36 Planning an integrated skills lesson

• 37 Planning to teach grammar

• 38 Planning to teach vocabulary

• 39 Planning to teach pronunciation

• 40 Planning for content-based instruction

• 41 Planning for task- and project-based instruction

• 42 Planning for learning opportunities

• 43 Blended and flipped learning

• 44 Learner-centred lessons

• 45 Special needs and individualization

• 46 Teaching one-to-one

• 47 Teaching large, multi-level classes

Planning a focus on listening

• It's unlikely that a whole lesson will be devoted to listening activities, but it's not uncommon to plan a lesson which has the skill of listening as its primary focus.

The aim of most classroom activities involving listening is to develop learners’ ability to understand the stream of speech – which is not simply a case of knowing all the words and grammatical structures of the language. In fact, even after many years of study, second language learners are often surprised – even shocked – by how little they understand when they first encounter fluent speakers of the language. Hence, the aim of a listening activity is not so much to teach new items of language but to help learners recognize language they are already familiar with, to process the stream of speech in real time, and to make plausible inferences when they come up against gaps in their knowledge.

So, while the overall aim is understanding, the specific aims of a listening focus might include developing the ability to:

• ▪ perceive and discriminate individual sounds;

• ▪ segment the stream of speech into recognizable words;

• ▪ identify key indicators of changes in discourse direction and stance, such as discourse markers;

• ▪ use prosodic clues (such as stress and intonation) to infer attitude, to distinguish given information from new information, to recognize turn openings and closings;

• ▪ guess the meaning of unfamiliar words from context;

• ▪ use contextual clues and background information to infer meaning and make predictions.

This chapter reviews the various organizations that comprise the anti-sweatshop movement and what policies they advocate. It provides a history of the origins and growth of the anti-sweatshop movement.

Chapter 2 describes the fundamentals, applications, standardization, and operating principles of RFID technology and offers a glimpse into the design considerations and architectures of modern UHF RFID readers.

A principal reason for the continuing significance of West Side Story in the musical theatre repertory is the quality of the score, with memorable songs and dance music that are intimately tied to the plot. This chapter opens with brief consideration of significant matters for Bernstein and Sondheim as they created the score. Description of the orchestration, which Bernstein accomplished with the assistance of Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, includes the process and a description of the show’s three major soundscapes and how they interact in the score. Bernstein’s unification of the score involves shared melodic and rhythmic motives, identified here and documented through musical examples. The approach to individual numbers involves important material concerning their composition and significant aspects of lyrics and music, documented with many references to the 1957 and 2009 original cast recordings and Bernstein’s 1984 studio recording of the score.

Chapter 6 explores low-cost and low-complexity techniques for the design of an ISO 18000-63-compliant RFID reader and presents an experimental prototype to validate the proposed concepts.

The Russo-Japanese War was fought during 1904–1905 between Tsarist Russia and Imperial Japan. The war broke out due to their conflicting interests in the Korean Peninsula and the north-eastern region of China, known then as Manchuria. Both saw the conflict as a zero-sum game in which compromise was a temporary solution. Japan’s objectives were the control of Korea, the seizure of southern Manchuria and the conclusion of the conflict with a peace agreement that would ensure its own long-term presence and interests in Korea and China. Russia’s objectives were the inverse of Japan’s and included the control of Manchuria, seizure of Korea and the expansion of its political and economic sphere to play a pivotal role in the entire region. Japan had far more limited resources and manpower, but it could mobilise its armed forces more quickly and gain the upper hand in the region, at least initially. As an island country, Japan had to control the seas from the outset and limit the duration of the war. The war lasted seventeen months but demonstrated that when strategic objectives are carefully defined and meticulously executed, as was the case with Japan, then the prima facie weaker party may win.

Although the early part of the century involved the Nationalist Party (KMT) campaigns – the Northern Expedition (1926-28) – to reunify China after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the history of China’s military strategy in the twentieth century is largely dominated by the activities of the Chinese Communist People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Embroiled in the first civil war with the Nationalists and avoiding annihilation during the latter’s five encirclement campaigns (1927–1937), the PLA under Mao Zedong’s leadership began to develop some of the core ideas of Communist Chinese military strategy – People’s War, and Active Defense. During the anti-Japanese War of Resistance, the Communists and the Nationalists arrived at a temporary truce to fight Japanese invaders (1937–1945). This period was largely marked by stalemate, but still involved millions of casualties, the use of guerrilla warfare, and the movement of millions of troops across China. Mao’s vision of military strategy unfolded with the resumption of the Communist–Nationalist civil war: guerrilla warfare; manoeuvre warfare; a hybrid of conventional and unconventional operations; conventional warfare; and then a war of annihilation, culminating in the Nationalist retreat to Taiwan.

This chapter outlines the book’s motivations, its main argument, and competing positions to which the book’s arguments contrast.

The danger to democratic norms aside, this chapter demonstrates that state government is also a needless source of additional regulation, additional taxation, and inefficient duplication of functions – in short, a waste of taxpayer money and a pointless burden on the citizenry. Yet, many of the specific functions currently performed by state governments are essential. The abolition of state government would therefore require the redistribution of those necessary functions between the national government and the local governments. This chapter demonstrates that such a redistribution would be administratively workable. To show this, it formulates general criteria for deciding which functions should go where and offers illustrations of how those criteria might be applied to specific functions in practice.