ENGLISH HOME LANGUAGE

Grade 6

Module 1

LISTENING

LISTENING

EDUCATOR:

Tape a series of sounds in random order, so that when sequenced correctly, they will “tell” the story of a break-in.(e.g. dog barking; footsteps on gravel; broken glass; match being struck; drawers/doors opening and closing; alarm; running footsteps on gravel).Ask learners to close their eyes and listen carefully to the sounds.

Instructions

Your teacher will play a sound recording to which you must respond in the frame on the next page.

Close your eyes and listen carefully.

List the sounds you remember.

Listen once again.

Add to your list or make changes if necessary.

Decide what the sounds are “telling” you - what have you just witnessed with your ears?

Arrange the sounds in the order that the events would have taken place.

Check your ideas with those in your group.

SPEAKING

Set up a list of ten questions that you, as a detective, would ask a suspect brought in for questioning. Use the next page for this purpose.

Hints

You know the answers to the questions relating to when the crime was committed, what the eyewitness saw, fingerprints found, etc.

Formulate your questions so that a YES or NO answer is impossible.

Make use of your voice to be authoritative.

Role-play

Working with a partner, take turns to be either the suspect or the detective.

Police Report

Using the information you put together from the sound effects on page three, write up a short report about the Break In. Keep the following in mind:

This is a formal report and therefore only the FACTS must be reported.

Make use of STATEMENTS only.

Be sure to use the proper PUNCTUATION.

The house next door to the Smiths has just been burgled.

Grandma Smith called 10111 and when the policemen arrived, they wanted to find out what the robbers looked like. Sergeant Daniels asked Grandma Smith to circle the words in the list below that best described each robber.

All the words you have circled are called ADJECTIVES.

Mrs Smith arrived home to comfort Grandma Smith and to help the sergeant draw up a list of stolen items. The list needed to be precise. Choose adjectives from the list of words in column two, to make identification of the stolen goods easier.

Court Drama

EDUCATOR:

Things to do if possible: Visit a courtroom. Invite a lawyer / magistrate / prosecutor to be part of the dramatisation. Watch a video of a courtroom drama, e.g. A Few Good Men.

Before you plan your scene, be sure you know who’s who in the zoo!

Right! Now go ahead and practise your scene to present to the class.

Unwritten Signature

1. In 1431 a young woman declared to be a sorceress was burned at the stake in Rouen, France. The English judges who tried Jeanne d’Arc, the Maid of France, believed that only evil powers could have made her victorious at the head of the French army. Burning had been thought the proper death for witches and traitors for centuries.

2. But was it Joan of Arc who died at the stake? There are stories, with some records to support them, that Joan was alive for about twenty years after she was supposed to have been burned. She is said to have become the wife of Robert des Armoises, a knight of Lorraine, in the northeast corner of France.

3. In the 1900s the claim of Jeanne des Armoises could have been settled with no trouble. Nowadays anyone charged with a crime and put into prison is fingerprinted. If fingerprints had been recorded for Joan of Arc and had proved to match those of Jeanne des Armoises, her claim of identity would have been allowed. Had the prints not matched, Jeanne des Armoises would have been proved an impostor.

4. How can a person’s identity be proved in this way? The answer is that no two people with identical fingerprints have yet been found. Scientists calculate that there is only one chance in millions of millions that two people might have identical prints.

5. Dactyloscopy (from the Greek daktylos, finger, and –skopia, observation) may be called a young science. But knowledge of fingerprint differences is very old. Thousands of years ago, the emperor of China marked his thumbprint on orders as proof of their authority. Diggers in modern Jordan found “signed” pottery made some three thousand years ago. The fingerprints on the wine jars and other clay items were so clear that the finders were able to sort out each potter’s work. Through the centuries, and even today, people of the East have used fingerprint signatures. And Eastern practices, ancient and recent, led to the science of dactyloscopy in the West.

6. The two men who awakened European interest in the science of fingerprinting were Britons who were working in Asia. Both wrote reports that appeared in the magazine Nature in 1880.

7. The first report in Nature was by Henry Faulds, a Scot who was a medical missionary in Japan. Faulds had noticed fingerprint markings on ancient Japanese pottery. His curiosity about these led

him to experiment. By removing skin from fingertips and allowing it to grow again, he proved that the pattern for each finger was distinctive, unlike any other. He discovered that the clearest imprint resulted from using damp paper and a film of printer’s ink. And, because he could imagine as well as observe, Faulds made an important suggestion: bloody finger marks at the scene of a crime might help the police to identify a criminal.

8. Sir William Herschel was the second Briton to report in Nature. He added more proof that fingerprints were unchangeable and distinctive. Working in Calcutta, India, Herschel had learned that Chinese coolies used fingerprint signatures. He applied their practice to Indian affairs. He required people receiving government wages or pensions to “sign” with the left thumb for each payment. He also began to register the prints of those sentenced to prison, to make sure that no impostor could be paid by the criminal to take his place.

9. Years of study in dactyloscopy followed the reports of Faulds and Herschel. But before their pioneer work led to widespread use of fingerprints as clues and evidence, an American writer had used them in a detective story.

10. A chapter in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883, told the story of a search for a murderer. A man had killed Karl Ritter’s wife and daughter. Karl had the bloody prints of the man’s right-hand thumb and fingers. From an old prison keeper Karl had learned of the fingerprint method of identifying an individual. He knew that the murderer was a soldier in a certain company of cavalry. Pretending to tell fortunes, Karl took fingerprints of the cavalrymen until he found the prints that matched his clue.

11. The problem for police was often more difficult than that in Mark Twain’s story. Unlike Karl Ritter, police did not always know the group to which a criminal belonged. They therefore had to have a collection of prints that they could depend upon. But a search through a collection for matching prints could be time-consuming; records had to be scientifically sorted and arranged. Science had to find a proper method of describing prints by their patterns of lines and ridges.

12. The search for a method went on through the 1880s. Faulds himself tried to find the way to make his suggestion useful. But two police officials finally solved the problem. Their solutions gave law forces everywhere a new and mighty weapon in the fight against crime.

13. The first man to devise a way of utilising this new weapon was Juan Vucetich, of Argentina. By 1891 he had worked out a system, using ten prints, to describe and group the patterns. He began the first collection of prints for police use. The next year his department proved that bloody finger marks on a doorpost were exactly matched by the prints of a woman who had accused a neighbour of murdering her two sons. Her trial for murder was the first of many cases settled by fingerprint evidence alone.

14. The second man to devise a system for classifying prints was Edward Henry, inspector-general of police in Bengal. His system worked so well that in 1899 India allowed for fingerprint evidence by written law – the first country to do so. Two years later, when Henry went to New Scotland Yard, his method had been approved in England. The fingerprint branch of Scotland Yard was the first of its kind in Britain.

15. Year by year during the 20th century, Vucetich’s and Henry’s systems spread. The radio network of Interpol, the international police force with some eighty member nations, has developed methods of classifying that have made it easier to find matching prints in large collections. Machines as well as men work at searching for the prints.

16. Dactyloscopy has many uses today, but it has had its hardest impact as an aid to law forces. From the moment he commits a crime, a criminal must fear this modern science. Police are experts in finding and getting prints from the scene of the crime. Searchers in the filing systems can find any prints ever recorded. And at his trial, the criminal will see the law’s respect for the evidence of an unwritten signature.

Questions & answers

How well did you read?

Highlight the answer you choose.

Did you get the facts?

1. Scientists claim that finding two people with the same fingerprints is

2. Henry Faulds, a pioneer in the science of fingerprints, discovered

Did you follow the sequence of events?

3. Faulds began to experiment with fingerprints after he

4. The story that Mark Twain wrote appeared before

5. Juan Vucetich gave the law a new weapon to fight crime when

How well do you reason?

6. Faulds removed skin from fingertips because he wanted to know whether

7. That Herschel used people’s thumbprint “signature” when they were paid shows his acceptance of the

Did you understand the author’s purpose?

8. The author uses Joan of Arc to illustrate his point that fingerprinting would

9. The author of this selection was trying to

Assessment

Memorandum

Identity Parade

An emerald necklace

An antique vase

A Phillips television

A Picasso painting

A Rolex watch

A diamond ring

Court Drama

Unwritten Signature

B

B

C

B

A

B

C

B

B

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Last edited by Siyavula Uploaders on Jul 16, 2009 10:30 am -0500.