Haverhill, Iowa TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

Overview Here we look Productive skills: speaking and writing. Both speaking and writing are needed in communication Speaking requires : requires a greater degree of fluency as the speaker will rarely have time to think and plan an answer. Writing skills: require time which the students and teachers often do not have so this skill is often neglected but is very Important, but with the use of computers this skill can be acquired but not completely perfectly When two or more people are communicating with each other, we can be sure that they are doing so for one of the following reasons: ?They have some communicative purpose ?They want to say something ?They want to listen to something ?They are interested in what is being said To introduce a communicative activity to the students the above factors must be there plus the teacher, The teacher must create the need and desire, in the students, to communicate. If these factors are not present, it is far less likely that the activity will be the success that the teacher had envisaged. If the students don't see the point in doing something, they're far less likely to want to participate! Fluency : will always come first as you practice speech first Accuracy : will come later as the student understands structure of the tense Practice of Speech or Activities This is controlled by the teacher : Drilling & Charol is the best way and safest way as the students will not feel shy and mistakes will not be apparent. Always try and use ‘3by ‘3 rule. Prompting Pre-planned questions and answers, this will help in confidence and pronunciation. Further to this you can use Guided activities Creative communication Model dialogues & Guided role-play Encouraging students to speak Free role-play, Discussions, Debates, Communication games Techniques to encourage Interaction ?Pair-work ?Group-work ?Plenty of controlled and guided practice before fluency activities ?Make speaking activities purposeful (create a desire and need to communicate) Etc A typical free/creative speaking activity lesson: Lets take the subject of weather and weather forecasts and discuss the weather in the students countries. Eg 4 seasons or rainy seasons or desert climate. Engage Stage First get the weather in the students country for the whole year, find if they know about other countries weather patterns. Finally where they can get weather forecasts e.g. from newspapers , internet, news flashes, etc Study Elicit weather forecast vocabulary and complete various matching and gap-fill exercises. Activate First students pick a country but not their own and a month of the year, and write it on card this activity should be done in pairs. Pick up the cards and re- distribute them to different pairs. After this they then have to prepare a weather forecast for that country for the month that was chosen. Guidelines for a free / creative speaking activity Before the lesson Decide on your aims: what you want to do and why Try to predict what the students will bring to the activity and any problems they might have. A few factors will go along with this will students capacity for this lesson will they have something to say , will they find the activity interesting , do they have the language skills.etc Work out how long the activity will take and tailor it to the time available Prepare materials on the subject and always try and keep a recording device ready for use. And work out specific instructions. During the activity ?Arouse the students ?Remind them structures or vocabulary ?Give specific instructions ?Organise pairs or groups so coordination is right ?Have enough time on your hands encase it goes further ?Make the activity an even flow process particular with Role- plays ?Monitor the activity: do not interrupt ?Evaluate the activity ?Wait until after the activity has finished before correcting Encourage students which are shy or slow during the process but don’t spoon-feed. After the activity Provide feedback: 1.First praise the students , and focus on what they did well . 2.If you have recorded the activity play it back and praise the students do not go negative here, look for improvements 3.Mistakes should be made on a one to one basis by the teacher and if possible corrected at home. Maybe even given extra exercises to do in their own private time. If there is a common mistake then the whole class should be corrected at the same time Writing skills Written English is very different from spoken English, there are differences in grammar, vocabulary, and in spelling. But all the same factors will come into play for the writing activities Handwriting Poor hand writing gives a very poor impression of the person writing it. Thus the teacher needs to make sure that it is neat and recognizable. Here all I can say is practice makes perfect. Spelling The use of computers into writing skills brings a big difference here but rules still apply. The use of an American system to a British system are quite different and so is the spelling. Pronunciation in English is also different from spelling, Thus I will say again practice makes perfect. Layout and punctuation Majority of the students have problems with this, if they have not been exposed to it. Some languages have a complete different way of punctuation, others write from right left to right . Considering this we must explain the rules with practice. After students have completed a piece of written work we should get them to check it over for grammar, vocabulary usage as well as punctuation, spelling, layout and style of writing (is it too formal/informal?). Creative writing Creative writing should be encouraged, as it engages the students and the finished work usually provides them with a sense of pride. Typical creative writing tasks may include poetry, stories and plays. It would a good idea to do this by pair working in the class. Activity lesson The learner objective would be for the students to be able to use appropriate language for completing speech bubbles in cartoons, and produce a story by themselves. Engage Show extracts from newspapers pictures without text and ask students to bring up idea’s of what happening in the picture. And what could happen after or before Study Show students an example of a cartoon strip with speech bubbles for dialogue and rectangular boxes for description/action, etc, and elicit the difference. Then in pairs give them cartoons without any text and ask them to fill a story and put forwards theirs idea’s in a realistic way. Activate Get together enough cartoon strips with a minimum of 5 boxes to give to each pair of students Remove both the dialogue and the descriptions. Cut and paste the strips into a vertical sequence of 5 pictures. Draw a dotted line between each set of pictures. Demonstrate with the students that they will fill in the missing information for picture one only. They then fold the paper over along the dotted line so that it is not visible. Pass the paper to the next pair and repeat for picture Get each pair to read out its sheet to the rest of the group. Games in the Classroom Games are popular with children, teenagers and adults these provide useful controlled practice and free practice material. There are two kinds of games: competitive games and co-operative games. Many of the games that we played as children or play as adults can be incorporated into our classrooms. A game is an activity with rules, a goal and an element of fun. The teacher should pick the appropriate game for the class which is being held and make sure that there a full participation of all who are involved in it. For ref please check unit 12 page 10