Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified in Texas? Are you interested in teaching English in Bellaire, Texas? Check out our opportunities in Bellaire, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English in your community or abroad! Teflonline.net offers a wide variety of Online TESOL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language. Here Below you can check out the feedback (for one of our units) of one of the 16.000 students that last year took an online course with ITTT!
UNIT 12 – TEACHING PRODUCTIVE SKILLS
Building from the last lesson, this lesson talks about the two productive skills: speaking and writing. Both of these skills need specific work and to be both given classroom time, to ensure students develop their communication skills properly. Communication using these skills is necessary for four major reasons: the people involved need to communicate for a purpose, they want to say something, they want to listen to something, and/or they are interested in what’s being said. Building on these factors in lessons can help motivate students.
Both accuracy and fluency are important for developing productive skills. Accuracy based activities involve drilling and prompting, as well as some guided dialogues. Fluency can be built using free role play, debates, communication games, and many other activities. The unit lists six (of course they may be many more) reason why students may be reluctant to speak up in the classroom, and states that the teacher should try to overcome these issues and encourage language production. This can be done with less stressful activities like pair-work, or by other means that need to be determined based on the individuals (and the culture, age of students, etc.).
The unit then gives a straight-arrow lesson plan for a creative speaking class, along with some important guidelines for before, during, and after the activity, which is very useful to see planned out.
Following this, there is a section on writing skills (including handwriting, spelling, punctuation, and layout), which are key components in any language learning experience. Since English isn’t a phonetic language, many students have trouble with writing skills, especially spelling. The unit finishes with an example creative writing lesson and some games.
Overall this lesson had a lot of good information and was very clear.
