TEACHING LISTENING

Teaching listening is a very important skill that we have to teach it appropriately. In this case, we should teach listening in real-life situation, so children will learn in the best way. Therefore, we are going to take into account some features connected to real-life situations.

We have to know some characteristics when we are going to design listening text. The most common kind of spoken discourse is informal speech, the listening texts should present some features of improvise spontaneous speech. The good interaction between the speaker and the listener is essential. Both parts can usually each other and there is interaction between them. For this reason, we could improvise some listening texts, using videos is also a useful way to overcome the problem of lack of visual environment that audio recording present. Finally, we have to take into account the single listening and as we have seen in real-life situations, the listener listens to the discourse just time. For this reason, it is necessary that the discourse has enough repetitions and redundancy, so pupils could understand better and get the necessary information.

If we are going to create listening task, we should know what types of expectation we want. It is useful if learners know the topic or something related to the text. We should explain some aspects of the listening. Listeners should respond in an intermittent way during the listening, since these intermittent answers are natural in real-life conversations. Sometimes, there is not enough repetition and redundancy.

We have to know the learners´ problems, for this reason I am going to describe some of these problems in listening. One of them is trying to understand every single word, this promoting comprehension. But not always it is not necessary knowing all words. Another feature is the fast natural speech, this means that informal speech is usually fast and sometimes unclear. For this reason, we should repeat some things when children need it. The tiredness is other problem when they do listening. Therefore, we have to avoid very long listening and we can also stop several times the recording or listening text. Finally, learners sometimes feel overload, because of there is too much information and they cannot cope with the task.

We can focus listening in different ways; these ways are “casual” listening and “focused” listening. We can find the casual listening when we do it without a particular aim and it is not necessary concentrate on it much. On the other hand, if we have an aim, we are going to concentrate more and this is the case of “focused” listening. Focused listening is the type of listening that we usually do in the classroom. There is another kind of listening, a listening task focuses children´s attention and help them to listen. For this reason, we can use guiding questions, since these questions are also aimed at focusing children´s attention and helping them to understand what kinds of things they are going to listen.

As I said before, listening is difficult for children, therefore, as teacher we have to facilitate the listening for them. The repetition is necessary, because if you do not understand something when you listen, if you listen again, you could understand more things. Besides, listening requires hard concentration. Young children have short attention span. Because of this, we have to pay attention on it and help children doing according to their level. If children listen to a dialogue, teacher can help them in different ways. Teacher can present some questions and also vocabulary about the dialogue; students are provided with guiding questions before listening to the dialogue; and students can listen to the dialogue twice.

As teachers, we should encourage children to use listening strategies; we can fin predicting and guessing meaning as examples of listening strategies. In the case of predicting, pupils should guess what they are going to listen to. They can make some predictions about the general topic or specific details. On the other hand, if we talk about guessing meaning from the text, the meaning of unknown vocabulary can be worked out by the children if they pay attention to the context.

In listening activities, there are three stages: Pre-listening (it means what we do before listening to motivate and contextualize students); While-listening (activities of this stage are carried out during the listening); and Post-listening (these activities are done after listening).

Listening has different purposes, these are: to calm students down when they are noisy; to stimulate them when they are bored; to improve pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary, etc; to encourage children to interact with others; to reinforce concepts that we have previously seen in other subjects; and to improve concentration span and memory. There are many types of listening activities: Listen and repeat, listen and discriminate, listen and perform activities, listen and draw and colour, etc.

To sum up, listening skill is essential for everyone, because we start listening when we are young. Besides, for the future it is indispensable to create a good base to develop pronunciation, learn vocabulary, learn to listen properly, etc. We have to provide to children some tools to do listening in an appropriate way.

TEACHING SPEAKING

Speaking is a very important skill, because of this we have to give them activities to develop the ability to express themselves through speech. Besides, we have to motivate them starting with activities developing this skill from the very beginning.

Children expect to learn quickly and can feel disappointed if there are not immediate results. For this reason, we should provide them many opportunities to speak English as soon as possible. In controlled and guided activities our goal can be that pupils produce correct language. We should correct their mistakes when they are produced, but if we establish situations in which free communication is encouraged, we should not correct their mistakes. In this case, we can write down what they should be corrected and we will do it later. Besides, if children ask you if something is correct or incorrect, we can answer them.

At the beginning, the teacher has to make controlled and guide practice, since children do not know using a language appropriately and we must help them in many ways. Therefore, children will start learning formulaic language. It means that they will start learning chunks (listen and repeat the same sentences to remember it) of language and this helps them at least. In this case, drawing can also be useful for presenting language.

As I said before we have to start with controlled and guide practice. Controlled practice and presentation are closely linked. Children should start practicing the language that has just been introduced. In these practices, they had better not to make many mistakes. In these activities children have to start asking similar question and they can do it in pairs. Drawings and puppets can be useful too. In the case of guide practice, it is usually done in pairs or groups. They can make some questions about the same topic and answer it. For instance they can use some images and make question about it and the others answer it.

We cannot forget dialogues and role play. In speaking both are very important. Dialogues are a stage between guided and free practice. Controlled dialogues can turn into free practice progressively. First of all, the dialogue is presented by the teacher. After listening to the dialogues, then some pupils could practice it with the teacher. Finally, children will work in pairs. Role play is another way of presenting dialogues and it is connect with real life situations. The improvisation is involved in role plays, because of this, pupils are given situations but they can decide which words they are going to use. We can control some role plays and others just give some directions and children could interact in a free way. It is really important that before starting the role play, children have to know the dialogues. There are some advantages of dialogues and role plays: questions and answer are controlled; communication is encouraged; intonation, stress, facial expressions, etc. are worked; language is practiced in a particular situation.

When children have practiced all these kinds of activities, then they can access to free activities. The difference of this activity is choice, since pupils can say what they want and also they can choose the way to say it. Free activities present some features: They are not highly controlled by the teacher; genuine communication is encourage, these types of activities connect the work in the classroom with real life situations; attention is focused on the message instead of on the language; in these activities fluency is more important that accuracy; a game element is usually related to these activities; there is usually an information gap.

There are many speaking activities that are classified from tightly controlled to freer activities. These are Look, listen and repeat (the teacher show a picture and tells the pupils the word, the pupils repeat it); Listen and participate (this is often used when children are listening to a story. Pupils are encouraged to repeat some words or sentences); Reading aloud (Like bingo, children have to read words aloud); Memory games (children will develop memory, concentration, etc.); dramatization (children can act out a situation, a dialogue or a story. This activity can be connected to others); Rhymes, action rhymes, songs, chants, tongue twister (chunks of language are learnt. These activities are usually linked to movement, actions and imitation); Retelling a story (Pupils have to retell a story that the teacher has previously told them or they have read); Using flash cards, etc.

In short, speaking is necessary in education, it is a very important skill in children lives, since they must learn to communicate with others in an appropriate way. They must understand others and be understood. Therefore, we have to give them the necessary tools and present activities that help them to improve this skill. We have to motivate and help them when they need it in an adequate context.

TEACHING WRITING

                                        

I am going to focus on teaching writing. It is very important to know that when someone teaches writing also it is necessary teaching reading. Both are indispensable and the base for the development of our knowledge. After said this, we have to find some answers relating to teaching writing. May be the first question will be why is writing especially difficult for children? It is because it is not usually about “the here and the now” (writing is the opposite of reading and it is more difficult) and it takes a long time to master it. Besides, traditionally, it is better priory of error correction over content (children need correct their writing to learn the appropriate pattern). Another question could be for instance how can writing skills be developed? First children start copying, then they do a guided writing and finally they will finish with a free writing. This is a process that everybody needs to start writing. When children copying, it is mechanical, they do not think in anything, but when they finished with free writing, they think a little bit, because it is meaningful.

We need to know a global definition about writing. For this reason, I am going to make a definition of writing: Writing is thinking of what you wish to say, turning your thoughts into words, expressing opinions, describing real and imaginary worlds, playing with sounds and words and poetry.

Another interesting thing is the tools for writing, since children have to access to a variety of tools for writing such as chalk, paint, crayons, etc. In addition to this, they have to access to different surfaces for writing such as boards, paper, computers, tablets, shaped books, etc.

                                         


                                                         
                                                       

Besides there are different contexts and genres in which children are going to work. As teachers, we must provide them a wide range of contexts such as greeting cards, diaries, home-made books, word banks, lists, letters, stories, comic strips, plays, etc. After seeing all these types of aspects, they will understand and will know the differences between them and to use these in an appropriate way.

When we are going to teach writing, children need motivation. We have to give them plenty of opportunities to write in different contexts. Also, we need to know the importance of the audience, not just the teacher; since children have to be an active part in this process. Another thing to take into account is why we write, because it is very important choosing the convenient moments and children will learn why they writing. A part from that, children have to write to communicate something to someone related to the real life. And the last feature that takes part in motivation is that writing must be meaningful, since it must have a direct relationship between meaningful and writing. If there is not a connection between these aspects, writing would not make sense.

We have to talk about the formal approaches to teaching literacy skills, because it necessary knowing how children should learn to write and also to read. We can find four aspects inside it. First, the emergent literacy (text); second, the language experience approach (sentence); third, whole words/ words approach (word); and finally, phonic teaching (letters/sounds).

The most important thing in this process is pre-writing, since we have to give them some tools and explain some activities which help them to do appropriately. In addition to that, in the same way that reading, there are some objectives in pre-writing. These objectives are: developing positive attitudes to writing (and reading) skills; learning about basic print conventions; taking part in school events related to writing (and reading); being able to copy short sentences with a personal meaning; learning some words by sight; starting to recognize some words and letters in books; and starting to learn the Alphabet. Another interesting thing is that, the types of activities that as teacher, we can present to them related with pre-writing. There are some examples such as make a pictogram (word level), design a T-shirt (sentence level), acrostic poetry, writing greeting cards, etc. When they do writing activities, we have to control it. We have to correct the facts (correct mistakes in sentences), re-ordering words (with cards for example), tables, etc.

                                                       

In conclusion, both reading and writing skills are necessary in our life and in our future. We have to develop these aspects to create a wealth of knowledge and have more possibilities in our professional future.

            

TEACHING READING

Nowadays, we have found different ways to teach such as stories, videos, etc. But, I am going to focus on reading stories, because as I see it is one of the best ways to teach different things in an effective way. Children can imagine their own worlds and understand values and the real word in a different way. With these stories, children can be close to the reality. An interesting thing is that we can find many books depend on the age of the student, because of this there is a wide variety.

It is very important knowing that there are four steps when we read a story. These steps are: pre-reading, before reading, while reading and post reading. The pre-reading activities that we can do with children are varied; these can be a domino, a song or something like that. Before reading we have to make some question or do some tasks about the story about their previous knowledge such as sentences: true or false, fill the gaps, discuss the topic before reading it, etc. When we are telling the story (while reading) we can ask some questions about pictures, words, characters, etc., because children have to follow the story and they have to be able to explain some details about it. At the end, when we have finished reading (post reading) the story, we can make comprehension questions or they can make a picture. These kinds of activities will change depend on the age as I said before, since students demand different things because of their level.

Another thing inside this type of teaching, we can find different ways of reading, these types are that the teacher has to read aloud and the students follow it in silence, the students read it silently and the last one is that the students read it aloud in turns. What about real life silent or aloud? There are some advantages and disadvantages. If we focus on reading aloud, we can find some advantages such as the students do an individual reading with the teacher, they can improve the pronunciation and rhyme and if they do it in pairs or in groups, they can help to each other. The disadvantages are for instance that the story will not be interesting for the students, some mistakes can be encouraged and it could be not a good way of using the lesson time.

It is important taking into account to start with texts (emergency literacy). Then we will continue with sentences, then with words and finally with letters. It is interesting that children predicting because these things connect with the real life. We have to show them this aspect.

My strong belief is that as teachers we have to take part in school events related to reading and also writing with children. We have to teach them that reading is important and fun too. Besides we can catch their attention decorating the class with labels (put a label on a table, put on the right places, etc.), posters, messages (in a student´s birthday we can write a card) and reading aloud. We can show them these stories using traditional books, new technogies, etc. Also we can make gestures, use puppets, add voices, etc., to introduce children better in these readings.

 

Besides, we can talk about reading techniques and we will use them depending on what type of thing we want to do in that moment. For example, we can use skimming (reading a text in order to understand the gist), scanning (reading a text quickly in order to obtain specific information), intensive reading (reading in detail with specific learning aims and tasks), extensive reading (reading text for enjoyment and to develop general reading skills), predicting, etc. As I said before we can use them depend on the moment. For instance, if we can know what kind of prior knowledge that children have, we will use predicting technique; if we want that they read and understand everything, we will use intensive technique and so on.

The most important thing, it is the age of student as I said before, since we will choose one book or another or a technique or another. If children are babies, a good book will be Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See, because this book stimulating them with pictures and colours. In the case that children are in Infant, there are a lot of books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Rainbow Fish, etc. If children are in Primary, we can use Monkey Puzzle, Room on the Broom, etc. In addition to this, everything depends on whether we teach with books, since these stories have vocabulary, grammar, rhyme, phonetic, etc.

To sum up, I must say that reading is an essential thing in our lives and in our future. We need to learn to read for everything. As teachers, we have to read them or to teach them to read in a proper way. We have to choose a good book for them to teach values, vocabulary, grammar, etc., helping them to develop strategies and show them the importance of the imagination and the real world.