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ESOL CURR & Materials DEV

Author: Glemaud, Marie
Creation date: Thursday, February 9, 2006 9:14:21 PM EST

What makes listening difficult?

Teaching listening skills is one of the most difficult tasks for any ESL teacher. This is because successful listening skills are acquired over time and with lots of practice. It's frustrating for students because there are no rules as in grammar teaching. Speaking and writing also have very specific exercises that can lead to improved skills. This is not to say that there are not ways of improving listening skills; however they are difficult to quantify.

One of the largest inhibitors for students is often mental block. While listening, a student suddenly decides that he or she doesn't understand what is being said. At this point, many students just tune out or get caught up in an internal dialogue trying to translate a specific word. Some students convince themselves that they are not able to understand spoken English well and create problems for themselves

List and describe the six types of classroom listening performance.

1. Reactive

Sometimes teachers want Learners simply listen to the surface structure of an utterance in order to repeat it back to teacher. This type of performance requires little meaningful processing.

2. Intensive: It is a technique whose purpose is to Focus is on components (phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markets, etc.)

3. Responsive

A significant portion of classroom listening activity consists of short stretches of teacher language designed to elicit immediate responses. The students’ task in such listening is to process the teacher talk immediately and to fashion an appropriate reply. Examples include:

Asking question - “How are you today?
Giving commands - “Write down these words.
Seeking clarification - “Can you repeat that?”
Checking comprehension - “How many people were on the bus when the accident happened?

4. Selective

In longer stretches of discourse students scan material selectively for certain information. The purpose of this is for students to be able to find important information in a field of potentially distracting information such activity requires field independence of nth part of the learner.
Example of discourse:
speeches,
media broadcasts
stories and, anecdotes
Conversations in which learners are “eavesdroppers.”

Techniques for promoting selective listening skill could ask students to listen for

People’s names
dates
certain facts or events
location, situation, context, etc
main ideas and/or conclusion

5. Extensive

This develops a top-down, global understanding of spoken language
Students listen to lengthy lectures or conversations in order to derive a comprehensive message or purpose
Students may have to use other interactive skills such as note-taking/discussions in order to understand.

6. Interactive

This listening performance includes all five above as learners actively participate in discussions, debates, conversations, role-plays, pair and group work.
The performance may be intricately linked to speaking in order to affect a genuine communicative interchange. Debates, role-play, panel discussions.

List techniques for teaching listening across the three proficiency levels, beginning level, intermediate level, and advanced level listeners.

Techniques for teaching listening will vary considerable across the proficiency continuum. The ever-present relationship among all four skills and the necessity in authentic, interactive classes to integrate these skills even you focus on the specifics of one skill area.

In an interactive, forum-skills curriculum, make sure that you don’t overlook the importance of techniques that specially develop listening comprehension competence.
Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating
Utilize authentic language and contexts
carefully consider the form of listeners’ response
Encourage the development of listening strategies
Include both bottoms-up and top-down listening techniques

Teaching Speaking

Author: Glemaud, Marie
Creation date: Saturday, February 11, 2006 6:53:55 PM EST

List the types of spoken language

1. Interpersonal (sometimes referred to as interactional)

2. Transactional

What makes speaking difficult?

1. Clustering: Fluent speech is phrasal, not word by word. Learners can organize their output both cognitively and physically (in breath group) through such clustering.

2. Redundancy: The speaker has an opportunity to make meaning clearer through the redundancy of language. Learner can capitalize on this feature of spoken language.

3. Reduced Forms: Contractions, elisions, reduced vowels, etc., all form special problems in teaching spoken English. Students who don’t learn colloquial contractions can sometimes develop a stilled, bookish quality of speaking that in turn stigmatize them.

4. Performance Variables: One of the advantages of spoken language is that the process of thinking as you speak allows you to manifest a certain number of performance hesitations, pauses, backtracking, and corrections. Learners can actually be taught how to pause and hesitate.

5. Colloquial Language: Make sure students are reasonably well acquainted with words, idioms, and phrases of colloquial language and they get practice in producing these forms.

6. Rate of Delivery: Another salient characteristic of fluency is rate of delivery. One of your tasks in teaching spoken English is to help learners achieve an acceptable speech along with other attributes of fluency.

7. Stress, Rhythm, and Intonation: This is the most important characteristic of English pronunciation, as will be explained below. The stress-timed rhythm of spoken English and its intonation patterns convey important messages.

8. Interaction: As noted in previous section, learning to produce waves of language in a vacuum- without interlocutors- would rob speaking skill of its richest component: the creativity of conversational negotiation.

List the five types of classroom speaking performance.

1. Imitative:

2. Intensive

3. responsive

4. transactional (dialogue)

5. interpersonal(dialogue)

6. Extensive (monologue)

Describe the seven principles for designing Speaking Technique.

1. Use techniques that cover the spectrum of learner needs, from language based focus on accuracy to message-based focus on interaction, meaning and in fluency. When you do a jigsaw group technique, play a game, or discuss solution to the environmental crisis, make sure that the lesson includes techniques that are designed to help students to perceive and use the building blocks of language. At the same time don’t bored your students to death with lifeless, repetitious drills.

2. Provide intrinsically motivating techniques. At all time, try to appeal to students’ ultimate goals and interest, to their need for knowledge, for status, for achieving competence and autonomy, and for “being all that they can be.” Often student don’t know why we ask them to do certain things; it pays to tell them

3. Encourage the use of authentic language in meaningful contexts. It takes energy and creativity to devise authentic contexts and meaningful interaction but with the help of a storehouse of teacher resource material it can be done. Even drills can be structured to provide a sense of authenticity.

4. Provide appropriate feedback and correction. In most EFL situations, students are totally dependent on the teacher for useful linguistic feedback. It is important that you take advantage of your knowledge of English to inject the kinds of corrective feedback that are appropriate for the moment.

5. Capitalize on the natural link between speaking and listening. Many interactive techniques that involve speaking will also include listening. Integrate speaking and listening; speaking goals, listening goals many naturally coincide, and the two skills can reinforce each other. Skills in producing language are often initiated through comprehension.

6. Give students opportunities to initiate oral communication. Part of oral communication competence is the ability to initiate conversations, to nominate topics to ask question, to control conversation and to change the subject. As you design and use speaking techniques, ask yourself if you have allowed students to initiate language.

7. Encourage the development of speaking strategies. Strategies such as these could be used in your classroom to help students developing their own personal strategies for accomplishing oral communicative purpose. For examples, ask for clarification, ask someone to repeat something, using fillers or using conversation maintenance cues.

List the two major approaches to teach conversation.

1. Indirect approach in which learners are more or less set loose to engage interaction.

2. Direct approach involves planning a conversation program around the specific micro skills, strategies, and processes that are involved fluent conversation.

What should be the goal of teachers of English pronunciation?

Our goals as teachers of English pronunciation should therefore be more realistically focused on clear, comprehensible pronunciation. At the beginning levels, we want learners to surpass the threshold beneath which pronunciation detracts from their ability to communicate. At the advanced levels, pronunciation goals can focus on elements that enhance communication: intonation features that go beyond basic patterns, voice quality, phonetic distinctions between registers, and other refinements that are far more important in the overall stream of clear communication that rolling the English or getting a vowel to perfectly imitate a “native speaker.”

What are the factors within learners that affect pronunciation, and how can you deal with each of them?

1. Native language-: Pronunciation difficulties can be overcome through a focused awareness and effort on the learner’s part.

2. Age: Remind your students, especially if your students are older, that “the younger, the better: is a myth.

3. Exposure: If class time spent focusing on pronunciation demands the full attention and interest of your students, and then they stand a good chance on reaching their goals.

4. Innate phonetic ability: If a pronunciation seems to be naturally difficult for some students, they should not despair; with some effort and concentration, they can improve their incompetence.

5. Identity and language ego: Learners need to be reminded of the importance of positive attitudes toward the people who speak the language (if such target is identifiable), but more important, students need to become aware of – and not afraid of – the secondary identity that may be emerging within.

6. Motivation and concerns for good pronunciation: You can help learners to perceive or develop that motivation by showing, among other things, how clarity of speech is significant in shaping their self-image and, ultimately, in reaching their goals.

When and how should you treat errors in the language classroom? What must you avoid at all costs?

The most useful implication of Vigil and Oller’s model for determining how you will administer error in that cognitive feedback must be optimal in order to be effective. Too mush negative cognitive feedback-a barrage of interruptions, corrections, and overt attention to malformations-often leads learners to shut off their attempts at communication. They perceive that so much is wrong with their production that there is little hope of getting anything right. On the other hand, too much positive cognitive feedback-willingness of the teacher-hearer to let errors go uncorrected, to indicate understanding when understanding may not had occurred-serves to reinforce the errors of the speaker-learner. The result is the persistence, and perhaps the eventual fossilization, of such errors. The teacher must be very careful to discern the possible reinforcing consequences of neutral feedback. What we must avoid at all cost is the administration of punitive reinforcement-correction that is viewed by learners as an effective red light- devaluing, dehumanizing, or insulting them.

Teaching Reading

Author: Glemaud, Marie
Creation date: Wednesday, February 15, 2006 9:48:23 PM EST

When considering the ESL student's needs describe how to enlighten your students on features of different types of written language (genres).

Preschoolers and kindergartners are learning their A B C' by drawings of people, animals, and things that begin with a letter of the alphabet. Each day in the month of September you will wear costumes beginning with the letters of the alphabet. I will suggest that you will need your parents' help on picking out costumes. Are You Ready? Let's Get Dressed! Learning colors, exploring emotions, and reading are very important tools in learning and life. Practice recognizing your colors by using different objects. You can also learn to recognize words by reading along with your parent. The knowledge that you gain will help you with learning in the classroom

List and describe the seven characteristics mentioned in the textbook.

1. Permanence: spoken language is fleeing. Once you speak a sentence, it vanishes(unless there is a tape recorder around) Writing language is permanent and therefore the reader has an opportunity to return again and again, if necessary to a word of phrase or sentence, or even a whole text.

2. Processing time: A good deal of emphasize is place on reading speed in our fast-pace. It is good because the reader can indeed capitalize on the nature of the printed word and develop very rapid reading rates. The bad new is that many “slow” readers can feel inferior.

3. Distance: The written word allows, message to be sent across two dimensions: physical distance and temporal distance.

4. Orthography: The orthography of a language is the set of symbols used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs correctly, including spelline, punctuation, and capitalization.

5. Complexity: You might be tempted to say that writing is more complex than speech that would be difficult to demonstrate. Writing and speech represent different modes of complexity, and most salient different is the nature of clause.

6. Vocabulary: vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language.

7. Formality: Writing is quite frequently more formal than speech. Formality refers to prescribed forms that certain written message must adhere to.

List and describe strategies for Reading Comprehension.

Identify the Purpose in Reading: Efficiency reading consist of “read” and perhaps were rather slow in the process. By doing so, you know what you’re looking for and can weed out potential distracting information.

Use Graphemic Rules and Patterns to Aid in Bottom-Up Decoding (especially for beginning level learners): At the beginning levels of learning English, one of the difficulties students encounter in learning to read is making the correspondences between spoken and written English. In many cases, learners have become acquainted with oral language and have some difficulty learning spelling conventions.

Use Efficient Silent Reading Techniques for Relatively Rapid Comprehension (for intermediate to advance levels): Intermediate-to-advanced level students need to be speed readers, but you can help them increase efficiency by teaching a few silent reading rules. Reading speed is usually not much of an issue for all but the most advanced learners.

Skim the Text for Main Ideas: Skinning consists of quickly running one’s eyes across a whole text for its gist. It is the most valuable strategies for learners. It gives readers the advantage of being able to predict the purpose of the passage, the main topic, or message, and possibly some of the developing or supporting ideas.

Scan the Text for Specific Information: Is quickly searching for some particular piece or pieces of information in a text. Its purpose is to extract specific information without reading through the whole text.

Use Semantic Mapping or Clustering: The strategy of semantic mapping, or grouping ideas into meaning clusters, helps the reader to provide some order to the chaos.

Guess when you aren’t certain: The key to succeed guessing is to make it reasonable accurate by encouraging learners to use effective compensation strategies in which they fill gaps in their competence by intelligent attempts to use whatever clues are available to them.

Analyze Vocabulary: Learners can analyze s word in term of what they know about it. They can look for the following:

· Prefixes

· Suffixes

· Roots that are familiar

· Grammatical context that may signal information

· Semantic context (topic) for clues.

Distinguish between Literal and Implied Meanings: This requires the application of sophisticated top-down processing skills.

Capitalize on Discourse Markers to Process Relationships: Many discourse makers in English signal relationships among ideas as expressed through phrases, clauses, and sentences. A clear comprehension of such makers can greatly enhance learner’s reading efficiency.

List and describe types of Classroom Reading Performance.

Oral and silent reading: At the beginning and intermediate levels, oral reading can

· serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills,

· double as a pronunciation check, and

· serve to add some extra student participation if you want to highlight a certain short segment of a reading passage.

The disadvantages of too much oral reading can easily some into play:

· Oral reading is not a very authentic language activity.

· While one student is reading, others can easily lose attention (or be silently rehearsing the next paragraph!).

· It may have the outward appearance of student participation when in reality it is mere recitation.

Intensive and extensive reading: Silent reading may be subcategorized into intensive and extensive reading. Intensive reading, analogue to intensive listening, is usually a classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. It calls student’s attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implication, rhetorical relationships, and the like.

List and describe Principles for Designing Interactive Reading Techniques.

In an interactive curriculum, make sure that you don’t overlook the importance of specific instruction in reading skills: ESL students who are literate in their own language sometimes are left to their own devices when it comes to learning reading skills. We often assume that they will good reading simply by absorption through generous offering of extensive reading opportunities. In reality, there is much to be gained by your focusing on reading skills.

Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating: focus on the goals of your students in learning to read English. Choose material that is relevant to those goals. One popular and intrinsic motivating approach to reading instruction is the Language Experience-Approach (LEA) where students create their own material for reading.

Balance authenticity and readability in choosing texts: keep language at the proficiently level of a set of students.

Encourage the development of reading strategies: to extend are you getting your students to use all the strategy t be successful in learning how to read.

Include both bottom-up and top-down techniques: Give enough classroom time to focusing on the building blocks of written language, geared appropriately for each level.

Follow the “SQ3R” sequence: A process consisting of the following five steps:

1. Survey: Skim the text for an overview of main ideas.

2. Question: The reader asks questions about what he or she wishes to get out of the text

3. Read: Read the text while looking for answers to the previously formulated questions.

4. Recite: Reprocess the salient points of the text through oral or written language.

5. Review: Assess the importance of what one has just read incorporate it into long-term associations

Subdivide your techniques into pre-reading, during-reading and after reading phases: The three framework to follow in teaching reading:

a. Before you read: spend some time introducing a topic, encourage skimming, skinning, predicting, and activating schemata.

b. While you read: Give students a sense of purpose for reading rather than just reading because you ordered it.

c. After you read: Comprehensive questions are just one form of activity appropriate for post reading. Discussion author’s line of reasoning, vocabulary.

Build in some evaluative aspect to your techniques: it is important in reading to be able to accurately assess student’s comprehension and development of skills. The following responses indicate comprehension:

1. Doing- the reader responds physically to a command

2. Choosing- the reader selects from alternatives posed orally or in writing.

3. Transferring- the reader summarizes orally what is read.

4. Answering-the reader answers questions about the passage.

5. Condensing-the reader outlines or takes notes on a passage.

6. Extending-the reader provides an ending to a story.

7. Duplicating-the reader translates the message into the native language or copies it.

8. Modeling-the reader puts together a toy, foe example, after reading directions for assembly.

9. Conversing- the reader engage in conversation that indicated appropriate processing of information.

Does the textbook lesson on rain forests (Figure 18.3) adhere to principles of teaching interactive reading? Ye, the text book lesson on rain forest adhere to principle of teaching interactive reading.

Skim Lesson 2 (Figure 18.4) and evaluate this lesson on the basis of (a) opportunities for students to learn strategies of reading and (b) the eight principles for designing interactive techniques (especially #3 on choosing texts). Balance authenticity and readability in choosing text. – keep language within the proficiently level of a set of students and suitability which mean material that students will find interesting, enjoyable, challenging and appropriate for the goals in learning English.

2007-01-15 22:13:52 GMT

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