DEVELOPING SKILLS IN ENGLISH

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DEVELOPING SKILLS IN ENGLISH
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Listening Skills

• What kind of skill is Listening?

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Listening Skills

• Receptive not Productive

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Listening Skills

• Why is this skill important?

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Listening Skills

• Students need to listen with understanding to
  spoken English both inside and outside the
  classroom.

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Listening Skills

• Students can develop speaking skills only if they
  develop listening skills.

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Listening Skills

• Can we identify all those activities where the
  students need to use listening skills?

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Listening inside the classroom

• Directions/instructions
• Lectures
• Discussions
• Talks
• Dialogues
• Stories
• Information in other subjects
• Descriptions

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Listening outside the class room

• News broadcast
• Telephone conversations
• Enquiries/meeting a stranger
• Folk songs
• Advertisements
• Interviews

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Activity 1

• Introduction 1
• Listening without purpose and without
  concentration chatting to a friend, listening
  to a radio.
• What kind of listening is expected in a classroom?

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Activity 2

• Introduction 2
• Focussed listening
• drawing students attention to something specific
  to listen for
• reason to listen is given
• teacher helps the students to listen by leading
  them towards the main points

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Activity 3

• Lost My Way
• The teacher asks one student to come out and
  stand at the front. Why?
• Before going to the listening exercise, she
  checks that the students know the places on the
  map and prepositions like near, etc. Why?
• What skill is being cultivated along with
  listening skill?

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Extensive Listening

• general information, main points given
• students do not understand every word
• ability to predict what comes next
• peoples attitudes and opinions

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Intensive Listening

• specific information, particular items to be
  noted
• organization of ideas
• sequence of events
• lexical items
• structural items their uses and meaning
• functional items their forms and uses

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Intensive Listening

• if there is dialogue, bring in two different
  voices for the different speakers
• break the passage or dialogue into 2.3 or 4
  chunks each of which stops at a sensible point
• isolate the more difficult sentences after which
  you may want to leave a longer pause to give
  students some thinking and catching time
• mark in the margins places where you could vary
  things like volume of voice, speed of delivery,
  quality of voice, expression also places where
  you might have to mime or act or refer to a
  visual to make it clearer.

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Why questions during presentation of listening
material?
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Two sign-post questions to promote purposeful
listening
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General comprehension questions including one or
two very easy ones to check whether students have
grasped the main ideas
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More specific questions to be answered after a
second hearing of the passage.

• .

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Some questions to focus attention on grammatical
relations, cohesive devices
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Some more testing questions for the brighter
pupils on inferred meanings, attitudes
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Follow-up questions to promote oral work based on
the same topic
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Allied skills with listening

• Predicting what is to happen next
• Guessing at unknown words or phrases without
  panicking
• Using ones knowledge about the subject to help
  one understand
• Identifying relevant points rejecting
  irrelevant information
• Retaining relevant points -- note taking,
  summarizing

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• Recognizing discourse markers well, oh, another
  thing is, now, finally etc.
• Recognizing cohesive devices such as, link
  words like which, pronouns, references
• Understanding different intonation pattern, use
  of stresses
• Understanding inferred information co-speakers
  attitude

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Activity 4 Identifying while listening and
after listening tasks

• While listening tasks
• Take notes
• Complete flow-charts
• Draw
• Fill in a table
• Follow directions
• Write

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After Listening Tasks

• Discuss for or against
• Place in correct order
• Continue the dialogue
• True or false
• Select a,b,c or d
• Compare or discriminate

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Reading Skills

• Using a reading text
• Teaching basic reading
• Reading activities

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Before you read

• Here are some statements about reading
• Silent reading involves looking at a text and
  saying the words silently to yourself
• There are no major differences between how one
  reads in ones mother tongue and how one reads in
  a foreign language
• To understand a word, you have to read all the
  letters in it to understand a sentence, you have
  to read all the words in it
• The teacher can help students to read a text by
  reading it aloud while they follow in their books

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Reading skills

• The reading process
• Reading for meaning
• Reading aloud

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Read why?

• Read for pleasure
• Read for survival
• Read for work
• Read to study

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Reading for meaning

• Involves looking and understanding
• making sense of the written text
• We do not say the words we read, not even
  silently
• We do not read every letter or word

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Reading aloud

• Purpose to understand and to convey the
  information to someone else.
• Not an activity we engage outside the classroom
• Involves looking at a text, understanding it and
  saying it

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A m was walk --- dn the s----t, c-r----g a
g---n -------

• Man walking elephant the onto reading to help

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Basic reading

• Eyes take in whole phrases at a time
• Our eyes do not move from word to word in a
  straight line, but flip backwards and forwards
  over the text.
• Attempting one word at a time slows down reading
  and very often we lose the sense.

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Basic reading

• School
• Class
• Student
• Teacher

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Basic Reading Activities

• Using word cards in Look and Say method
• Using word cards in Look and Do method
• Match sentences with picture match halves of
  sentences together or draw a picture

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Reading Activities

• Picking the odd one out

• Focus on the different spellings of the
• same sound

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Using a reading text

• What is involved in reading a text
• Does it help in organising reading?
• What can be done before and after reading?
• What is the purpose for which a reading text
  is used?
• Is it to develop comprehension skills?
• Is it a way of presenting new words and
  structures?
• Is it a basis for language practice?

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Two ways of reading a text

• Teacher reads aloud students follow.
• Students read silently on their own.
• Activity

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Comparing the two ways of reading

• Understanding the text
• Developing reading ability
• Control of the class

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A third way of reading a text

• students read aloud in turn
• Useful at the early stages helps them to connect
  between sound and spelling.
• Do all the students participate?
• Are the students attention focussed on
  understanding or pronunciation?
• Unnatural as most people do not practice it in
  everyday life.
• Takes up a lot of time as students read slowly.

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Activities before reading

• Presenting new words which will appear in the
  text
• Giving a brief introduction to the text
• Giving one or two guiding questions for students
  to think about as they read.

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Presenting new words

• Identifying words which need to be presented
  before the text is read the words which would
  make it very difficult to understand the text if
  not known
• Helping students to guess the meanings of words
  from the context helps in developing reading
  skills

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Introducing the text

• Presenting the theme
• To increase their interest and make them want to
  read the text
• Eg.Plane crashes in a desert questions like
  which plane, which desert, any survivors,
  how did it happen?, whose fault?, was anyone
  I know involved?
• Students can write 5 questions on the title or
  imagine what the title is going to highlight.

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Guiding questions

• Teachers to identify good and bad guiding
  questions questions to give the students a
  reason to read or lead them towards the main
  points of the text so that after the first
  reading they should have a general idea of what
  is about.

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Preparing for silent reading

• Activity
• A doctor who worked in a village was very
  annoyed because many people used to stop him in
  the street and ask his advice. In this way, he
  was never paid for his services, and he never
  managed to earn much money. He made up his mind
  to put an end to this. One day he was stopped by
  a young man who said to him, Oh, doctor, Im so
  glad to see you. Ive got a severe pain in my
  left side. The doctor pretended to be interested
  and said, Shut your eyes and stick your tongue
  out of your mouth, Then he went away, leaving
  the man standing in the street with his tongue
  hanging out.. And a large crowd of people
  laughing at him.

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Reading activity

• Write the new words in italics in two lists
• Words presented before reading and words you
  could leave for students to guess.
• How would you introduce the text?
• Choose two guiding questions from the ones given
• Was the doctor rich?
• Was the doctor unhappy?
• What was the young mans problem?
• Where was the young mans pain?
• What did the doctor advise?

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Follow up activities

• Discussion questions
• Reproducing the text tell part of the story
  using prompts
• Roleplay
• Gap-filling
• Any other