DEVELOPING SKILLS IN ENGLISH Listening Skills What kind

DEVELOPING SKILLS IN ENGLISH

Listening Skills • What kind of skill is Listening?

Listening Skills • Receptive not Productive

Listening Skills • Why is this skill important?

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

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

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

Listening inside the classroom • • Directions/instructions Lectures Discussions Talks Dialogues Stories Information in other subjects Descriptions

Listening outside the class room • • • News broadcast Telephone conversations Enquiries/meeting a stranger Folk songs Advertisements Interviews

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?

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

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?

Extensive Listening • • general information, main points given students do not understand every word ability to predict what comes next people’s attitudes and opinions

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

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.

Why questions during presentation of listening material?

Two sign-post questions to promote purposeful listening

General comprehension questions including one or two very easy ones to check whether students have grasped the main ideas

• . More specific questions to be answered after a second hearing of the passage.

Some questions to focus attention on grammatical relations, cohesive devices

Some more testing questions for the brighter pupils on inferred meanings, attitudes

Follow-up questions to promote oral work based on the same topic

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

• 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 – cospeaker’s attitude

Activity 4 Identifying ‘while’ listening and ‘after’ listening tasks While listening tasks a. Take notes b. Complete flow-charts c. Draw d. Fill in a table e. Follow directions f. Write

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

Reading Skills Using a reading text Teaching basic reading Reading activities

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 one’s 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

Reading skills The reading process: • Reading for meaning • Reading aloud

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

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

Reading aloud • Purpose to understand 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

A m– was walk --- d—n the s ----t, c-r----g a g---n ------Man walking elephant the onto reading to help

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.

Basic reading • • School Class Student Teacher

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

Reading Activities • Picking the odd one out • Focus on the different spellings of the same sound

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?

Two ways of reading a text • Teacher reads aloud; students follow. • Students read silently on their own. Activity

Comparing the two ways of reading • Understanding the text • Developing reading ability • Control of the class

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.

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.

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

Introducing the text • Presenting 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.

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.

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, I’m so glad to see you. I’ve 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.

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 man’s problem? • Where was the young man’s pain? • What did the doctor advise?

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