Listening, speaking, reading and wrtiting (II)

READING

Reading is one of the four basic skills needed to gain competence in mastering a language. It is a written receptive skill. To achieve full comprehension, it is necessary interaction between  the information given and the reader's expectations. 

1. Reasons for reading and text selection

The ability to read effectively is fundamental for survival in our western society. Whenever we read, we have a specific purpose in mind. Sometimes, we read simply to get the gist of th text or to locate a concrete piece of information.

Reasons for reading	Text selection
·         To get information or search for information	·         Travel brochures ·         Train timetable ·         Bus schedule ·         Public signs ·         Weather forecast ·         Menus ·         Internet: web sites.
·         To satisfy to curiosity about a topic	·         Magazine articles ·         Newspaper editorials ·         Advertisements ·         Internet
·         To follow instructions	·         To know how to use a game ·         Recipes ·         Maps
·         To keep in touch	·         Postcards ·         Letters ·         Notes ·         Messages ·         Invitations ·         Emails
·         To find out when and where	·         Announcements ·         Programmes

Text shoul be adapted to the learner's cognitive development. Texts should cover a wide variety of topic in order to reflect the diversity of interests present in the classroom. Text should enhance motivation and promote self-esteem. They should reflect situations where the learner can activate his/her schemata and enrich the interpretation and should introduce some of the most important cultural references of the target language. The selecte text should be the result of a needs analysis.

Types of knowledge	Text selection
Sytantic knowledge	-          Position or articles -          Position of auxiliary verbs -          Position of adjectives and adverbs.
Morphological knowledge	-          Word formation (affixation compounding) -          Cohesive devices
General knowledge	-          Background knowledge
Sociocultural knowledge	-          Cultural references
Topic knowledge	-          Previous ideas related to the content
Genre knowledge	-          Science fantasy novel -          Tale -          Poems.

The Organic Law for the Improvement of Quality of Education. The curriculum of primary education

The methodology should be communicative, active, participative and collaborative.

•        LOMCE-LOE

LOMCE is not a law itself, but a modification of the previous one, so the basic document is the LOE, so it introduces new aspects and some others have been removed.

LOMCE do change what LOE states.

The curriculum is Ceuta doesn’t introduce objectives, but for instance in Andalucía does introduce them.

•       OBJECTIVES

a.      To reduce variations in requirements and demands within education systems throughout the country.

b.      To lower the drop-out rates in compulsory educational levels (pupils under the age of 16).

c.       To improve levels of achievements in Compulsory Secondary Education.

d.      To establish a clear system of profess indicators according to education objectives.

e.      To increase the autonomy of schools.

f.        To generalize and spread the use of ICT within education.

g.      To improve foreign languages learning.

h.      To promote and update vocation training studies. 

•        KEY COMPETENCES

The nomenclature and definition of Key competences in the LOMCE is based on a European Commission document on 21^st century competences. There are seven competences defined by the LOMCE. These focus on preparing children for the future, developing skills and attitudes that will help them to enjoy a good quality of life and to successfully interact with others in the contexts they are likely to encounter in their daily lives.

1.      Linguistic competence

2.      Mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology

3.      Digital competence

4.      Learning to learn

5.      Social and civic competences

6.      Initiative and entrepreneurship

7.      Cultural awareness and expression

•          SUBJECTS

     Within the LOMCE subjects are classified in three ways:

1.          Obligatory core subjects

a.      These are the same for pupils throughout the country, so they should take up at least 50% of the school timetable.

                                                              i.      Natural Sciences

                                                            ii.      Social Sciences

                                                          iii.      Spanish Language and literature

                                                           iv.      Mathematics

                                                             v.      First Foreign Language

2.          Obligatory specific subjects:

a.      Physical education and (religion or social and civic values).

b.      At least one of the following.

                                                              i.      Artistic Education

                                                            ii.      Second Foreign Language

                                                          iii.      Religion

                                                           iv.      Social and Civic values

      Elective subjects dependent on the Autonomous Community or School: these subjects are designed by each of the Autonomous Community.

•          ASSESSMENTS

   3^rd Primary, this is a diagnostic evaluation to detect difficulties and implement improvement measures. Each Autonomous Community carries these out and there are no academic repercussions.

    6^th Primary, this is an external exam, the same for all students across the country. The Government will develop and design the evaluation criteria and characteristics for these tests. Competences are measured: what the students knows and what the student knows how to do. The result will be informative and orientative for Secondary Education.

• ICT

The LOMCE emphasizes the importance of digital literacy and the appropriate use of technology to assist learning and build children’s confidence with technology and a to allow teachers to create a tailored digital solution to suit their pupils’ needs and their teaching context.

• FOREIGN LANGUAGES

Command of a second language, or even a third foreign language is a priority in Education as a consequence of the process of globalization. Nevertheless, there are still shortcomings in our educational system.

The promotion of plurilingualism is an objective that cannot be given up in the construction of a European Project.

The law definitely supports plurilingualism, so that students can express themselves fluently at least in one foreign language. 

• 
  

Listening, speaking, reading and wrtiting (I)

These four are the Communicative Abilities that must be applied in our lessons.

1. INTRODUCTION

There is a long tradition about the writter language instead of the oral aspect, and a huge influence of the knowledge of the morphology and syntax rules. The dictionary and the book were absolutely necessary for the translation of exercises. 

Nevertheless, there has also been an important tradition of teaching oral lanuages nor only for classical, but also for modern languages. 

Immersion techniques and oral practice primarily with native FL speaking teachers, were other solutions proposed. Audiovisual methodologies re-discovered  the memorization of dialogues, giving a really functional value through the visualisation of meanings. The use of tapes, filmstrips, visuals, recorders and language labs were additional aids. 

2. ORAL COMMUNICATION: Listening / Speaking

When we speak we can make use of periphrasis, gestures, facial expressions,  When we listes, we do not have control over the speaker.

It it obvious that speaking often follows listening (...). Ofthen, but not necessarily, improvement in listening comprenhension will bring with it an improvement in speaking.

Most people learning a foreign language spend more time listening than speaking. The listening activity may range from:

  1. The face to face understanding of several utterances spoken by one or more other persons,
  2. Listening to a speech on the radio, TV, Internet,... when noise in the room may cause                           interference.

Oral communication is, as Byrne says, a two way process between speaker and listener and involves the productive skill of speaking and the receptive (not passive) skill of listening. Both speaker and listener have a positive function to perform.

The speaker has to encode the message he wishes to convey, while the listener has to decode the message.

3. LISTENING

Teachers should provide students with sufficient listening practice to enable them to understand with reasonable ease both native and non-native speakers of English when they speak at normal speed in unstructures situations. 

Listening is key to all effective communication, without the ability to listen effectively messages are easily misunderstood-communication beaks down and the sender of the message can easily become frustrated or irritated.

A student will learn a freat deal by listening to the teacher, who is the most important model on which the student will base his/her own behaviour. It is important, therefore, that you speak English at a speed consistent with normal stress and rhythm and intonation patterns.

It is sumply not sifficient to expose the learners to those samples of spoken language which are, for example, the presentation of the unit. There samples are simplified to provide the student with models for oral production.

A silent period is recommended for beginners. Together with a great deal of listening activities. The teacher provides comprehensible input. Use of CDs, video recordings, ICT and based resources. Beginners may feel paralyzed when they do not understand.

A single speaker with a clear voice is recommended is early listening tasks. When there are two or more speakers, their voices shoul be clearly distinguished. Children must begin by getting involved in the listening task. Following recorded directions with some descriptive clues is recommendable to improve listening skills.

If the task  is easy to perform and the comprehensible input understood, an exchange of role is the next step. The more advanced pupils  will adopt the leading role. Children will reproduce the TPR resource (toral physical response).

The visual,  context, gestures, drawing, body language

Reasons for listening

We, as non-native speakers of English, need to undestand more than we should be able to produce. The samples of spoken language in all course-books do not contain a sufficiently high propotion of the features of natural speech. The learners will need much more than this if they are going to be able to cope with the real-life language situations. 

Even though good listeners may be able to get every word that they hear, this is not their concern most of the time. Specify your listening objectives when you carry out a  listening activity.  

As long as you achieve your objectuves, you are good listener- whether you catch every word or not.

Listening Practice

If you feel that your command of English is inadequate to meet your academic needs, such as taking nothes in lectures, expressig yourself tutorials. 

If you are anxious that it might be a potential obstacle to your future professional purssuit. To be able to listen well gives you confidence in communication. You can only talk sensibly when you can understand what is said to you. 

DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! NOW BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

Resources

Tv: Chooses your favourite programs and make regular appointments with them. 

Rdio-like Broadcast (Podcasts, stream radio, ...): You are free to do other things while listening- having breakfast, a shower, even jogging!

Watch news broadcasts (in English, of course) already watched on Spanish TV. 

English listening online

Listening activities have been traditionally divided into: pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening. 

MODELS

Model #1 Listening and repeating

            - Learner goals: to pattern-match; to listen and imitate; to memorize.
            - Instructional material: Features audio-lingua style exercises
            - Procedure: Asks students to listen to a word, phrase or sentence pattern or repeat it and                        memorize it.
            - Value: Enables students to do pattern drills, to repeat dialogues, and  to use memorized                           prefabricated patterns in conversation; enables them to imitate pronuciation patterns.
                                                   
Model #2 Listening and answering

• Comprehension questions 
• Learners goals: to process discrete-point information; to listen and answer comprehension questions.
• Instructional material: features a student response pattern based on a listening question-answering model with occasional innovate variation of theme. 
• Procedure: Ask students to listen to an oral text from sentence length to lecture lenght and answer factual quenstions. Uses familiar types of questions adapted traditional reading comprehension exercises
• Value. Enables students to manipulate discrete pieces of information, hopefully with increasing speed and accuracy of recall.
• If Can increase students' storck of vocabulary units and grammar constructions. Does not require students to make use of information for any real communicative purpose beyong answering the question , it is not interactive two-say communication.

Model #3 Task listening

• Learner Goals: To process spoken discourse for functional purposes, to listen and do something with the information, that is, carry our real tasks using the information received. 
• Instructional material: Features activities that require a student response patter based on a listenig-and-using (i.e., "Listen-and-Do ) model. 
• Student listen, them immediately do something with the information received; follow the directions fiven, complete a task, solve a problem, transmit the gist of the information orally or in writting, listen and take lecture notes, etc. 
• Procedure: Asks students to listen and process information and ise the orally transmitted language input inmmediately to complete a task which is mediated through language in a context in which success is judged in terms of wheter the task is performed. 
• Value: the focus is on instrucction that is task-oriented, not question oriented. 
• The purpose is to engage learners in using the ingormational content presented in the spoken discourse, not just in answering questions about it. Two types of tasks are language uses tasks, designed to give students practice in listening to get meaning from the input with the purpose of making functional use of it immediately and language analysis tasks, designed  to hel learners develop cognitive and metacognitive language learning strategies (i.e., to guide  them toward personal intellectual involvement in their own language). 

Model #4 Interactive Listening

• Learner Goals to develop:
• Aural/oral skills in semiformal interactive academic communication
• to develop critical listening
• critical thinking
• Intructional material: Features the real-time/real-life give-and-take of academic commnication. Provides a variety of student presentation and discussion sctivities, bith individual and small group panel reports, that include follow-up audience participation in question/answe sessions as an integral part of the work. It follows an interactive listening-thinking-speaking model with bidirectional listening/speaking. It includes attention to group bonding and classroom discourse rules (i.e., taking the floor, yielding the floor, turn taking, interrupting, cmprehension checks, topic shifting, agreeing, questioning, challegint, etc.)

Speaking in the classroom

Activities based on repetition and imitation

Littlewood introducd these types of types of activities and considered them as preparatory or introductory activities, intended to prepare learners for communicative activities.

Drills are an example of this type of structure-orientated exercises. They hel to assimilate facts about new language and enable puplis to produce the new language for the girst time by helpung them master the basic structural patterns of the language.

They are usually very controlled and have a fairly limited potential. They shouldn't be used either too freqently ot for too long. 

In the sectio we can also include introductory activities as the ones called "ice-breakers" or "warming-ups" which do not notmally have a definite objective but are used to tell the students, in an indirect way, it is English class time. 

Controlled activities

Controlled activities le students develop confidence and the ability to participate in simple conversations. 

The advantage of these types activities over drills lies on the fact that they offer a well-defined context for practice.

Let us consider some traditional examples.

Question adn answer practice is one of the commonest ways of giving language practice in the classroom.

Other techniques are right/wrong statements and corrections. Students are asked to say wheter a statement is right ot wrong whitin the context of the text and, if it is wrong, they must give the correct version; or they are asked to correct statements. 

A pair work activities

Pair work activities provide students with a greater amount of meaningful practice. There are various types of pair work activities. 

Gapped dialogues. 

In gapped dialogues one of the speakers has to supply the missing utterances

Languaje games

They help to improve speaking skills, i.e. "Hide and seek", where Students "hide" and object somewhere in a picture. They then take turns to find our where the object has been hidden by asking questions like "Is it on the bookcase'"

Decision-making activities

They require students to make certain decisions. Moreover they emply the information gap principle, that is, students have to find our what each pair or group has decided. For instance, they are give a set of numbered places and they write the numbers on a street plan to indicate their positions, which their parternts have to guess. 

REALIA

Maps, menus, radio and TV programmes are another way of getting students to interact using fairly controlled language. For example, with maps students can practice giving directions. With menus they can decide what they are going to eat and drink. With TV programmes they can discuss what they are going to watch. 

Questionnaires

With the mixed structures, they are effective ways of getting STUDENTS to draw on all their linguistic resources. They involve identifying somebody who corresponds to a requirement of the questionnaire. For example, the questionnare may read: Find someone who...

Interactives activities

Discovering identical pairs: one students has to find which picture, for example, is identical within a group of four. Discovering missing information: two studetns have an incomplete table and they have to get missing information from other

Discovering secrrets (guessing games)

These fames are accurancy-focussed games whose purpose is the reinforce what has already been taught. For example "X-number of questions" (one player thinks of a famouse person or place and the others try to find it out by asking no mote than X questions).

Socual interaction

Social interaction, simulations: children act as themselves, role-play: they act as someone else. For role-play the class is usually divided into small groups who are given situations and roles to acto out. 

Teaching oral English through songs 

Songs are a pleasurable, enjoyable experience which aids relaxation and group dynamics and increases attentiveness ande receptiveness in the language classroom. They bring variety to the lesson. They are highly memorable and help internalise quite long chunks of language.  They are personal and thus allow identification with the lyrics. They provide authentic examples of everyday language. They allow the target vocabulary, grammar, and patterns to be modeled in context. THey foster the developmente of grammatica, lexical, and sociocultural competence, as quell as of the linguistic skills of speaking and listening. They contribute to the improvement of pronunciation, if speed and of fluency.  

The learners answer questions about the text of the sonf and create their own for other classmates to answer. Other comprenhension-checking activities involve the creation or completion of charts and diagrams about the text, or the invention of titles for each verse and for the overall song.

The students are asked to identify deliberately introduced (and plausible) mistake in terms of vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation. The children can also be encouraged to manipulate the text of the song, modifying grammatical elements within it (e.g. tenses or parts of the speech), changing the final words of some lines with other that rhyme, or partially inventing the song and subsequently comparing it to the original version

As slightly higher levels, the sylistic features and sociocultural aspects reflected by the song's background can also be made explicit in order to foster further appreciation of the song and of the country's history and culture.

A lip syncing talent show can be held, either individually or in teams, with several students being appointed as judges and of course, the students should be urged to sing a song. Recording it and playing it to improve pronunciation can also be a good indea

Linguistic Competence

Linguistic competence is the ability to understand and express messages accurately.

It implies:

1      Correct use of grammar

2      Vocabulary

Mastery of vocabulary is a basic ingredient for communication. No matter how much we know about language, if words fail to come, no message is conveyed.

“Knowledge of a language demands mastery of its vocabulary as much as of its grammar”

(Wilkins)

It could be active or passive.

Active: vocabulary you can understand and recall and it is ready to use for communication.

Passive: Vocabulary that when heard or encountered cannot be used automatically bit it can be understood.

When teaching active vocabulary a greater amount of practice must be given.

The types of words and vocabulary items are:

1.      Content words (vocabulary items that refer to specific meanings

2.      Single words

3.      Compounds words

4.      Word with a prefix or a suffix added

5.      Phrasal verbs

6.      Collocations (phrases composed of words that co-occur for lexical rather than semantic reasons: fast train and not quick train).

7.      Idioms

Steps in teaching vocabulary

Linguistic input is absolutely necessary for language acquisition and it is the teacher’s role to provide his students with it in the most accessible way.

The first step should be to help learners understand the meaning of new words.

The second is to facilitate the learning of the pronunciation. 

Third step: Reading and writing of words.

Finally, to make it easy for students memorize them. 

     Resources to teach meaning

1. Definitions
2. Synonyms
3. Antnyms/Opposites
4. Hyponyms
5. Translation

     - Visual, autal, kinesthetic and tactile aids

     - Realia, mime, facial expressions and gestures

     - Flashcards, wall charts, photohtaphs or simple drawings 

    When to teach words

  Words connected with a particular function. When teaching how to perform the function: nice to meet you. Lexical sets. They can be pre-taught bedore dealing with the topic they are related to. But once isolated words hace been presented, they should be repeated in meaningful conexts.

    Study techniques

There are a few techniques that can help students memorize words. Say the word and try to see what it means in your mind. Use your senses: its smell, its taste, what it looks like, ...

Write the word while you say it & visualize ir. Copy words & keep them in a vocabulary notebook. You can copy them: in alphabetical order, in lexical fields. While you write words, say and try to visualize them in your mind. 

1. Prepare cards: (side A) a picture of the meaning/ (side B) Spelling+ponuntiation+the word in context (in a sentence)+ translation (?)
2. Invent key words that will remind you of them: chest-Chester = bad for your chest.
3. Revise the words and check if you remember them. For this you can use:
1. word cards
2. lists of words with their Spanish equivalents
3. Use a dictionary

   Memorizing words

By doing activitiens and exercises and playing games. 

"Other thing beihg equial, a colour picture will be remembered longer than a black and white picture; a sentence spoken by skilled actress will make more of an impression than the same sentence read in the 'now-listen.carefully' used by some teachers"

 Vocabularity activities

Variety is a very important facto here, since children get enthusiastic easily but they also get tired and lose concentration fast.

Listen-and-do-something type: listen and point, listen and colour, listen and draw, listen and cirle, listen ad tick/cross, listen and order, listen and follow instructions, listen and identify, listen and label, and listen and raise your hand when you hear a specific word.

Mixed types of techniques: Classification, association, memorization, ...

Listen and say, listen and repeat, listen, point and name, listen and complete words, match words with definitions, match synonyms or opposites, find the odd one out, group words belonging to the same semantic dielfs, and bainstorm round a word.

Games. Grammar, vocabulary, pranuciation and spelling. Cardboard games (bingo, dominoes, nought and crosses, etc). Memory games (Kim´s game, disappearing pictures…). Guessing games (guess the person, riddles…). Miscellaneous games. E.g. “Simon says” based on Asher´s Total Physical Response Method