Questions for discussion and practical tasks

1. Describe three stages in teaching reading: pre-reading, while-reading, post-reading.

2. Speak on some typical reading techniques

3. Why is teaching listening important?

4. What are the main principles of teaching listening to young learners?

5. How does a teacher choose a song for listening?

6. Specify three stages in presenting a song to young learners.

7. Choose any song and describe the procedure of using the song with young learners

8. Say how reading and listening are taught in secondary schools (use any standards textbook).

9. Prepare a set of three or four pictures. While listening to the story, students put the pictures in the correct order.

Transcript

Last night I went into a restaurant. It was an Italian restaurant. I sat down. The waiter came to me and gave me the menu. I looked at the menu, then I ordered spaghetti and a salad. The waiter didn’t say anything. I waited for about fifteen minutes, then the waiter brought me a hamburger. He put the hamburger in front of me, and I said: “No. this isn’t what I ordered”. So he took the hamburger away and I waited for fifteen more minutes and then he brought me the spaghetti.

Lesson 5 Formation of the basics of intercultural communication

Plan

1. Teaching speaking to young learners

2. Teaching writing to young learners

1. Teaching speaking to young learners

Young learners should get as many speaking opportunities as possible. The teacher combines various methods and tools: songs, games, chants, rhymes, etc.

Young learners are like sponges, they soak up everything we say and how we say it. Thus clear and correct pronunciation is of vital importance, since young learners repeat exactly what they hear. What has been learned at an early stage is difficult to change later on. With the help of mixed activities, such as dialogues, choral revision, chants, songs, poems and rhymes students’ speaking abilities grow, their pronunciation gets better and their awareness of the language improves. Choral reading of the short texts is also very important.

Textbooks are usually filled with situation dialogues, helping the students learn language in real-life situations. But learning these dialogues by heart is a definite no-no. It is much better and far more useful to substitute the words so that they are true to students and their world. Thus each student uses his/her own variation. Note: with young learners, grammatical points should be taught implicitly only, after they are 11 and up, the explicit approach can be used as well. The tasks for speaking should meet the level of the students. Teachers keep them interested by introducing new approaches to speaking in class. This could mean talking to different people, talking to different numbers of people, speaking as a whole class, half a class or in small groups.

For different levels in the same class tasks for speaking can be different. For example, the weaker students tell how many teddy bears there are in the song and the stronger ones tell what the teddy bears are doing in the song.

Some speaking activities are:

Action guessing game:

Teacher creates cards with actions written on them. He passes the cards around and has students mime the actions while others shout out what they think is happening.

Find someone who?:

Teacher creates a class set of cards, each with the name of an everyday object or word that students have already learnt. There are pairs of words in each set. Teacher gives each student one card and has him/her walk around the classroom to find the other student with the same card by asking, for example, ‘Do you have an apple?’

Guessing game:

This is an easy warm-up game that can be used to practise dialogue on any topic. It can be used for colors, emotions, vocabulary, weather, days of the week, months etc. One student takes a card with a given word written on it and looks at it without showing anyone else. The others have to guess the words by using appropriate language; for instance:

‘Is it Monday?’

‘No, it isn’t.’

‘Is it the day after Monday?’

‘Yes, it is Tuesday.’

The student who correctly guesses is handed the card. At the end of the game, the student with the most cards wins.

1 minute activity:

The teacher sets the task: ‘Talk about your favorite food for one minute’, ‘Talk about your favorite sport’.

Car race:

Teacher spreads vocabulary cards around a table in an ‘S’ shape and give each student a toy car or some other type of counter. With all students starting on the same vocabulary card, they take turns to roll a dice and move along from card to card. On whatever word students land on, they have to make a sentence using that word.

What’s missing?:

Teacher shows some vocabulary cards or real objects to students and allows time for them to study them for 30 seconds or more. Then he asks students to turn away and then removes one or more words/objects. Students turn back around and have to guess what’s missing.