3. Activities for practicing vocabulary

Drills (non-communicative exercises)

• Imitation of words, collocations, clichés, set expressions (saying them after the teacher or the speaker) with proper stress, focusing on some sound etc

• Word-building analysis (root, prefix, suffix etc)

• Grouping the words (according to the part of speech, prefix, topic, negative/positive connotation etc)

• Supplying hyponyms to a hyperonym (superordinate) (e.g. furniture, tree, flower, clothes etc)

• Odd man out ( a word that doesn’t belong)

• Gap filling (sentence level)

• Matching (a word to its definition, antonym, synonym, native equivalent)

• Mind maps (=networks = cluster diagrams)

Activities for developing receptive lexical skills:

• Reading vocabulary units aloud (to establish sound-graphic form correspondences)

• Matching a unit to its dictionary form and finding out its meaning in this very collocation;

• Filling in gaps in the text

• Sentence completion

• Choosing some units from the text (those units that belong to a certain topic, situation, have the same root etc)

• Deducing the meaning of words from their stem-building elements.

Activities for developing reproductive lexical skills:

• Imitation of the speech pattern

• Answering alternative questions

• Substitution

• Utterance completion

• Utterance expansion

• Answering questions of different types

• Using vocabulary units in learners’ own sentences

• Combining sentences into a monologue or a dialogue utterance

• Using vocabulary units in mini-texts.

The final activities are usually some communicative tasks. E.G Tell us what you do in winter. On Sunday? After classes?

Developing lexical skills learners simultaneously master some lexical knowledge that will provide for developing lexical awareness.

Lecture 6 Teaching Listening Comprehension

1. Competence in Listening comprehension. Factors that influence the level of listening comprehension

2. Difficulties which can be encountered in teaching listening comprehension

3. Stages of teaching listening and activities used at them

1. Competence in listening comprehension. Factors that influence the level of listening comprehension

Competence in listening comprehension presupposes learners’ ability to listen to authentic texts of different types and genres with different levels of their comprehension in direct or indirect communication. This kind of competence includes skills and sub-skills, knowledge and communicative abilities.

Skills and sub-skills of listening comprehension embrace the following ones:

• To recognize the communicative function of the text (e.g. invitation, persuasion etc)

• To obtain the gist (main ideas) from a text

• To identify specific details

• To distinguish main ideas from supporting details

• To predict the content of the text or the development of the discourse

• To infer the context of the discourse

• To recognize the speaker’s attitude towards the topic and towards the interlocutor or listener

• To infer the necessary information from the context

• To ignore unfamiliar language material, which is not important for understanding, etc.

The level of listening comprehension depends on the learners’ intellectual abilities development: anticipation, critical evaluation of the information they listen to, ability to analyze, classify and systematize received information etc.

Receptive phonetical, grammar and vocabulary skills are also important.

Knowledge includes linguistic knowledge, socio-cultural, pragmatic, socio-linguistic background knowledge (e.g. knowledge about communicative behavior of native speakers, addresses sir, so cannot be both teenagers).

We cannot ignore affective sphere: learners’ motivation is of paramount importance (thirteen or thirty drops – your life may be at risk).

Listening comprehension refers to oral speech, communication can be direct or indirect (through some devices: radio, disc, video, computer etc) It is reactive (not the initial step in communication). It is receptive (we receive information). It is internal by its character (takes place in listener’s mind) and results in understanding expressed verbally or by a non-verbal reaction.