The principles behind the teaching of reading.

P1: Reading is not a passive skill.

Reading is an incredibly active occupation. We have to understand what the words mean, see the pictures the words are painting, understand the arguments, work out if we agree with them. If we do not do these things - and if students do not do these things — then we only just scratch the surface of the text and we quickly forget it.

P2: Students need to be engaged with what they are reading. Students who are not engaged with the reading text - not actively interested in what they are doing - are less likely to benefit from it. When they are really fired up by the topic, they get much more from what is in front of them.

P3: Students should be encouraged to respond to the content of a reading text,, not just to the language. It is important to study reading texts for the way they use language, the number of paragraphs they contain and how many times they use relative clauses. But the meaning of the text, is just as important and we must give students a chance to respond to that message in some way. It is especially important that they should be allowed to express their feelings about the topic - thus provoking personal engagement with it and the language.

P4: Prediction is a major factor in reading.

When we read texts in our own language, we frequently have a good idea of the content before we actually read. Book covers give us a hint of what’s in the book, photographs and headlines hint at what articles are about and reports look like reports before we read a single word.

The moment we get this hint - the book cover, the headline, the word- processed page - our brain starts predicting what we are going to read. Expectations are set up and the active process of reading is ready to begin. Teachers should give students ‘hints’ so that they can predict what’s coming too. It will make them better and more engaged readers.

P5: Match the task to the topic. We could give students Hamlet’s famous soliloquy ‘To be or not to be’ and ask them to say how many times the infinitive is used, or give them a restaurant menu and ask them to list the ingredients alphabetically. There might be reasons for both tasks, but, on the face of it, they look a bit silly. We will probably be more interested in what Hamlet means and what the menu foods actually are.

We need to choose good reading tasks - the right kind of questions, engaging and useful puzzles etc. The most interesting text can be undermined by asking boring, inappropriate questions; the most commonplace passage can be made really exciting with imaginative and challenging tasks.

P6: Good teachers exploit reading texts to the full. Any reading text is full of sentences, words, ideas, descriptions etc. It doesn’t make sense just to get students to read it and then drop it to move on to something else. Good teachers integrate the reading text into interesting class sequences, using the topic for discussion and further tasks, using the language for Study and later Activation.

Teaching writing

The reasons for teaching writing to students of English as a foreign language include reinforcement, language development, learning style and, most importantly, writing as a skill in its own right.

Reinforcement: some students acquire languages in a purely oral way, but most of us benefit greatly from seeing the language written down. The visual demonstration of language construction is invaluable for both our understanding of how it all fits together and as an aid to committing the new language to memory. Students often find it useful to write sentences using new language shortly after they have studied it.

Language development: we cant be sure, but it seems that the actual process of writing (rather like the process of speaking) helps us to learn as we go along. The mental activity we have to go through in order to construct proper written texts is all part of the ongoing learning experience.

Learning style: some students are fantastically quick at picking up language just by looking and listening. For the rest of us, it may take a little longer. For many learners, the time to think things through, to produce language in a slower way, is invaluable. Writing is appropriate for such learners. It can also be a quiet reflective activity instead of the rush and bother of interpersonal face-to-face communication.

Writing as a skill: by far the most important reason for teaching writing, of course, is that it is a basic language skill, just as important as speaking, listening and reading. Students need to know how to write letters, how to put written reports together, how to reply to advertisements - and increasingly, how to write using electronic

media. They need to know some of writings special conventions (punctuation, paragraph construction etc.) just as they need to know how to pronounce spoken English appropriately. Part of our job is to give them that skill.

What kind of writing should students do?

Like many other aspects of English language teaching, the type of writing we get students to do will depend on their age, interests and level. We can get beginners to write simple poems, but we probably won’t give them an extended report on town planning to do. When we set tasks for elementary students, we will make sure that the students have - or can get - enough language to complete the task. Such students can write a simple story but they are not equipped to create a complex narrative. It’s all a question of what language the students have at their command and what can be achieved with this language. As we shall see with the four examples in this chapter, the models we give students to imitate will be chosen according to their abilities.

In general, however, we will try to get students writing in a number of common everyday styles. These will include writing postcards, letters of various kinds, filling in forms such as job applications, writing narrative compositions, reports, newspaper and magazine articles etc. We may also want to have students write such text types as dialogues, playscripts, advertisements, or poems - if we think these will motivate them.

Another factor which can determine our choice of writing task is the students’ interests. If everyone in the class works in a bank, we might choose to get them writing bank reports. If they are all travel agents, you can imagine getting them to write alluring advertisements for special deals. But, of course, this should not preclude using other types of creative writing with such groups.

When we have a much more mixed group - students, secretaries, doctors, teachers and police officers, for example - their interests won’t be so easy to pin down. At this point we will choose writing tasks which we think are generally useful but which, more importantly, they are likely to enjoy doing. Students may never have a need to write a scene from a soap opera, for example, but they might enjoy having a go, so it is worth doing.

There is no limit to the kinds of text we can ask students to write. Our decisions, though, will be based on how much language the students know, what their interests are and what we think will not only be useful for them but also motivate them as well.

50. Teaching listening

One of the main reasons for getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents — rather than just the voice of their teacher with its own idiosyncrasies. In today’s world, they need to be exposed not only to one variety of English (British English, for example) but also to varieties such as American English, Australian English, Caribbean English, Indian English or West African English.

The main method of exposing students to spoken English (after 1 teacher) is through the use of taped material which can exemplify a wild range of topics such as advertisements, news broadcasts, poetry readii plays, (pop) songs with lyrics, speeches, telephone conversations and manner of spoken exchanges. Teachers can imitate these, but good tapes; far more powerful.

The second major reason for teaching listening is because it he students to acquire language subconsciously even if teachers do not draw attention to its special features.

Lastly, just as with reading, students get better at listening the more they do it! Listening is a skill and any help we can give students in performing that skill will help them to be better listeners.

What kind of stening should students do?

The debate about the use of authentic listening material is just as fierce listening as it is in reading.

Listening demands listener engagement. Long tapes on subject which students are not interested in at all will not only be demotivating, students might well ‘switch off’ - and once they do that it becomes difficult for them to tune back into the tape. Comprehension is lost and lost listening becomes valueless.

Everything depends on level, and the kind of tasks that go with a tape. There may well be some authentic material which is usable by beginners such as pre-recorded announcements, telephone messages etc. Advanced students may benefit from scripted material provided that it interesting and subtle enough - and provided the tasks that go with it s appropriate for their level. What's special about listening? There are a numbers of ways in which listening activities differ from other classroom exercises: firstly, tapes go at the same speed for everybody. Unlilike language study or speaking practice - or even reading, where individual students can read at their own pace - the tape continues even if individual students are lost; listeners to a tape cannot flick back to a previous paragraph, re-read the headline, stop to look at the picture and think for a bit before continuing. On the contrary, they have to go with the speed of the voice(s) they are listening to. It is perhaps this relentlessness of taped material which accounts for the feeling of panic which many students experience during listening activities. It is especially for this reason that students have to be encouraged to listen for general understanding first rather than trying to pick out details immediately. They must get into the habit of letting the whole tape ‘wash over them’ on first hearing, thus achieving general comprehension before returning to listen for specific detail.

Listening is special too because spoken language, especially when it is informal, has a number of unique features including the use of incomplete utterances (e.g. ‘Dinner?’ serving as a perfectly functional way of asking ‘Is dinner ready?’), repetitions (e.g. ‘I’m absolutely sure, absolutely sure you know that she’s right’), hesitations (‘Yes, well, ummm, yes, possibly, but, er...’) etc. Experience of informal spoken English together with an appreciation of other spoken factors - the tone of the voice, the intonation the speakers use, rhythm, and background noise - will help students to tease meaning out of such speech phenomena.

Because of its special characteristics, teachers need to ensure that students are well prepared for listening and that they are clearly able to hear what they listen to. These and other concerns are summarised in the following six principles.

P1: The tape recorder is just as important as the tape.

However good your tape is, it will be useless if the tape recorder has a poor speaker or if the motor speed keeps changing and the tape goes faster or slower. You need to be sure that the tape recorder can be heard all round the classroom.

P2: Preparation is vital.

Teachers and students need to be prepared for listening because of it special features we discussed above.

Teachers need to listen to the tape all the way through before they ta it into class. That way, they will be prepared for any problems, nois accents etc., that come up.

Students need to be made ready to listen. This means that they will need to look at pictures, discuss the topic, or read the questions first, for examp to be in a position to predict what is coming.

P3: Once will not be enough.

There are almost no occasions when the teacher will play a tape only ones. Students will want to hear it again to pick up the things they missed t first time. The first listening is often used just to give students an idea of what the listening material sounds like so that subsequent listenin are easier for students.

P4: Students should be encouraged to respond to the contei of a listening, not just to the language.

As with reading, the most important part of listening practice is to dn out the meaning, what is intended, what impression it makes on t students. Questions like ‘Do you agree?’ are just as important as questio like ‘What language did she use to invite him?’

P5: Different listening stages demand different listening tasks.

Because there are different things we want to do with a listening text, we need to set different tasks for different listening stages.

P6: Good teachers exploit listening texts to the full.

If teachers ask students to invest time and emotional energy in a listening task - and if they themselves have spent time choosing and preparing the listening - then it makes sense to use the tape for as many different applications as possible.