CHAPTER 4: Teaching the skills.

LISTENING:

In some books teachers can identify listening exercises by the title or a symbol of a
speaker.

Stories: children respond very well to these activities as a part of their language.

Songs and rhymes: they have advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages Disadvantages
Traditional songs  Usually well  Difficult and old –
known. fashioned vocab.
 Important cultural
input for students.
Specially-written songs  To practise a  Not form part of the
language point. students culture.
 Music from songs  Artificial and
in the students boring.
language.

Task listening exercises: Students listening to a recorder text and performing some sort
of task (with physical response or filling gaps)

Other task based activities are some sort of writing or drawing tasks.

Pronunciation models: Many course materials include exercises on pronunciation and

stress , here the emphasis is on sound not in meaning,these exercises should be done
without them looking at the words.Students say the words out loud as they do the
exercise and the teacher corrects them.

Modeling exercises: English will be modelled as an exercise on the tapes to perform

guided dialogues.

- Procedure: First ,explain the activity after ,play the tape, support the class with
the coursebook and model the dialogue with a good student, finally check
pronunciation and play the tape if necessary.
SPEAKING:

Speaking exercises are identified by the title or a symbol for example a pair of lips.

Apart from the oral exercises taught , it is important the children have the opportunity to
speak English in their basic classroom communication.

The teacher has to make sure that the students understand because many exercises could
fail for this reason.

Oral drills: the exercises which require students to listen to words or sentences and
repeat them; there are lots of strategies to use in class and not keep a monotonous class.

- Work in groups: Use stress intonation and tone emphasizing a particular

utterance in the sentence and the students can change the meaning of the words.
- Use physical involvement: the approach of Total Physical Response (TPR) is
important when the students are doing oral drills to make the sentences much
more realistic.
- Use language that students know.

Some of these activities are “True or False drills” and “Throw in wild cards.”

Role plays: are small dialogues for practice in a particular structure or function there
are many models for role plays in the course book

The procedure for role-plays is:

1° Students familiarize themselves with the dialogue ,

2° The teacher divides the class into the pairs

3° Let students act out their role plays ,next the teacher walks around correcting errors.

4° Students swap roles and repeat the dynamic.

Information gaps: contrasting what students they hear or read with what they see, and
the students are asked to provide information that is missing or to correct wrong
information.

Acting: students act out scenes from stories

READING:

This skill has to be developed in L2 after they have used this in their own language.

Decodification: this is the correct pronunciation of the words and always be done aloud
and always following a model from the teacher or the tape.

Reading with understanding:

 - Guessing the meaning of unknown words, it can be difficult if the text has words
difficult to assume.
- Using readers there's a big list of guided reading material to encourage the
students to read outside the classroom.

WRITING:

The skill of writing consists in adapt students into a simple writing text to become more
active developing this skill.

Copying: to mantain the profiency in the language.

Filling in: the children read the sentence with the word missing and fill in the word by
choosing from a list.

Altering / writing to a model: students write a small passage changing the key words
to alter the meaning.

The written comprehension occurs when the teacher gives an exercise ,then students
will have to use their own words to be able to show what they are comprehending

It is quite important students produce short pieces of work making sure that the teacher
provides models they need.
Chapter 5: Getting to know your class.

When students start a new year they do not know every classmates for this reason is
important some activities:

Familiarization activities when the teacher will be able to see who is assertive and
active in group or pair group and who is less able to assert

- Activity number one name badges:

1° Ask the children to glue a photograph onto a cards, then students write their
names like “My name is Maria”, put the photographs on their chest, ask them to
organize themselves in line in alphabetical order and finally correct them if
necessary.

Other activities adapting for older children in adapting for higher levels is “Who am I”.

- “Whose feet?” the teacher has to identify the children by looking only at their
feet.
- Information charts:the charts should be mounted and pinned up on the Wall
for later use when the students are practising specific laguage structures.
- Birthday Wheel: games when it is comebody´s birthday and sing “Happy
Birthday to you”.
- Preferences pie charts:for showing proportions and work well with dialogues
(quiestionnaires).
- Height and weight the graphs:by making diagrams to explain them.
- Changes in nature flow chart:by using conjunctions at primary school
specially.
- Family tree:choose the web of family members to explain into the classroom.

Rules for the classroom:

Is important to stablish the working rules for activities in the class at the begining of the
year, and remind students to respect them.

Another important advice is group students in groups in such way that a “difficult
student” is helped by others, if he/she does not change the attitudes, the teacher might
apply activities to join the group.