TECHNIQUES AND PRINCIPLES IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

SKILLS Macroskills

o Listening

o Speaking

o Reading

o Writing

Integrated skills

o To develop the skills in parallel.

Focal skills

o Exploits certain skills as tools for developing others. is a language skill that a student is currently working on.

Supporting skills

o These are language skills that can be used to support work on a focal skill.

Emergent skill

o They develop to some extent as a consequence of work focused on some other skill.

1. TEACHING LISTENING

Used most frequently by students.

Listeners actively involve themselves in the interpretation of what they hear.

Not all listening is the same that´s the reason why students need to develop different sorts of listening capabilities .

Listening involves a sender, a message, and a receiver.

The complexity of the listening process is greater when the receiver has lack of lexicon and grammar knowledge.

Teachers should help their students become effective listeners by modeling listening strategies and providing listening practice in authentic situations.

GOALS AND TECHNIQUES FOR TEACHING LISTENING

Teachers and instructors should produce students who can use listening strategies to maximize their comprehension, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension.

Focus on the Listening Process

Integrate Metacognitive Strategies

Before listening

During listening

After listening

Use Authentic Materials and Situations

STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING LISTENING SKILLS

Top-down strategies

• listening for the main idea

• predicting

• drawing inferences

• summarizing

Bottom-up strategies

• listening for specific details

• recognizing cognates

• recognizing word-order patterns

Teach students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their listening

Listening for Meaning

DEVELOPING LISTENING ACTIVITIES

Construct the listening activity around a contextualized task.

Define the activity's instructional goal and type of response.

Check the level of difficulty of the listening text.

INTEGRATING LISTENING STRATEGIES WITH TEXTBOOK AUDIO AND VIDEO

1. Plan for listening/viewing

2. Preview the tape/video

3. Listen/view intensively section by section. For each section:

4. Monitor your comprehension

5. Evaluate your listening comprehension progress

ASSESSING LISTENING PROFICIENCY

It must have a purpose

It must require students to demonstrate their level of listening comprehension by completing some task.

 2. TEACHING SPEAKING

Speaking involves three areas of knowledge:

Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary)

Functions (transaction and interaction)

Social and cultural rules and norms

GOALS AND TECHNIQUES FOR TEACHING SPEAKING

The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency.

To help students develop communicative efficiency in speaking, instructors can

use a balanced activities approach that combines language input, structured

output, and communicative output.

Language input comes in the form of teacher talk, listening activities, reading passages, and

the language heard and read outside of class.

Language input may be content oriented or form oriented.

Content-oriented input focuses on information.

Form-oriented input focuses on ways of using the language

Structured output: Students may have options for responses.

Communicative output, the learners' main purpose is to complete a task.

STRATEGIES FOR DEVELOPING SPEAKING SKILLS

1. Using minimal responses

2. Recognizing scripts

3. Using language to talk about language

STRUCTURED OUTPUT ACTIVITIES

Two common kinds of structured output activities are information gap and jigsaw activities.

Information Gap Activities

o Filling the gaps in a schedule or timetable:

o Completing the picture

Jigsaw Activities

o Jigsaw activities are more elaborate information gap activities that can be done with several partners.

Communicative Output Activities

o They allow students to practice using all of the language they know in situations that resemble real situations.

1. TEACHING READING

Reading Purpose and Reading Comprehension

Reading research shows that good readers:

•Read extensively

•Integrate information in the text with existing knowledge

•Have a flexible reading style, depending on what they are reading

•Are motivated

•Rely on different skills interacting: perceptual processing, phonemic processing, recall

•Read for a purpose; reading serves a function

READING AS A PROCESS

Reading is an interactive process that goes on between the reader and the text,

resulting in comprehension.

Reader knowledge, skills, and strategies include

Linguistic competence

Discourse competence

Sociolinguistic competence

Strategic competence

GOALS AND TECHNIQUES FOR TEACHING READING

Teachers and instructors should produce students who can use reading

strategies to maximize their comprehension, identify relevant and non-

relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word

comprehension.

INTEGRATING READING STRATEGIES

Before reading: Plan for the reading task

During and after reading: Monitor comprehension

After reading: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use

USING AUTHENTIC MATERIALS AND APPROACHES

1. The reading material must be authentic

2. The reading purpose must be authentic

3. The reading approach must be authentic

USING READING STRATEGIES

Effective language teachers help students develop a set of reading strategies and match appropriate strategies to each reading situation.

•Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions. •Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension. •Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions •Guessing from context •Paraphrasing

READING TO LEARN Reading is an essential part of language instruction at every level because it supports learning in multiple ways.

• Reading to learn the language• Reading for content information • Reading for cultural knowledge and awareness

Students need to follow four basic steps:

• Figure out the purpose for reading. • Attend to the parts of the text that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore

the rest. • Select strategies that are appropriate to the reading task • Check comprehension while reading and when the reading task is completed.

DEVELOPING READING ACTIVITIES

Construct the reading activity around a purpose that has significance for the students.

Define the activity's instructional goal and the appropriate type of response

Check the level of difficulty of the text.

Use pre-reading activities to prepare Students need to follow four basic steps:

Figure out the purpose for reading.

Attend to the parts of the text that are relevant to the identified purpose and ignore the rest.

Select strategies that are appropriate to the reading task.

Check comprehension while reading and when the reading task is completed.

students for reading.

Match while-reading activities to the purpose for reading.

AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT

It must have a purpose

It must require students to demonstrate their level of reading comprehension by completing some task

2. TEACHING WRITING

When writing, students have to learn to use the following:

the Roman script representing the language in print

the spelling conventions of words

the sentence level grammar (including punctuation)

the selection and structuring of information for different purposes/text types.

the use of a range of different language expressions to convey appropriate

levels of formality, politeness, directness etc. for the purposes at hand.

REMEMBER THAT:

 Written English differs from speech in a number of ways; some of them

are related to vocabulary and grammatical choices and others are related

to information structuring and whole-text organization.

“This way of thinking about writing, and learning to write within the

curriculum, suggests that knowing the basics such as spelling patterns of

words and aspects of grammar is important and necessary, but it

represents only a part of a complex development. In order to develop

pupils’ writing ability it would be helpful to take a ‘message first’

approach. In other words, we should consider grammatical accuracy and

other formal features of English with reference to what the pupil is being

asked to do in writing. Practically this means asking a number of

questions when thinking about pupils’ writing. ”

Some Questions to take into account when our students write: Does the content of a piece of writing match with what is expected?

Does the pupil’s writing meet the requirements of the appropriate norms/standards?

Is the information structured appropriately?

Is the writing presented in the expected form?

Does the text provide a continuous flow of clear and connected information?

Does the language used create the ‘right’ tone?