Effective Language Learning: Subskills, Techniques, and Activities
3 Specific Reading/Listening Subskills + Examples
- Identifying topic
- Recognizing specific words/sounds (decoding – look and say)
- Confirming predictions or guesses
Intensive and Extensive Language Practice
Extensive listening/reading: is the action of listening/reading a language in real life (outside the classroom) by yourself and for pleasure.
- News, films, songs, series, podcasts, magazines, newspapers.
Intensive listening/reading: is the action of listening/reading a language in a classroom. The aim is to develop the subskills.
- Textbook and audios from the textbook.
- In intensive reading/listening, students should read or listen with a task/purpose in mind.
- In Primary, we use an intensive listening/reading structure: Pre-listening/reading, While-listening/reading and Post-listening/reading.
Pre-Reading Stage
The pre-reading stage is very important since it activates the previous knowledge of the students and can teach some necessary vocabulary so that they understand the reading.
In addition, it creates a context that facilitates the understanding of the text and at the same time motivates the student.
Prediction Tasks
The benefits of prediction tasks are that they prepare students about what they are going to hear, and they allow them to remember their previous knowledge about the topic and the genre of the listening (Knowledge Schemata).
Read/Play More Than Once
Audios and videos should be played more than one time in class because it allows students to develop different subskills (sounds, intonation, the use of certain words or grammar) and get the maximum details from the hearing.
1st time: general information. 2nd time: specific information.
*They have to read/listen with a purpose, that´s why we show the questions/task before.
Pre-Teach Vocabulary
Pre-teach vocabulary is the action of teaching the vocabulary that is necessary for the topic/task or the one that is impossible to guess from the context.
*It should be done before the listening or reading.
Authentic Texts
Authentic texts are more motivating for the students. Authentic text provides natural scaffolding for the readers, the structure and patterns of real language support comprehension. Also, it helps the students to understand how language works in the real world and invites them to take part in that world. That’s why it’s always better to use authentic texts with our students.
On the other hand, there are some disadvantages by using authentic texts. Sometimes the text is not focused on what we want to teach to our students, also it takes more time for the teacher to prepare that kind of text. We need to select really good texts, because some are too difficult to understand or long for our students.
Information Gap
Information gap speaking task: is a task where students need information from other students.
They have to interact in order to share the information and “bridge the gap” between them.
The benefits of having an information/opinion gap are that language practice is much more meaningful because students ask questions with a real purpose. It provides some choice to express yourself. Also you get feedback from another person and it shows understanding.
We can make the information gap more powerful with these examples: Spot the difference. Find someone who. Role plays (mingling).
Feedback
In controlled practices, we correct mistakes that are related to the target language, lexis, grammar or pronunciation. 1st Content – 2nd Form.
- Feedback on the spot: accuracy and form (linguistic).
- Delayed feedback: fluency and content.
Task Controlled Communicative + Information Gap
- Spot the difference. Find someone who. Role plays (mingling).
Controlled Practice +
Controlled practice is used to describe exercises that are designed to re-enforce a specific language point and require a particular answer.
Pure fluency speaking is not enough because every speaking task requires some “control”, such as language output, degree of choice or cognitive load.
Oral Drills
The benefits of oral drills are that we provide an excellent and fun support of pronunciation and grammar fluency.
- Repetition: choral, individual, half chorus, chants. E.g. Model and drill the correct pronunciation of “Spain”, “mountain”, “friends”, etc.
- Substitution: E.g. Use substitution drills to practice the structure “I’ve got a …”
- Transformation: E.g. Use transformation drilling to model + practice verb TO BE
“I am…You are…He/She is…”
- Back-chaining: E.g. How to borrow something using back-chaining “…, please?; borrow your…, please?; Can I borrow your…, please?”
Skimming vs Scanning
Skimming is reading a text quickly to get a general idea of meaning.
- Examples in real life: see what is in the news, to see through a catalog to choose an offer, to see through a text to decide if read it or not.
- Examples of classroom activities: give the students some news or articles and give them two minutes to obtain the main idea.
Scanning is reading a text quickly in order to get specific information.
- Examples in real life: find your name on a list, find the time of a specific train on a timetable, check at what time a program is on TV.
- Examples of classroom activities: scanning race, find a word in a dictionary, check the date of a historical event in the text.
English Tricky
The problem with English is decoding:
- Lots of homophones.
- More consonant digraphs e.g. [ck], [gh] and trigraphs [ght] [tch] – also called consonant clusters.
- Approximately the same letters, but more sounds (12 vowels, 24 consonants).
- The correspondence grapheme-phoneme is not as stable/predictable in English as it is in Spanish.
* The correspondence grapheme-phoneme is not one to one because same phoneme with different letters (convergence) and one letter with different phonemes (divergence).
Spanish: L24 P24. English: L 26 P 44
Look and Say + Phonics
The difference of these two complementary approaches is:
Look and say the words (called sight words): students learn to say and read new words in context. The whole word recognition is helped by using printed material, for example, word cards for labeling and directions.
- Activities: Word cards for labeling objects of the classroom (chair, table, wall, door, window, etc.) or Picture matching with the written word.
Phonics (letters used to make sounds): students learn the letters sound (phonemes), not the name of the letter. The sound recognition is helped by learning obvious letter patterns and playing with the sounds.
- Activities: Having the phonic alphabet and learning little by little. Flies sound letters: where they have to hit different flies, blend the sounds, and say the word.
“Tricky Words”
Tricky words are words that early readers struggle with because they cannot be spelled or read phonetically using the letter-sound correspondences known by the student. E.g: I, was, my, the, many, no, she, he, etc.
Many tricky words are ones that we use often, so it’s important to teach kids how to spell and pronounce them.
Stages of Writing
The main stages of writing are:
- Familiarization (letters and words): can be through “look and say” or phonics approach.
- Examples in letters: air/ back/ palm-writing.
- Examples in words: jumbled letters, word snakes, anagrams, crossword puzzles.
- Controlled writing (NOT authentic text): Repetitive and mechanical. Not usually communicative or creative. Allows learners to experiment with writing to gain confidence.
- Examples: punctuate a text. Write short answers to questions. Jumbled sentences to form a paragraph. Complete a text (with or without word bank). Use connectors/verbs/prepositions in a gapped text
- Guided writing (Authentic text and with communicative purpose): The learner produces entire sentences, but with significant support and guidance.
*Normally is related to a genre (e.g. survey, message, fact file, etc).
- Examples: Story maps, story patterns. Sentence frames. Mini books.
- Free writing (Little support or not): the objective is fluency on writing and genre. Students have the chance to be creative and express their own ideas.
*Instructions must specify audience and purpose.
* Usually related to a specific genre (letter, description, narrative, poem, essay, etc.).
Genre
Genre is a term used to classify types of spoken or written discourse. These are normally classified by content, language, purpose and form.
In Primary EFL we could work in genres like diary entries, short letters, short communicative messages, informal letters, poems, stories, notes, lists and recounts of experiences.
Correction
There are three basic approaches to correcting written work:
- Correct each mistake.
- Give a general impression marking.
- Underline mistakes and/or give clues to the type of mistakes made and then let students correct the work themselves.