Effective Language Teaching: Listening, Speaking, Reading, and Writing
Listening in Language Learning
Listening to Books: Teachers’ talk is a major source of language input for children. Students become accustomed to the intonation patterns and sounds that the teacher provides. Most students will be able to deduce meaning from the context or gestures used by the teacher in class.
Teaching English
Should start with listening and speaking. These are the two main skills to teach first, in order to read and write properly. Introduce them gradually. Use gestures along with messages to help students work out the meaning.
Affective Function
Teachers need to accept children’s comments in their first language and encourage them to contribute.
Strategies Used by Teachers to Elicit Information When Telling a Story
- Use repetitions
- Comprehension checks
- Confirmation checks
- Clarification requests
- Miming actions (non-verbal communication)
Listen & Do Activities
These activities are very useful as they can incorporate many different multiple intelligences, such as sticking, coloring, etc. They also allow teachers to see what children have understood.
Predictability Enhances Understanding
A clear pattern of the story, introduced with a similar phrase, helps understanding.
Are Listen & Do Activities Suitable for Both Older and Younger Learners?
Yes, the only change is that the instructions should become more challenging for older learners, along with the type of story.
Reading and Writing
First, children read in their mother tongue. Then, they need to be sufficiently competent to learn a foreign language. Children need to be literate in their first language in order to learn another. Reading and writing reinforce what they have learned orally. While learning to read, children make intelligent guesses (top-down processing).
Two Strategies
- Teach letter-sound correspondence patterns: Songs and rhymes are great for teaching phonics because they follow the same pattern, helping children learn how to write and read words.
- The whole-word method: Encourages learning some sight vocabulary that children can recognize when reading. This helps children to see and remember words as visual images.
Young Learners and Reading
They don’t have a strong background in oral English; they use guessing for words.
Reading Activities
Start with sub-skills (learning to decode familiar written language). In the beginning, the teacher might introduce written words to let children experience printed materials (e.g., labeling objects). This would make them more familiar with the words, and oral words can be represented in written form (using visual aids).
Connecting Spoken Words to Written Words
Use word cards (matching the pictures with the written labels).
Word-Level Reading
Memory card game (matching pictures and words). Children play in teams, picking up two cards at a time to see if they match. A lot of work with word cards will help children build a sight vocabulary of commonly used words in English.
Writing
Writing is a complex skill.
Activities for Younger Learners
Tracing and copying. Teachers can vary activities by introducing creative copying, in which children select which words they are going to copy from a list and add some of their own. Copying is also done after an oral activity. Word snakes (creating and solving simple puzzles, including word-level writing). Children can create their own crosswords. Guided writing activities with personally relevant messages.
Activities for Older Learners
Freer writing (recipes, shopping lists, etc.), using computers.
Writing Theory
- Writing at the word level: Making lists, crosswords, word games.
- Writing at the sentence level: Short letters, answering questions, simple poems, writing using pictures.
- Using formulas is a good way to introduce grammar (e.g., “My name is…”).
- Writing from personal experience.