Receptive Teaching Skills

1*What is listening comprehension?

Mention one of the problem a second language learners face?

is that even if we have carefully rehearsed a particular utterance and manage to produce it to a native speaker, it may well result in a torrent of language from the other person.
What do you think about native speakers accent?
I think that they speak so fast and beause of this we cant understand nothing, and maybe they dont have the patient to understand a L2 speaker.
Are there listening problems if you dont have a good English level, explain why?
yes there are, because you wont understand nothing what is the exercise about.Also because there are some words that we dont know what is the meaning, and during the exercise we lost time just thinking but sometimes inferring can help to have an idea.

2*What is successful listening?

What are the difficulties a student has in a listening activity?
To separate speech from non-speech sound seems a real achievement: the other parts of the process which we take for granted in our L1 - dividing an unfamiliar speaker's utterances into words, identifying them, and at the same time interpreting what the speaker meant and then preparing an appropiate reply- now become formidable tasks.

How can we avoid those difficulties?

*The syntax of the utterance has yo be grasped and the speaker's intended meaning has to be understood.

*We also have to apply our linguistic knowledge to formulating a correct and appropriate response to what has been said.Do you think it is important to learn a second language?
Yes, I think it is really important, because we can learn another culture and we can be able to communicate with other people; L2 could be more important for the society if our native language is not spoken by a big part of people.

3*One view of listening:the listener as tape recorder

What is the listener as tape recorder about?
Is when the student reproduce the information but not always understand it.

What do you understand as listening comprenhension?
is the ability that the listener's use for remember the message that they received.

What is the problem with the tape recorder in the comprehension of the message?
the problem is if we can be sure that the listener has understood what was said.

4*An alternative view of listening: the listener as active model builder.

What does the mental model listening involves?
It involves different methods so that students can practice their listening and they can have a bit more of this language.Learners can know more about this, for example: pronunciation of the words, social context to have a closer look.
What do you do understand by coherent interpretation?
I understand when students has knowledge about it, and it must be clear so that they can recognize all of this and they can try understand, and they do not try to guess the information or invent some things about the language.
What is the effect a listening has on speaking?
I think it has a lot of importance on Speaking and on the others skills because student can learn better with this model and to practice their pronunciation, to improve their reading, it is so helpful because they learn vocabulary and different thing that they need in her learning about this or different language.

Exposition

What makes listening difficult?

CLUSTERING: pick up manageable clusters of words , avoid not retainning long constituents or losing the idea paying attention to every word in a utterance.
REDUNDANCY: take advanse of reduncy in conversation to pay attention just to the sentences with new information. Be aware of insertions of “I mean “ and “you know”.
Reduced forms: As redundancy, reduced forms are very common in native conversation. Reduction can be phonological (“Djeetyeet” for “Did you eat yet “), morphological ( constractions like I’ll ), also syntactic and pragmatics.
Performance Variables: casual speech by native speakers contains hesitations, pauses, and corrections commonly. Also will include ungrammatical forms, some of these forms are simple slips for example “We arrived in a little town that there was no hotel anywhere”.

Colloquial language : learners who have been exposed to standard written English language sometimes find it surprising and difficult to deal with colloquial language(idioms ,slang, reduced forms and shared cultural knowledge).
Rate of Delivery: learners will nevertheless eventually need to be able to comprehend language delivered at varying rates of speed and, at times, delivered with few pauses.
Stress, rhythm and intonation: English is stress-timed language, English speech can be a terror for some learners. Also intanation patterns are very significant not just for interpreting straightforward elements such as questions, statements but for understanding more subtle messages like sarcarms, endearment, insult, solicitation ,praise,etc.
Interaction: to learn to listen is also to learn to respond and to continue a chain of listening and responding.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 252.
Listening exercise: http://www.esl-lab.com/rest1.htm
Ordering at a Restaurant
Instructions: Listen to the questions by pressing the "Play" link and then choose the best answer. See the Quiz Script here. Press the "Final Score" button at the bottom of the page to score your quiz.
1. PLAY:
A. Three people.
B. That'll be all
C. No. We're not ready yet.
2. PLAY:
A. I'll take a large Sprite.
B. I'll have a piece of apple pie.
C. French dressing, please.
3. PLAY:
A. T-bone steak, please.
B. Medium.
C. I'd like rice with my steak.
4. PLAY:
A. I'll have the salad, please.
B. I'd like the rice.
C. Bread, please.
5. PLAY:
A. Yes. I'd like more water.
B. I didn't order this.
C. Yes. The food is great.

Summary
Types of classroom listening performance

*reactive: The learner does not have to involve any understanding.
*intensive:the student focus in only thing,the learner has to single out certain elements of the spoken language.
*responsive: The teacher language elicits students’ immediate responses. Student listens to the teacher, understands and replies.
*selective:the learner does not have to process everything, but rather to scan the material for specific information.
*extensive: The learner is focused on a global understanding of the spoken message.
*interactive:Learners participate in discussions, debates, interactive conversations, role-plays, group and pair work.

Principles for designing listening techniques

*In an interactive, four-skills curriculum, make sure that you don't overlook the importance of techniques that specifically develop listening comprehension competence.
*use techniques that are intrinsically motivating: considerer the listeners personal interests and goals
*carefully consider the form of listeners responses: the use of authentic language real-work task enable students to see the relevance of classroom activity.
* encourage the development of listening strategies: design techniques in such a way the student responses.
*include both bottom- up and top-down listening techniques:
bottom-up:the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning.
top-down: the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language.
Listening techniques from beginning to advanced
The importance of listening comprehension in language learning is the techniques that are in the profiency levels how bottom-up, top-down, interactive types and activities.

Examples : types of listening exercises

http://www.esl-lab.com/trip1/trip1.htm
http://www.esl-lab.com/zoo/zoord1.htm
http://www.ompersonal.com.ar/firstcertificate2/listening/fce08a.htm
http://www.englishmedialab.com/survival%20English/listening/ticket%20to%20Glasgow%20.htm
http://www.englisch-hilfen.de/en/exercises_list/hoeren.htm

Microskills of listening comprehension (adapted from Richards 1983)

1. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.
2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.
3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their rolein signaling information.
4. Recognize reduced forms of words.
5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpretword order patterns and their significance.
6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.
7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.
8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules and elliptical forms.
9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.
10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.
11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.
12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.
13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.
14. From events, ideas, etc., describd, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.
15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.
16. Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.
17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appeal for help and signaling comprehension or lack thereof.
Reference: ANDERSON Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

Reading: is a process that requires an active participation on the part of the reader, also can help us build new vocabulary.

Models of the reading

bottom-up: emphazises a part of the reader's , contextual information.
top- dowm: emphazises what the reader brings to the text.
interactive reading: recognize the interaction between bottom-up and top down processes.

the process of the reading is about the differents steps in how to do a reading exercise.

Strategies of the reading

efficient reading: the teacher have to decide what is the right material, they have to use the text effectively also improve reading speed.

word attack skills: help students decode and understand unfamiliar words.

reading for plain sense text attack skills:the student have to understand the syntax of the reading also interpreting elliptical expressions.

understanding discourse: is the purpose of the reading it means that the student have to recognizing the text organization, or the presuppositions underlying the text.

Reading subskills

1. recognising words and pharases in English scrip

2. using one's own knowledge of the outside world to make predictions about and interpret a text.

3.retrieving information stated in the passage.

4. distinguishing the main ideas from subsidiary information.

5. deducing the meaning and use of unknown words; ignoring unknown word/pharases that are redundant, i.e; that contribute nothing to interpreting .

6. understanding the meaning and implications of grammatical structures.

7. recognising discourse markers.

8. recognising the function of the sentence- even when not introduced by discourse markers: e.g. example, definition paraphrase.

9. understandinr relations within the sentence and the text.

10. extracting specific information for summary or note taking.

11. skimming to obtain the gist, and recognize the organization for ideas within the text.

12. understanding implied information and attitudes.

13. knowing how to use an indez, a table of contents, etc.

Teaching English through English. Jane Willis. Ed. Longman. 1998, Edinburg pp.192

TESTING TECHNIQUES

OPEN QUESTIONS: can encourage learners to expand on their answers, which requires them to construct longer examples of language.

Characteristics that open questions have:

they will give you opinions and feelings
they hand control of the conversation to respondent
open questions begin with such as: what,why,when , etc.
they ask the respondent to think and reflect

reference: http://changingminds.org/techniques/questioning/open_questions.htm.

Ordering parts of a text

· Order by chronological events
· Logical events
· By context

FILLING THE GAPS

Context
Longer text
Higher level

MULTIPLE CHOICE

identify
Scoring easy
Rapid and Economical
Disvantages:
Cheating is facilitated
Knowledge

GUESSING WORD MEANING FROM CONTEXT

Encourage readers to make and test predictions.
it is very useful
Focussed mostly on evidende

INFORMATION -TRANSFER TECHNIQUES

Another set of information for testing students understanding of text is the use of information transfer techniques, often associated with figures (as before, this term is used to cover all non-linear material such as chart, tables, illustrations). The information in a text is transferred to a table or diagram (either provided by the teacher, or generated by students). In the process the text becomes reduced and its content is presented in a partly graphic or visual form. Some teachers may recognize this as a graphic outline.The language items are linked with the information structure and the ideas of the text

· Understand the main idea
· Identifying order
· Recognizing parts of speech
· Guessing meaning from context
· Inferring meaning
· Identifying order
HOW WORDS ARE LEARNED

Reference: Thornbury,Scott. How to teach Vocabulary, Longman, England, 2002, pp.185

Receptive Teaching Skills

martes, 10 de agosto de 2010

Reflective comment

Material Design

Lesson Plan

Journal

Theoretical Framework

Introduction of the Course

Program of the course

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