WRITING

Teaching Writing: Strategies

The most important factor in writing exercises is that students need to be personally involved in order to make the learning experience of lasting value. Encouraging student participation in the exercise. The teacher should be clear on what skills he/she is trying to develop. Next, the teacher needs to decide on which means (or type of exercise) can facilitate learning of the target area.

Choosing the target area depends on many factors; What level are the students?, What is the average age of the students, Why are the students learning English, Are there any specific future intentions for the writing (i.e school tests or job application letters etc.). 

Having decided on the target area, the teacher can focus on the means to achieve this type of learning. As in correction, the teacher must choose the most appropriate manner for the specified writing area. 

With both the target area and means of production, clear in the teachers mind, the teacher can begin to consider how to involve the students by considering what type of activities are interesting to the students; Are they preparing for something specific such as a holiday or test?, Will they need any of the skills pragmatically? What has been effective in the past? A good way to approach this is by class feedback, or brainstorming sessions. 

Finally, the question of which type of correction will facilitate a useful writing exercise is of utmost importance. Here the teacher needs to once again think about the overall target area of the exercise. 

Exercise Pre-writing Activity #1

Time allotment (5-10 minutes)

 

Give each student any book or magazine to use (e.g., Readers' Digest, anthologies). The teacher should have a selection also, in order to model the process.

Have students open their books or magazines at any page and choose a word at random—the first word that jumps off the page at them--and record this as Word #1; close the book.

 

Continue this until each student has four words recorded.  Students then focus for about one minute on each word separately, and list all their thoughts, ideas and associations that the word generates. Students then begin to make connections among the four words and their lists of personal associations by writing phrases, sentences, and ideas that demonstrate a relationship among the words. Students now have had a writing warm-up and may continue developing the ideas generated or bank these ideas for another day's writing.

 

Exercise Pre-writing Activity #2

Time allotment (5-12 minutes)

 

      Teachers may request that students bring pictures of people, or the teacher may supply them (photographs or pictures clipped from magazines). Each picture should show several people in sufficient detail to reveal size, facial expression, dress, and other facets of character.

     Quickly walk the students through this activity, question by question, so they record the first thoughts and reactions that the pictures generate, rather than dwelling too long on one question. The teacher should ask students to examine their pictures closely, and explain that they will need to use their imagination for the activity. Some questions the teacher might ask are:

 
- Who is the main character in the picture?
- What is an appropriate name for this character?
- How old is this character?
- What emotions is this character showing in the picture? Describe the evidence that you have for this (e.g., facial expression, gestures).
- What kind of work might the character do for a living? Give reasons to support your decision.
- What might the person be thinking or saying? What makes you imagine this?
- What other characteristics are revealed by the character's dress and stance?
- What might have happened before the picture was taken? What might happen next?
- How are the other characters in the picture related to the main character? What evidence makes you think so?
- What is the attitude of the main character to the other characters? What is the attitude of the other characters to the main character? What are some possible reasons for these attitudes?
- What might it be like to be the main character or one of the other characters?

Instruct students to record ideas briefly, using phrases and words rather than sentences. Students then may take the opportunity to develop their ideas further, or save their notes and ideas for use at a later date.

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READING

Goals and Techniques for Teaching Reading

Instructors want to produce students who, even if they do not have complete control of the grammar or an extensive lexicon, can fend for themselves in communication situations. In the case of reading, this means producing students who can use reading strategies to maximize their comprehension of text, identify relevant and non-relevant information, and tolerate less than word-by-word comprehension. 


Before reading: Plan for the reading task

• Set a purpose or decide in advance what to read for
• Decide if more linguistic or background knowledge is needed
• Determine whether to enter the text from the top down (attend to the overall meaning) or from the bottom up (focus on the words and phrases)

During and after reading: Monitor comprehension

• Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses
• Decide what is and is not important to understand
• Reread to check comprehension
• Ask for help

After reading: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use

• Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area
• Evaluate overall progress in reading and in particular types of reading tasks
• Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task
• Modify strategies if necessary

Exercise:

THE REAL THING?
One of the most successful commercial products ever launched is said to have come about as the result of a mistake. In 1896, Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, was selling a nerve tonic known as ‘French Wine Cola – Ideal Nerve Tonic’. By accidentally adding fizzy water instead of still water to the recipe, a pharmacist called John S. Pemberton invented what has today become the most popular soft drink in the world: Coca-Cola. Along with its closest rival – Pepsi – which appeared on the market three years later, Coke has enjoyed phenomenal success worldwide, particularly in the past fifty years. Indeed, old Coke bottles and ‘limited edition’ cans can often fetch considerable sums from collectors, and there are even stores which deal exclusively in Coke products and memorabilia.

What could possibly account for the amazing success of Coca-Cola? How has this combination of carbonated water, sugar, acid and flavourings come to symbolize the American way of life for most of the world? After all, even the manufacturers could hardly describe Coke as a healthy product since it contains relatively high amounts of sugar (admittedly not the case with Diet Coke which contains artificial sweeteners instead of sugar) and phosphoric acid, both of which are known to damage teeth.

1. In paragraph 1, ‘cans can often fetch considerable sums’ means the same as:
(A) Coke is quite expensive in some parts of the world
(B) collectors consider carefully how much they are paying for a can of Coke
(C) some collectors will only drink Coke in exclusive stores
(D) certain Coke cans are worth a lot of money as collectable items

2. ‘Coke has enjoyed phenomenal success’ paragraph 1 suggests the writer:
(A) thinks that the success of Coke is very strange
(B) believes that the success of Coke has been impressive
(C) rather disapproves of the success of Coke
(D) considers the success of Coke to be undeserved

3. In the last sentence of the passage the writer implies that:
(A) most people would like to live in America
(B) many people wish for a lifestyle like they imagine most Americans have
(C) drinking Coke reminds a lot of people of visiting America
(D) living in the United States is a bit like living in a dream

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SPEAKING

Goals and Techniques for Teaching Speaking

The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency. Learners should be able to make themselves understood, using their current proficiency to the fullest. They should try to avoid confusion in the message due to faulty pronunciation, grammar, or vocabulary, and to observe the social and cultural rules that apply in each communication situation.

Jigsaw Activities

Jigsaw activities are more elaborate information gap activities that can be done with several partners. In a jigsaw activity, each partner has one or a few pieces of the "puzzle," and the partners must cooperate to fit all the pieces into a whole picture. The puzzle piece may take one of several forms. It may be one panel from a comic strip or one photo from a set that tells a story. It may be one sentence from a written narrative. It may be a tape recording of a conversation, in which case no two partners hear exactly the same conversation.

• In one fairly simple jigsaw activity, students work in groups of four. Each student in the group receives one panel from a comic strip. Partners may not show each other their panels. Together the four panels present this narrative: a man takes a container of ice cream from the freezer; he serves himself several scoops of ice cream; he sits in front of the TV eating his ice cream; he returns with the empty bowl to the kitchen and finds that he left the container of ice cream, now melting, on the kitchen counter. These pictures have a clear narrative line and the partners are not likely to disagree about the appropriate sequencing. You can make the task more demanding, however, by using pictures that lend themselves to alternative sequences, so that the partners have to negotiate among themselves to agree on a satisfactory sequence.
• More elaborate jigsaws may proceed in two stages. Students first work in input groups (groups A, B, C, and D) to receive information. Each group receives a different part of the total information for the task. Students then reorganize into groups of four with one student each from A, B, C, and D, and use the information they received to complete the task. Such an organization could be used, for example, when the input is given in the form of a tape recording. Groups A, B, C, and D each hear a different recording of a short news bulletin. The four recordings all contain the same general information, but each has one or more details that the others do not. In the second stage, students reconstruct the complete story by comparing the four versions.

With information gap and jigsaw activities, instructors need to be conscious of the language demands they place on their students. If an activity calls for language your students have not already practiced, you can brainstorm with them when setting up the activity to preview the language they will need, eliciting what they already know and supplementing what they are able to produce themselves.

Structured output activities can form an effective bridge between instructor modeling and communicative output because they are partly authentic and partly artificial. Like authentic communication, they feature information gaps that must be bridged for successful completion of the task. However, where authentic communication allows speakers to use all of the language they know, structured output activities lead students to practice specific features of language and to practice only in brief sentences, not in extended discourse. Also, structured output situations are contrived and more like games than real communication, and the participants' social roles are irrelevant to the performance of the activity. This structure controls the number of variables that students must deal with when they are first exposed to new material. As they become comfortable, they can move on to true communicative output activities.

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