JOURNAL

 

Listening and speaking skills

Why is it important to teach these two skills?

Before mentioning the importance of both skills is relevant to highlight they have an immanent relationship, which means their functions are successful all together.

Both skills speaking and listening have crucial purposes:

 

●       Listening is the understanding of the meaning said in an oral way. While students activate their receptive skills they could no longer decode information for later being produced. This reinforces the expressive skill.

●       Speaking has several functions; practical and social. It is necessary for speakers to be involved in a social context to transmit and decode meaning.

According to Vygotsky (1978), these two skills permit language learning, that's why it is important for students to be exposed to a great amount of input.

 

Moreover, according to Halliday (2007), both skills are crucial for addressing specific purposes, which are linguistic and practical. Those purposes can be summed up in the following table.

What challenges do you think can be faced when teaching these skills? How  would you overcome them?

 There are many challenges for this, for instance:

●       Low motivation for learning

●       Teacher's under qualification

●       No good infrastructure conditions

●       No enough material

●       Teacher do not meet with students' interest and needs

 

Furthermore, according to a Research study (2014) carried out in the University of Kenya, there's some challenges:

 

"Teachers face a number of challenges in teaching, listening and speaking in

languages. These include students’ lack of motivation for developing communicative competence; low English proficiency, and resistance to class participation. In addition to these are teachers’ misconceptions, lack of training in CLT combined with deficiencies in sociolinguistic competence, little time for developing materials for communicative classes, and large classes. Other difficulties include grammar based examinations; insufficient funding; and lack of support."

 

A good way to overcome this currículum problem is for both students and teachers to engage in the process of learning. Teachers must create a diagnostic for knowing what students want and need to learn, and concerning the competences that are already established for developing, teachers must use creative activities to involve students.

However, as I already said, the responsibility is for students as well. Therefore, they need to be constantly motivated and knowing that one is the main person who has to cultivate our own education. Another aspect to improve is the interpersonal relationship between students and teachers. If teachers do not create a confidence environment, are indifferent to students' life situations, or simply do not try to generate a confidence place, the goals will be difficult to achieve.

How would you use task based instruction to teach these skills?

 

Pre-task (providing them input about a topic).

 

Reproducing a record audio about an interesting topic of students so that they may familiarize themselves with the target language. While listening to the audio, they will

be reading the audio transcription in a piece of paper in order for them to identify unknown vocabulary. Moreover, it is fundamental that the audio presents a problem.

While-activity (time of producing their understanding or opinions about the audio)

Once they have understood the content of the audio, they will be asked to provide their comprehension or give solutions if it is required. After that, the teacher will ask them how they would face the problem and what possible challenges it implies.

 

After-activity (discussion among students about the topic)

As the classroom will surely be a scenario of different opinions, it will guarantee that disagreements emerge about it. So they will need to make clear their thoughts and defend their points of view.

What is the purpose and advantage to use culture when teaching these two skills?

Purpose: Providing context to students for their communication since culture references student’s background and it influences student’s thoughts.

 

Advantage: students will be able to hold wide conversations with different speakers without any barrier. This also will avoid cultural misunderstandings.

 

How would you use multimodality to teach these skills?

First, I would appeal to the use of images, videos, music and other attractive materials to engage them.

(Let’s take an example just about a video)

In second place, the teacher will make some questions about the video so that students give their answers in an oral way after watching it.

Finally, they will be asked to make a short dialogues in pairs using the main topic of the video.

Reading and writing skill

These skills promote critical thinking on students as well as create solid based arguments while communicating. Moreover, It improves the way of communication since students enrich knowledges to hold deep conversations about different topics. And also, reading and writing will guarantee students an excellent preformance on other subjects. 

However, it is difficult for both teachers and students to treat these skills because of the low reading comprehension of students so this easily cause lack of interest in learning, students get bored for not understanding the topics studied yawing constantly and stopping the reading times. Even, reading and writing works as the groundwork for the other skills. 

A way for overcome them is making a diagnostic about the most interest topic of students for later including them in the lessons and using strategies ando techniques to involve fully students. Once the survey is done, the teacher needs to carefully select the activities for a susccessfully engagement. 

For instance, the implementation of short texts with open and close questions below, paraphrasing activities, hypothetical situations, role plays, etc. Culture is relevant because we build knowledges reading hystory and storys about communities, technological breakthroughs, Academic articles, theories, etc. 

Some adequate multimodality activities might be the use of books, scientific articles, synopsis about contents, images, films, videos, images, etc. Let's take the use of a story by promoting reading and writing. Students might be asked of reading a story about a character and them must create a mind map about the key aspects of the character's life as well as his most renowned works.

Grammar and Vocabulary skills

Grammar and Vocabulary skills are keystones for learning the target language. 

Their importance is as high as other skills. There are some reasons to hold this argument: we need Grammar and Vocabulary to be good speakers and reinforce fluency. Although we make utterances syntactically mistaken, the receptive person may understand the idea.

However, this shows a low quality of the speaker's language. Moreover, Grammar and Vocabulary provide a sufficient semantic source for communication and this guarantees the speaker transmits his ideas in a wide range of variety. 

Nevertheless, these skills represent challenges for either teachers and language learners such as lack of students' motivation and retention, inadequate learning materials, and no sufficient and efficient time for studying of students. But there are some tips for facing these issues. 

Firstly, it is necessary to incorporate based Grammar fun games to create an entertainment environment, make match activities, create short sentences using a determined vocabulary, find purpose for a communicative grammar, and use culture for increasing interest in students. Culture is crucial in the language learning process for two reasons: to know the life of native speakers through Academic contents, it gives the chance to know more context and history of native speakers, find lexical differences between US and UK language, etc. An appealing way for teaching language is through games, videos, music, role play, dialogues, etc. 

For instance, teaching vocabulary and Grammar through music. The teacher hands in to students a piece of paper that contains the letter of a song. But the letter must have blank spaces for completing. Before reproducing the song, the teacher will ask students their perspectives about the music's name. Once they participate, they will be given the worksheet. During the activity, the music will be reproduced and students attention is required for catching the missing and proper words. In post activity, the teacher must question which words are unkown for them to further understanding. With those unkown words, students must write down sentences using the proper syntax. 

 

ASSESSMENT

There are two kind of Assessment: Qualitative and Summative. But for obtaining good outcomes in students after a particular lesson, it is paramount for teachers to focus primerily on the latter one. It is crucial to teach the Assessment skill in order for both students and teachers to improve aspects in terms of pedagogy, techniques, methodologies, strategies for teaching and learning process. A challenge to use the Assessment in classroom would be the low knowledge of tutors to enhace the way in which students learn and Internalize further the objectives proposed. Another challenge would be maybe the type of Assessment used for teachers. For instance, a student who receives usually an active destructive Assessment for not making a good process, his motivation will readily decrease by no less than a little time. Teacher therefore must be as much careful as possible, and students must know recognize when needs to improve for his own performance. A form to make use the Assessment is appealing to creative sources such as Portfolio, diaries, Worksheets, etc. Moreover, instructional videos might be used to teach the Assessment.