TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS: INTRO

Skill: Listening. Tools form listening.

It is common in ELT (English Language Teaching) to talk about “the four skills”, i.e.
listening, speaking, reading and writing. They are also referred to as skill areas, or
macroskills, each being made up of many microskills. Everybody knows that
people don’t learn to use a language by mechanically adding up lots of separate
little skills, anymore than they learn by adding up lots of separate structures and
functions, but analysing the language into skills gives teachers more ways of
meaningfully focusing their teaching and motivating their students.

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are a constant part of people’s lives, and
teachers want to use this fact to organize their work and their student’s learning
process. Therefore, teachers base their skills work around the answers to these
questions:

- What do people listen to, say, read and write? (Sources)

- Why do people do these things? (Motivation)

- How do people do these things? (Skills and strategies)

And then teachers work on the following question:

- How can teachers teach skills and strategies in English?

In order to start working on the answers, it is necessary to group the skills into two
pairs. There are two ways of doing this:

 First possibility:

Listening and speaking can be grouped together, because they are the skills
necessary in face-to-face communication. For some learners, this is the main focus
of their interest.

Reading and writing are the skills necessary in written communication, and this is
the main motivation for other learners.

 Second possibility:

Listening and reading can be grouped together, because they are both used to
receive language which was produced by someone else – receptive skills.
Speaking and writing are both productive skills.

Most speakers of languages, whether they are first or second language speakers,
have stronger receptive skills than productive ones. They can understand more
difficult pieces of speaking and writing than they can produce themselves.

It is also the case, though, that different learners will have different strengths
across the four skills for a number of reasons:

- Their previous learning or may have concentrated on developing particular

skills because of a particular exam syllabus.

- Their level of confidence may mean that they feel safer with the receptive skills
(listening and reading) than the productive skills (speaking and writing).

- Their own particular learning style may naturally favour the development of
one set of skills over the other.

The four skills can be mixed in any way, but the most common ways involve
listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Young learners (1° - 2° - 3° grades)

70% of the class Listening

Speaking
30% of the class Reading

writing

Other groups
25% Listening
 25% Speaking
25% Reading
25% writing

The structure of a skill lesson

The simplest way of structuring a skill lesson is in three stages:

 Before the skills activity

- Lead in: The activities in this stage should engage the learners’ attention and
get them thinking about the topic they will be hearing, reading, talking, or writing
about. For example, to introduce a reading text about festivals, you could ask
learners about their favourite festival in their country.

- Language focus: Teachers might also include a short language focus to

introduce some key vocabulary or expressions.

 During

- Tasks: there will be a task or series of tasks that the learners have to carry out.
For example, listening to a story and arranging pictures in the order of the events in
the story

 After the skills activity

- Language focus:after the learners have completed each task, teachers will need
to go through the task carefully, checking understanding and giving answers in
listening and reading lessons, and giving feedback/mistake correction in writing
and speaking lessons. Teachers may like to have a specific language study spot,
doing more detailed language work on a reading or listening text, or giving learners
more practice in a structure or function that they are finding difficult in a
speaking or writing activity.

- Transfer: finally, students can use the skills activities they have just completed
as a springboard intro practising another skill. For example: learners write about
their strongest childhood memories. In groups they make wall posters with a
collage of “Our memories”. These are pinned up for other learners to read.

10 Rules of Listening in Young Learner Classes

1. Although listening is a receptive skill, the students are not and should not be
passive while listening; in other words, they should be engaged and/or work in the
listening task actively.
2. The students should be engaged with different listening tasks according to their
age, learning style, listening capacity and phonological awareness.
3. The language teachers should train the students to listen to the English sounds
carefully.
4. The teachers should train the young learners to follow simple instructions to get
them ready to develop other language skills.
5. Different listening tasks should be addressed in class:

 Listen & Do
 Listen & Draw
 Listen & Colour
 Listen & Mime
 Listen & Predict
 Listen & Respond
 Listen & Write (needs literacy)
 Listen & Identify (may need literacy)
 Listen & Match (may need literacy)
 Listen & Complete (needs literacy)
 Listen & Read (model for pronunciation)

6. The students should be given a different task each time they listen to the same
text. (i.e.: First, listen to have a general idea; second listen to complete the blanks;
third, listen to check your answers)
7. Input through tapes, videos or teacher modelling should be provided; the audio
tools should be in good quality.
8. The teachers should be aware of the importance of familiarity (with the context,
language, task, voice ...etc.), difficulty (what is expected as the output)
and teacher’s language (repeating, simplifying, and using gestures, intonation and
formulaic expressions that help children to figure out the intended meaning)
9. It is important to embed listening into stories, games, routines, rhymes, songs.
They may not understand every word, but they can understand the meaning from
the context, visuals, and gestures as in real life.
10. Both bottom-up (requiring linguistic knowledge) and top-down (requiring world
knowledge) listening should be addressed.

Tools for listening

Online music players: lyricstraining.com, http://www.saberingles.com.ar/songs/index.html, Groves

Sound recorders: smart voice recorder, y otros para Android

Sound editing: Audacity

Podcasting
What is a podcast?

A podcast is an audio file that you download from the Internet. After you download
it, you can listen to it on your computer or on an MP3/portable music player (for
example, an iPod or iRiver). You can subscribe to a podcast so that it is delivered
to you automatically each day, just like a newspaper.

Podcast to listen to/ or watch

 ESLPOD.COM sections in eslpod.com English cafe (sample listening), Esl

podcast on different topics ( sample Dating nice guys and bad boys), learn
English magazine ( downloadable from itunes or on google play for Android)
 Learn and play:Este juego ameno y educativo es un tutor móvil para auto-
estudio del vocabulario y la fonética del nivel inicial (básica). La serie de
palabras se base en temas diferentes ampliamente usados en la vida
cotidiana. Este tutorial le permite aprender de forma efectiva a la correcta
pronunciación y ortografía, justo por la presencia del apoyo
audiovisual. ( available at google play and other stores visit website)
 The English We Speak ( podcast from bbc.uk) sample Done and dusted
 6 Minute English
 British Council Elementary podcasts (sample podcast)
 British Council Professionals Podcasts: This series of podcasts helps you to
improve your English for your career in the workplace, and covers a large
number of business and work themes. They are suitable for learners at
intermediate to advanced level. (sample Biotechnology)
 Open Sesame podcast ( for kids) videos (sample ) sample 2

Creating your your podcast

 Podbean
 Voicethread

Sites to download songs and rhymes

http://freekidsmusic.com/traditional-childrens-songs/

http://www.dreamenglish.com/freedownload