Strategies for teaching the four Language skills

Strategies for Developing listening Skills

ELT General Supervision Teaching Listening Listening Strategies Top-down Bottom -up ELT General Supervision

Top-down strategies: Top-down strategies are listener based; the listener taps into background knowledge of the topic, the situation or context, the type of text, and the language. This background knowledge activates a set of expectations that help the listener to interpret what is heard and anticipate what will come next.

Bottom-up strategies: Bottom-up strategies are text based; the listener relies on the language in the message, that is, the combination of sounds, words, and grammar that creates meaning

Listening strategies: Listening strategies are techniques or activities that contribute directly to the comprehension and recall of listening input. Listening strategies can be classified by how the listener processes the input.

for Teaching Listening Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening Integrating metacognitive Strategies Listening Process ELT General Supervision

Metacognitive Strategies: Self-Management: Manage Your Own Learning Determine how you learn best Arrange conditions that help you learn Seek opportunities for practice Focus your attention on the task.

Bottom-up strategies include: listening for specific details recognizing cognates recognizing word-order patterns

Top-down strategies include: listening for the main idea predicting drawing inferences summarizing

What makes listening easy or difficult? Three principal categories: the type of language we are listening to our task or purpose in listening the context in which listening occurs

Listening Activities Pre-listening: Plan for the listening task Set a purpose or decide in advance what to listen 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)

While-listening: Monitor comprehension Verify predictions and check for inaccurate guesses Decide what is and is not important to understand Listen/view again to check comprehension Ask for help

Match while-listening activities to the instructional goal, the listening purpose, and students' proficiency level. Organize activities so that they guide listeners through the text. Use questions to focus students' attention on the elements of the text crucial to comprehension Use predicting to encourage students to monitor their comprehension as they listen.

Sample while-listening activities listening with visuals filling in graphs and charts following a route on a map checking off items in a list listening for the gist searching for specific clues to meaning completing cloze (fill-in) exercises

Post-listening: Evaluate comprehension and strategy use Evaluate comprehension in a particular task or area Evaluate overall progress in listening and in particular types of listening tasks Decide if the strategies used were appropriate for the purpose and for the task Modify strategies if necessary

Post-listening activities: The procedure may be: general or special questions wrong statements making a plan(key words or key sentences) giving a gist of the text written reproduction role-plays multiple-choice test etc

Procedure: Help students identify the listening goal: to obtain specific information; to understand most or all of the message. Help students outline predictable sequences in which information may be presented: who-what-when-where (news stories); who-flight number-arriving/departing-gate number (airport announcements) etc… Help students identify key words/phrases to listen for

Strategies for Developing speaking Skills

ELT General Supervision Teaching Speaking Many language learners regard speaking ability as the measure of knowing a language. These learners define fluency as the ability to converse with others, much more than the ability to read, write, or comprehend oral language. ELT General Supervision

ELT General Supervision Speaking involves three areas of knowledge: Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary): Using the right words in the right order with the correct pronunciation Functions (transaction and interaction): Knowing when clarity of message is essential (transaction/information exchange) and when precise understanding is not required. Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants ELT General Supervision

Goals and Techniques for Teaching Speaking The goal of teaching speaking skills is communicative efficiency . Learners should be able to make themselves understood. Instructors can use a balanced activities approach that combines language input, structured output, and communicative output. ELT General Supervision

Strategies for Developing Reading Skills

What strategies should I teach? The most practical way of thinking about teaching reading comprehension is to organize instruction according to how you want students to think about strategies. For this reason, the most straightforward way of organizing comprehension strategies is to think about strategies that one might use pre- reading, while-reading, and post- reading.

Strategies for developing Reading: previewing headings, surveying pictures, reading introductions and summaries, creating a pre-reading outline, creating questions that might need to be answered, making predictions that need to be confirmed, etc.

While-Reading Strategies consist of those strategies that students learn to use while they are reading a text selection. These strategies help the student focus on how to determine what the author is actually trying to say and match the information with what the student already knows.

questioning inferring visualizing Making Connections The While-Reading Strategies include: questioning inferring visualizing Making Connections

Post-Reading Strategies consist of those strategies that students learn to use when they have completed reading a text selection. These strategies are used to help the student "look back" and think about the message of the text and determine the intended or possible meanings that might be important.

These strategies are used to follow up and confirm what was learned (e.g., answer questions or confirm predictions) from the use of before and during reading strategies. to focus on determining what the big, critical, or overall idea of the author's message was and how it might be used before moving on to performance tasks or other learning tasks.

How do you teach comprehension strategies? The stages of instruction that are most often cited as being effective in helping a student learn a strategy are: orient students to key concepts, assess, and ask students to make a commitment to learn, describe the purpose of the strategy, the potential benefits, and the steps of the strategy, model (thinking aloud) the behavioral and cognitive steps/actions involved in using the strategy,

(4) lead verbal practice and elaboration of the key information and steps related to the strategy, (5) provide for guided and controlled practice of the strategy with detailed feedback from the teacher and/or knowledgeable peers, (6) gradually move to more independent and advanced practice of the strategy with feedback from the teacher and/or knowledgeable peers,

Strategies for Developing writing Skills

Introduction In order to be able to select and use appropriate procedures & materials, as well assess their learners’ needs and progress, teachers need to be clear regarding the desirable outcomes of a writing programme and the strategies involved in good writing.

a- Pre-writing: 1. Stimulate the students creativity. 2 a- Pre-writing: 1. Stimulate the students creativity. 2. Get them to think about how to approach a writing topic. 3. In this stage, the most important thing is the flow of ideas.

b- Drafting: 1- Students write quickly on a topic for five or ten minutes without worrying about correct language or punctuation. 2- Working in groups, sharing ideas.  3- Exchanging views: Different students choose different points of view and think about and discuss them.  

c- Editing:   1- Ordering: organizing the notes written. What should come first? and why? 2- Self –editing: A good writer must learn how to evaluate his own language to improve through checking his own text, looking for errors.  

D-Peer editing & proof reading: - The texts are exchanged / interchanged and the evaluation is done by other students. - The students are some times asked to reduce the texts & to edit them concentrating on the most important information.

Useful tips on how to carry out a writing lesson successfully. 1. Bring some energy and excitement to the process of writing in the classroom. 2. Create a writing environment that is authentic and purposeful. 3. Resort to group work to help decrease the students' fear and the complexity of writing tasks.

4- Make your tasks lively and enjoyable and make the atmosphere of the class less intimidating by allowing students to work together and hence to assist each other. 5- Spare no pains making positive comments to help build students' confidence & create a good feeling for the next writing class.

6- Implement in your students the idea that their writing is addressed to a person, for a reason and with an expected response. 7- Provide a real audience for your students by creating class magazines or by swapping letters with other classes. 8- Make your students know that, as their teacher and audience, you are interested in their ideas.

9- Train your students on the techniques of writing: listing, selecting and organizing. 10- Help develop your students grammar, syntax, punctuation by analyzing stylistic features of good reading texts. 11- Insist on responding to the content and how far the students have achieved their purpose for writing.

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