7_Capacities_of_the_English_Language

7 SKILLS OF TEACHING AND LEARNING THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE Executed by: Student of Moldova University of European Studies, Faculty of Foreign Languages, 4th academic year (I- IV) CHISINAU* 2011 1. Introduction As suggested by the title, this compartment is about the skills of teaching and learning English as a foreign language: reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary cultivation, grammar practice and pronunciation. All those skills deal with communication (of any type) that is important in all subject areas in the curriculum. Hence, literacy should have a central position in the curriculum. Only a competent teacher with long and varied experience can provide those skills in order to obtain good results at the English lessons from the 2nd or 3rd forms up to the 12th. Every form requires different teaching methods and approaches. Even so, there will be always pupils/ students with different levels of literacy which means that there are some pupils /students who fail to acquire and understand the given information. One solution for this problem in our schools is the division of the classes in smaller groups consisting of 10-15 pupils. It makes, of course, the teacher’s job easier and more efficient and pupils’ understanding – deeper. Other things being equal, the more time students have to study the facts, a principle or practice a skill, the better they learn. Teaching and study time in school, as well as student work done at home, advance students’ learning. In school and in life, students face a diversity of circumstances that require language skills. For this reason, the pupils need more experience with varieties of reading, listening, writing speaking and other activities that would help them to acquire the skills they need to be successful and correspond to the circumstances. The exams/ tests also represent an efficient method to develop pupils’ skills, especially if they are made by their English teacher and personalized for every class and level. The aspect of language skills can be different and the practices presented here can be applicated throughout the world. 2. Reading Reading is an activity which deals and interferes more or less with other activities, such as writing or speaking. Reading may sometimes get people rid of voice, grammar, vocabulary knowledge. It depends on how much you read because as you practise it, you memorize better the grammar rules, new words/ vocabulary and not least, you learn how to speak more fluently. Reading from the 5th form (for example) differs very much from that of the pupils from the 8th one. Although there are some pupils in the 8th form who still meet difficulties with reading, they are more skilled than pupils from the 5th form because those ones are situated at the beginning of their trip in the reading world. It is very important to teach correctly this skill from the very beginning because if pupils will do mistakes and nobody will correct them, they will get accustomed to them and therefore it will be more difficult to remember things that were misunderstood. There are some methods of improving this skill. Training students 'glance' can speed up the reading speed to avoid the by-word reading, and can improve the brain reaction speed. Another important means is to guess the meaning of the words (sometimes of the same ones, but which have different meanings in different contexts). Not least, it is also very important to chose an interesting text which corresponds more or less with pupils’ background knowledge because if we give a too difficult text to the 5th form pupils they will rapidly get bored by this. 3. Writing Writing is a skill which also needs a good base and motivation. As we read different texts with different topics, we may also practise different varieties of writing, such as poems or essays. This is one of teacher’s obligations to explain all the types of writing (reports, letters, poems, etc) and also give examples. Pupils’ obligation is to represent this in practice. They can do it by expressing their own feelings, experiences and knowledge in a written form. The teacher, from her part, must motivate them by appreciating their works fairly and even not hesitate to put unsatisfactory marks to lazy pupils because writing needs frequent practice and hard work for improvement. All pupils can be encouraged to write as well as they are able. Not only the teacher must take part in stimulating pupils to become better writers but also their parents by supplying them with magazines, books or other sources(from libraries or wherever), because as we know – the more we read, the more we develop our imagination. As the other activities such as reading, it has different levels for different grades. I tried to develop this skill in 5th grade pupils by asking them to write at home little essays with topics that had been discussed at previous lessons. The 8th grade pupils are more skilled in this activity, so they were asked to do more. They also brought information about writers and personalities from history because their activities (biographies) may serve as models for pupils’ lives, too. 4. Speaking Speaking is an activity that everybody does in his/ her day-to-day activities. Pupils like to discuss a lot at breaks and interfere in different discussions in their native language, but when it comes to English there are some negative aspects that shall be changed. Children, adolescents and even adults sometimes fear the challenge of sustained, formal speaking before large groups. But this fear may be removed by the teacher by pointing out their abilities in speaking, helping them to express themselves and by maintaining a friendly atmosphere in the class. The teacher must also provide feedback to students while teaching a grammar topic (for example), by checking for understanding and asking them to ask questions about the given information. To practise more speaking the pupils from both 5th and 8th grades used to present information, answer questions and hold group discussions. The teacher also demanded them to ask each other questions and answer them. From what I observed, the less prepared pupils are often not involved into English lesson discussions so you need to be a little responsible toward the learning to improve your speaking ability. Pupils are less likely to be fearful and anxious and more likely to do well if they are well prepared. 5. Listening Listening skills are essential for learning since they enable students to acquire insights and information, and to achieve success in communicating. In the classroom, the teacher presented listening materials such as tapes with oral texts and then she asked pupils questions and discussed about them. They also listened to other materials, such as: speeches of non-native English speakers, broadcastings, etc which seemed quite interesting to me. Listening is also one of the best was to improve pupils’ attention because they know they will be given questions after doing it. This represents a good practice in note-taking and communication based on their notes. Not least, the task before listening may lead them to select and note only the main points from the listened information and put aside (but not neglect) incidental or less-relevant ideas because there is quite limited time to make notes. From what I’ve seen, this activity is practiced beginning with the 10th form probably because it needs more skilled pupils with a richer vocabulary than younger ones. Listening can assure for pupils collaborations because they may work together and investigate the listened material by completing each other with information. 6. Vocabulary The vocabulary teaching requires different skills and knowledge from teacher’s part because the more he/she knows the language (English), the more efficient he/she teaches its new words/ vocabulary. But this is not the only thing which can assure a successful vocabulary teaching/ learning. First of all the teacher should know how to explain quickly and efficiently any unknown words, because the more complex and complicated the information about a word is, the more likely the learners are to misunderstand it. I’ve observed that teaching vocabulary in smaller classes demands more activities and games which would increase pupils’ attention. Those activities could be drawing spidergrams on the blackboard, working with synonyms/antonyms, dividing words into groups (such as: animals, holidays, food, etc), playing games (such as: “The Snowball”, crosswords) etc. Before giving a new word, the teacher should also give quickly its meaning by using a translation, a known synonym or a simple definition; showing a picture/ diagram, breaking the word into parts and explaining each part and the whole word, giving several example sentences with the word in context, etc. The presentation form of the word is also important in order to obtain a good comprehension from pupils’ part. To make that, the teacher should pay attention to the form of the word, show on the blackboard how it is spelled, underline the stem, suffix and/or prefix that make up the word, show its pronunciation by pronouncing and writing its transcription on the blackboard, etc. To remember more efficiently a certain word it is recommended to tell the learners if it is frequently used one and that it’s worth noting for future attention. One decision that the teacher should make while teaching a word is that he/she should decide if it is worth spending time on or not because there are many words (in any foreign languages) that should be known mandatorily and others which are used only in particular domains, fields, or are rarely used. Vocabulary exercises are very important for the pupils’ word learning because they involve everyone into this activity which seems to be very attractive. For example the 8th form pupil’s book gives many stories, poems (and other texts) with some highlighted words in them. The most interesting part is that those texts are followed by exercises which have the task to match the highlighted words from the text with their synonyms that are given in the exercise. I saw that pupils liked very much this type of exercise because it isn’t boring at all. No matter how we present a word, it must be made in an interesting way to catch pupils’ attention and thus “leave a footprint” on their memories. 7. Grammar It is considered that grammar is one of the most difficult aspects of language that must be taught and learnt well. There are two extremes of teaching and learning the English language grammar: one is based on the formal presentation of rules, forms and grammar patterns at the blackboard or in the textbook; and the other focuses only on reading, listening and using the English language in communication activities without grammar instruction because they (those activities) help in a certain way to absorb and analyze the information and learn at a subconscious level how to use the language. But the role of the teacher is to combine those two aspects in order to make the grammar teaching/ learning more complex from the methodological point of view and not too complicated for pupils to understand. To facilitate the understanding at a maximum level the teacher shall draw schemes of types of verbs, adjectives, nouns, tenses (or other grammar topics) and their patterns of use. The schemes represent also the shortest way to explain something. The time limit of all those explanations shall be as short as possible because if it takes too much time, the pupils (especially the small ones) become to get bored. Maybe the grammar topics are not the most beloved ones for both pupils and teachers but they are extremely necessary to avoid mistakes in future, communicate freely, etc. 8. Pronunciation Every person begins studying a foreign language with learning pronunciation rules, which are important to pronounce the word correctly. The main aim of learning a foreign language is to be able to communicate with people, but bad pronunciation can cause misunderstanding. That is why we need to teach correctly pupils’ pronunciation from the very beginning and follow some rules while doing it. In order to make teaching pronunciation more effective both teachers and pupils should make cards for each sound and corresponding letter or combination of letters. The word transcription is very important to notice in teaching and learning pronunciation. Every time pupils learn a new word and write it in their vocabularies, they should be aware of how it sounds, write its transcription and pronounce it several times. For better memorization they should learn the new words at home. Other methods of learning pronunciation for pupils are: more reading, discussing with the teacher (the teacher should always pay attention to the incorrectly pronounced words), listening to tapes… Watching Hollywood movies in English (without translation or with subtitles) also can be an efficient method of learning pronunciation because we see how native English speakers pronounce different words and try to imitate them in a certain way.