Skills

ASSIGNMENT 3: SKILLS RELATED TASK Sharifa Khatun The role of a teacher within a classroom has changed over the years. The traditional image of the teacher standing in front of the class, blurting information to their students expecting learning to be taking place has been slowly pushed away. Teachers are becoming learners themselves, developing changing and improving their techniques and methodologies. Focus is now how best a teacher can facilitate a student to learn. Lessons are more student centred and teachers must motivate students to want to learn and design tasks maximises a students’ potential. Teaching languages used to concentrate on grammar, reading and writing where language was practiced orally through drilling and repetition. However, the way we learn through practice and experiences using our productive and receptive skills are now the key elements to a lesson. According to Scrivener 1 he explained that: “Nowadays most interest is now expressed in a balanced spread of work on all language systems and attention is also given to skills work in its own right, particularly emphasising listening and speaking….” In order to learn, communicate and develop as human beings we use our productive (speaking and writing) and receptive (listening and reading) skills. Although reading is a receptive skill, in that you cannot see learning or understanding taking place, it should not be underestimated. As a fluent English reader we are able to automatically and effortlessly process the information in a text. However in the case of a person learning to read English for the first time they face many hurdles. Recognising the Roman alphabet, the fact that English is read from left to right, the punctuation marks, capital letters, spelling, new vocabulary are to name a few. There are four skills that are important in reading development: 1. Phonological processing: Understanding the sounds of the letters, joining sounds to produce words and the phonemic sounds. 2. Vocabulary recognition: Comprehension of vocabulary 3. Syntactic processing: Recognising grammatical relationships 4. Schema activation: Using previous knowledge and understanding. As I will be focusing on students in a Level 1 ESOL class, I will assume that they know their letters, are able to construct words, recognise many of the words and have a good understanding of the grammatical relationships. I will be setting a reading task for this group, as I believe that being literate has a positive effect on their social and economical lifestyle. With this in mind I have chosen to use a review of a local restaurant in the local area from the local newspaper. Reasons for the set reading task: * When researching the needs of a group in this level, many students expressed that they would like to have the opportunity to speak more freely and write about something other than themselves. I believe that the activities that I will be setting will give them plenty of opportunity to do that. * They are able to connect to this personally, as most if not all the students will have eaten in a restaurant or even a chicken and chip shop and have an opinion about the food. * It gives an opportunity to talk about their personal experience, which is a great way of engaging themselves with the activities. * As many live within the local area they may even have eaten at the same places and can discuss their experiences with each other. For this task there are many activities that can be done: * Role play * Thinking about a suitable title for a review * Reading for gist * Reading for specific information * Looking at other reviews * Reading a menu * Discussing their favourite meal * Talking about their favourite restaurant * Writing a review * Discuss recipes/ingredients * Writing a recipe book * Re-arranging a sequence of actions * Writing a complaint/compliment about something they ate * Making a verbal complaint/compliment to the manager Furthermore, this lesson’s topic can be developed to help their numeracy skills in adding up their bills, calculate what they can buy if they had a certain amount of money to spend. Finally it is an opportunity to enhance their ICT skills as they can type up their review or design a menu. According to the schema theory developed by R C Anderson (1984)2, which describes how a student combines his own background knowledge to understanding the information in a text, pre-reading tasks are a good way of building and activating learners’ schemata. TASKS FOR THE SET READING: 1. Lead in to the topic by asking them to discuss in pairs their favourite restaurant or meal. a. Each student will have to tell another pair about their partners’ favourite restaurant/meal. This encourages the students to enhance their listening skills and also gives the students the opportunity to speak freely. 2. Pre – teach lexis b. Pre – teach words that would help them to understand the review better (worksheet 1). c. Show the new words on the IWB d. Before you give the meaning try and elicit the meanings from the students. e. Give time for the students to fill in the table, leaving space for any new words that they would like meaning for. 3. Suggest a suitable title after deciding if the review was positive or negative f. First show the review on the Interactive white board (see review of restaurant)3 g. Tell them that they have to decide whether the reviewer had a positive experience at the restaurant and suggest a title for this review. h. While the students are reading the text go round the class monitoring their reading and make sure that they understand the reviewer’s comments about his meal. They can underline words that they do not understand. Encourage them to work together to find the meanings. i. If there are words that you feel the whole class are struggling with write them on the IWB and when all the students have finished reading explain them. Usually there are some students that will know words that the others are not familiar with so try and ask them first. j. Ask the students if they felt the Hazev restaurant got a good or bad review. k. Ask them to write a title for this review on the top their papers. 4. Re-arrange a sequence of events when visiting a restaurant (Work Sheet 2) l. The texts should be cut out on card. m. Hand out to each student cards with the sequencing texts and ask them to put them in the order they feel seems right when visiting a restaurant. n. Remind them that they can use the review of the restaurant to help sort the texts. o. Encourage them to work individually and ask why they opted for certain steps to be before the other. p. Give them a time limit (5 min) so that it encourages them to try and read a little faster and be able to scan for specific information that will help them complete this task. q. When all students have completed the ordering get feedback as a group and using the IWB re-arrange the cards. r. They should all agree where each card should go. Follow up activities: 1. Role play: “When the waiter gave my food it was cold!”. a. Put the title on the IWB and ask CCQs (worksheet 3) b. Once you are satisfied that they class understand the above title get them to work in a group of three or four. c. There can be a waiter, a manager and a couple who are having their meal. d. Tell the class that they will be doing a role play about a couple who would like to make a complaint about the service they received from their waiter. e. Hand out role cards about each character that they can use in the play (worksheet 4). f. They will them have a chance to act out their play to the rest of the class. 2. Write a review g. Get the students to brainstorm what they would need to include in their reviews. (Worksheet 5 is not for the students but for you to make sure that they have included what you want to see in their reviews.) h. Get them to write their ideas on a spider diagram. You can write this up on the IWB and print it out for them or a big sugar paper. i. In the class encourage them to draw out a skeleton of what they plan to write and how they will be structuring it. j. Get the students to write a review about a restaurant that they have visited. k. Task ‘d’ can be set as homework. 1 Scrivner, J.(1994) Learning Teaching 2 Anderson, R.C. and Pearson, P.D. (1984) "A Schema-Theoretic View of Basic Processes in Reading Comprehension", in Carrell, P.L., Devine, J. and Eskey, D.E. (eds) (1988) Interactive Approaches to Second Language Reading. Cambridge: CUP. 3 East End life, 10/10/2011, page 22 WORKSHEET 1 NEW VOCABULARY MEDITTERANEAN | SPACIOUS | APPETITE | EXTENSIVE | DÉCOR | EXOTIC | SOUTH QUAY | | | | WORKSHEET 2 RE-ARRANGE I paid the waiter and went home feeling satisfied. | I needed to hurry; my partner was waiting for me at the station. | Okay, so I needed to get to South Quay station. | | When the menu was handed to us we just couldn’t decide what to order, everything looked delicious. | It felt like a hot summer night in the Mediterranean. | We took our seats and enjoyed the bread. | It was such miserable whether outside. | I ordered my food. | I sat back while waiting and soaked in the beautiful décor. | Our dishes were delicious. | Finally, we were out of the rain and into this wonderful spacious restaurant. | I chose a dessert as the mains were quite small. | The restaurant was very busy but I still managed to book a table for two. | REVIEW OF A RESTAURANT WORKSHEET 3 CCQs 1. Did the waiter bring the food to me' 2. Was my food cold' 3. Did the waiter take too long to bring my food' 4. Am I happy' 5. Am I going to eat my food' 6. Am I going to pay for my food' WORKSHEET 4 WAITER * Does not think that the food is that cold * Not sorry for food being late * Does not feel it is their fault * Gives customer the bill | CUSTOMER 1 * Is not happy with the service * Demands a new meal which is hot * Refuses to pay | CUSTOMER 2 * Very annoyed with waiter but tries to calm their partner * Is not happy to pay for the bill | MANAGER * Very apologetic * Agrees to a refund | WORKSHEET 5 Decor Atmosphere Cost of your order Promotions Your meal Restaurants address Restaurants name Your name Attitude of staff Review should include