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The last unit covered the receptive forms of language (reading and listening), and now Until 12 discusses the two productive skills: speaking and writing. Since language teachers rely heavily on production to gauge a student’s skills, many lessons are centered on writing or speaking.
While writing is one of the productive skills, it often isn’t focused on as much as speaking. Writing is usually a solitary activity, so having every student writing quietly can almost seem like a waste of time, as opposed to having a lively speaking activity. However, writing presents a different set of challenges compared to speaking. The differences between written and spoken word should be noted, as well as the vocabulary used. Spelling is often an issue for students, since English isn’t a phonetic language. Also, hand writing and punctuation should be addressed and noted, so students don’t ingrain bad habits. Writing is an inherently less lively activity, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t as important.
As was mentioned above, most activities in language classroom focus on speaking. But teachers should be mindful of the type of speaking activity they want their students to do. The two main types of speaking activities are accuracy and fluency. Accuracy activities are much more controlled, and focus on the students using the target language point properly. On the other hand, fluency activities focus on allowing the students to use the language freely, in a more natural way. The teacher shouldn’t be concerned with how correct the language is; the point of a fluency activity is to let the students play with the language and decide things for themselves.
In this unit, the productive skills of speaking and writing were discussed, as well as possible lesson ideas and ways to encourage student participation. Speaking and writing activities are one of the key ways that teachers can see their students’ language understanding, and effective retention of content. A variety of different activity styles can gauge this further, so teachers should strive to create various diverse activities and games in the classroom.
