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In this lesson we took a look at productive skills: speaking and writing. It is important when speaking to recognize common factors when two people are communicating: there is a purpose, somebody is listening and that somebody is interested in what is being said. It is important that the teacher creates a need or desire from students when communicating. There are two significant factors when teaching which is accuracy and fluency. Accuracy activities concentrate on producing correct language. Fluency is focused more on allowing students to experiment and be creative with the language. They are both equally important and it is good to know the types of activities to do in the classroom. The first is controlled activities where you would want to do more drilling & prompting. The second is guided activities in which this is more accuracy based and the students can do model dialogues or guided role-play. The third is creative communication to help with fluency. These activities can be discussions, debates or communications games.
Another few important factors to remember when teaching productive skills is encouraging the students to speak, techniques for student interaction and being able to prepare a lesson for creative speaking. It is important to pick topics that the students are interested in or comfortable with so that the students enjoy communicating. A few techniques that can be used are pair-work, group-work, purposeful speaking activities and even changing the classroom dynamic. A typical lesson would be in ESA format to engage the student in a discussion, elicit responses and complete various exercises in study and then pair the students up in the activate stage to have them create and present their own project. Lastly, it is significant to be familiar with guidelines for preparing a lesson. You want to be prepared before the lesson and try to predict what problems students may have. It is also important that during the activity to motivate students and peak their interests. Also make sure that students are getting enough time and that they are processing the information. After the activity is done it is always good to give positive reinforcement and tell the class how well they communicated or what they can work on.
Writing skills are probably one of the most under taught skills in language. Most people just want to be able to speak. It is very important to know how to write and it is very good practice too. One factor of writing to work on is penmanship. This is an important skill to practice the alphabetical system and work on formation of words. Another factor of writing is spelling so that there is no misunderstandings of how words are perceived. The layout and punctuation is also very important to help students learn different structures of writings. Also punctuation is important so that students know the correct usage of the language. Lastly, it is good to get students practicing with creative writing. A few writing activities that they can do would be poetry, stories and plays. Again just like in speaking, a creative writing lesson can be in ESA format.
