Wardsboro, Vermont TESOL Online & Teaching English Jobs

This unit went over the two productive skills: writing and speaking. These skills are involved when people want to communicate, or have some kind of message or purpose to convey, and when people want to find something out, or be kept up to date on what is going on around them or something they are interested in. Therefore, it is important for a teacher to try and inspire these desires in students in order to make lessons most effective. In other words, if students are given no real purpose to communicate, tasks and activities will seem more like chores and students will not be as enthusiastic about performing them or open to their contents. The unit also highlighted the difference between accuracy and fluency. This should be kept in mind when a teacher is planning a lesson and creating activities. Accuracy tasks are designed to help students produce proper language. Forming grammatically correct sentences and producing the correct spelling and pronunciation of words are good examples. Mainly these tasks are for the Study phase, when teachers should be correcting students far more often. As for fluency activities, they are designed to allow the students play with the language and work towards being able to fluently keep up communication. They are better suited for the Activate stage, which is more communicative and does not have the aim of producing perfect, spot-on language. Neither fluency nor accuracy should be given priority over the other. There are different types of activities that help practice each skill. More controlled tasks are better suited for practicing accuracy. 3x3 pronunciation drills are a good example. The teacher would have a great amount of control over the class, and the focus of the students would be to produce proper pronunciation. For fluency exercises on the other hand, more open, communicative activities, such as role plays, are suitable. Students would have more freedom of direction and in creating dialogue. The goal however would be fluid, functional communication rather than a perfect, native performance. Teachers have to be aware of problems that might occur in the classroom when working on both speaking and writing skills (when working on anything really). That means they have to get to know their students and know what might be holding them back from speaking in the class. The teacher must create a fun, safe environment for students to feel comfortable to talk freely and make mistakes. This can be a difficult challenge for some. I work in Japan for example, and my students are deathly afraid of making mistakes or looking stupid. The culture is not as open or expressive as it may be in some western societies. I always use topics that the kids are familiar with and can enjoy. Also I usually put them into pairs of groups to take the spotlight off individuals. For writing, the problem range is different. Things like spelling and punctuation can become a challenge. That is very true here in Japan. Japanese punctuation and text layout drastically differs from that of English, and sometimes students produce work that is illegible for a host of reasons: from poor handwriting to grossly incorrect layout/punctuation. To combat this, I give them as many examples as possible and provide/suggest some reading materials that would help them familiarize themselves with written English. It is important to inspire the same type of interest in writing as speaking. The unit mentions that writing is often neglected, which is probably true, though I find my students to be much more comfortable with writing simply because no one can see them making a mistake as it occurs. Either way, giving students something interesting and relatable to write about should help. I have given students assignments to make movie reviews or write about past trips. That way the subject matter is pretty much entirely their own and they can share experiences that they enjoyed with their classmates.