Teaching productive skills. Writing and speaking.

Teaching productive skills. Writing and speaking.

Productive skills (definition). (T - teacher)

Productive Skills - term used for speaking and writing - skills where students actually have to produce language themselves.(they are in some way active [we produce language])

Basic methodological model for teaching productive skills:

• Lead-in stage - here Teacher (T) engage students with the topic
• T sets the task - T gives instructions
• T. monitors the task - for example, T is going around the class, helping if necessary.
• task feedback - T gives comments after task has been finished
• follow-up task  - activity related to the task

Coherence and cohesion

In order writing  to be successful, it has to be both a.coherent and b.cohesive.

a. Coherent - Coherent writing makes sense because you can follow the sequence of ideas and points.(For a text to be coherent, it needs to be in the right order, or at least make sense).

b. Cohesion - is more technical matter since it is here that we concentrate on the various linguistic ways of connecting ideas across phrases and sentences.

Factors influencing language use.

1. Form and meaning - you can use different language forms to express one idea. The same form can have a lot of different meanings. But the context(situation) and the co-text(lexis and grammar which surround the form) usually resolve ambiguity.
2. Purpose - Types of purpose include - inviting, apologising, offering, suggesting. They influence language use.
3. Appropriacy and register - factors which influences our choice of language: gender,

channel-there’re differences between spoken and written language., topic - it affects our lexical and grammatical choices, tone , Setting - library, or a night club.

Dealing with difficulty. //

• Improvising - speakers try any word or phrase hoping that it’s right.
• Discarding - abandon the thought and ignore it if speaker can’t find words.
• Foreignising -  speakers choose a word in a language they know well and “foreignise” it. English speaker who learns spanish want to  say happy. He uses english “content” and adds “o” = “content-o”.But it works, as there is Spanish word “contento”which means happy.
• Paraphrasing - здесь все ясно.

Productive skills in the classroom: problems and solutions (language, topic and genre).

Teacher has to make sure that student has the minimum language to perform particular task.  

Teacher should try to choose interesting topic for students to make them engaged.

When introducing new topic, teacher should activate schemata. The purpose of activating schema is to have the learner recreate an experience so new information can be associated with what is already known.

Vary topics and genre: T has to constantly vary the topics to make everybody interested. T has to vary the genres, if T wants students to gain confidence in writing and speaking in different situations

Writing conventions (handwriting, spelling and punctuation)

Handwriting -there are still a lot of occasions when we have to write by hand(language exams, postcards, notes). We should encourage students with problematic handwriting to improve.There might also be students whose native-language orthography is very different from English and they have to be taught exactly how it is done. For example with the help of letter tracing worksheets (прописи).

Spelling: bad spelling is perceived as a lack of education or care. In every variety of English there may be different spelling - and we should focus on one variety. The difficulty might be that - the correspondence between the sound of a word and the way it is spelt is not always obvious(типа не как пишется так и читается):  A single phoneme may have different spellings(paw, pore,poor,daughter,Sean), and the same spelling may have different sounds (or,word, information,worry,correspond).

How to improve?

a.Draw attention to the different ways of spelling of the phonemes.

b.Whenever we come across a new word, T asks what other words they know with the same kinds of spelling or sounds.

c. More reading

D. draw attention to the mistakes of spelling

Punctuation: There are different punctuation conventions within every community,culture.

Punctuation is frequently a matter of personal style, but we should keep in mind that there are well-established rules which we should obey,otherwise a piece of writing may look awkward to many readers.

Writing skills (accuracy and fluency).

Activities could be designed to expect students’ accuracy(in a study of a piece of grammar, a pronunciation exercise, vocabulary work) or fluency when we want students to use the language as fluently as possible.
According to this principle we may say there there are a)“non-communicative” and b)“communicative” activities.

a)“Non-communicative” activities - T corrects and points out the mistakes In different ways:

Repeating- T makes the student to repeat himself, by asking “again?”

Echoing - T repeats the same mistake that was made

Statement and question - “does everybody agree that it’s correct”
Hinting  - for example, to say word “tense”, or “countable”

Reformulation - S:”she said me I was late”; T:Oh, so she told you  you were late,did she?”; S: “Oh, yes, I mean she told me.”

b)Communicative activities - T. shouldn’t interrupt. Only in emergency cases, such as:

Gentle correction: when communication is about to be broken down.If students can’t think of what to say, we may  help - offer an option or if it’s the right moment, T may want to draw the student’s attention to a problem

Recording mistakes - it’s easy to forget what the student have said- so after the student performance we can give feedback.

In writing - we may correct using symbols, such has S(for spelling errors);WO(word order) etc. It’s not necessary to correct every mistake. Every time we may focus on mistakes of different kind and not correct everything.

Approaches to student writing.

The roles of the teacher:

Motivator(motivates students, creating the right conditions); Resource(T should be ready to supply information and language); Feedback Provider(T should respond positively and encouragingly to the content the students have written)

There are number of approaches to practice writing skills inside and outside the classroom:

Product and Process. In the teaching of writing we can focus on the product of that writing (the aim of a task, the end product), or on the writing process itself. One of the disadvantages of getting students to concentrate on the process of writing is that it takes time.

Genre. Genre represents the norms of different kinds of writing.Before concentrating on genre, teachers give students samples, typical models of particular genres.

Creative writing- imaginative tasks(writing poetry,stories,plays).  Advantages of such tasks(the sense of achievement,  pride in work). Difficulties of such tasks(when people “have nothing to say”, they may find creative writing painful and demotivating experience, associated with failure and frustration).

Writing for learning and writing for writing. The first one we need to help students learn language or to test them on that language. The second we need when we want students to write for example a good story/advertisement/poem, and here counts not the use of the past tense, but the ability to write.

Writing as cooperative activity - group, cooperative writing is good because: 

1. Allows the lecturer to give more detailed and constructive feedback as she deals not with 1 student.
2. Individual students say or write things they might not have come up with on their own.the generation of ideas is more lively

Building the writing habit: T needs to help to get over difficulties and help to build the writing habit.1 way - give interesting and enjoyable tasks to do:1.dictate half-sentences for them to finish, 2.give a poem or the other mode so that students could come up with slightly different version.3. Ask students to write what was the video,song about(which we’ve just watched/listened)4. Describe pictures

Elements of speaking (language features, mental/social processing)

Language features- they are necessary for successful language production

Connected speech: good speakers have to be able to produce not only individual phonemes, but fluent “connected speech” (i’d have gone)

Expressive devices: good speakers have to be able to change the pitch and stress of particular parts of utterances, vary volume and speed. THey should be able to show  how they are feeling by physical and non-verbal(paralinguistic) means if we talk about face-to-face communication.

Lexis and Grammar: Teachers should supply their students with a variety of phrases for agreeing,disagreeing,expressing surprise, approval etc.

Negotiation language:we use it to make something clear(I’m sorry, what does this mean?), or to highlight/show the structure of what we are saying(to begin with, what I mean is)

Mental and social processing: Success is also dependent on rapid processing skills.

Language processing - it involves the retrieval of words and phrases from the memory and their assembly into appropriate sequence(comprehensible order)

Interacting with others - speaking presupposes interaction with at least 1  other person. Effective speaking involves a good deal of listening, an understanding of how other participants are feeling etc.

(On-the-spot) Information processing - the ability to process the information the moment we get it. We need to be effective instant communicators and to respond instantly.(though it can’t be applied to every culture)

Classroom speaking activities.

Acting from a script - T. can ask S to act out scenes from plays/coursebooks or their own written dialogues

Simulation and role-play - спонтанно разыгрываем выдуманную историю

Questionnaires

Communication games - the aim of such  games is to get students talking as quickly and fluently as possible.

a.Information-gap games:put in the right order, draw a picture, solve a puzzle, find similarities and differences between pictures.

b.Television and radio games: for example,“Just a minute” (a  comedy contest on UK radio) - each participant has to speak for 60 seconds in a subject they are given without hesitation, repetition or deviation(отступлений).

Discussion: a. Unplanned discussion - they occur in the middle of lessons. They can be successful.

b.Formal debates - students prepare arguments in favour or against various propositions

C.instant comment - T. shows photographs or introducing topic at any stage of a lesson and S. have to say the first thing that comes into their head.

D. Buzz Groups - which presuppose a wide range of discissions.

E. Reaching a consensus - T. encourages students to reach a common decision or consensus - often as a result between choosing specific alternatives.

Prepared talks - when student/students make a presentation on a topic of their own choice.

Writing lesson sequences.

Some of them can be aimed on basics of writing (writing conventions, coherence and cohesion, correct writing), others can be aimed at the build of the writing habit (writing for fun, creative writing), others are designed to give students practice in the skill of writing(identify genre features, writing for communication )

Speaking lesson sequences

We use speaking lesson sequences for a number of purposes. For example, to focus on: 1. Practice of lexis and grammar. 2. Language, information processing; 3. Interacting with different people 4.Making arguments 5. To create necessary conditions for communication

Speaking can be only the first stage for different types of writing or reading activities. (writing a report, reading an article)