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TOPIC 7:
I.- INTRODUCTION
1.- Characteristics
III.- LISTENING
What to be learnt
How to teach
What material to use
What activities will be done
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Pre-listening activities
Prediction exercises
Vocabulary exercises
Grammar exercises
While-listening activities
Post-listening activities
IV.- SPEAKING
Repetition drills
Substitution drills
Transformation drills
Guessing drills
Controlled activities
Autonomous interaction
Functional communication
Social interaction
V.- SUMMARY
VI.- REFERENCES
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I.- INTRODUCTION
In this topic, well start from the idea that the Foreign Language Area
Curriculum mentions a sequence which must be followed when teaching the
different skills: the oral skills (listening and speaking) are stressed over written
skills (reading and writing). That's because learning to speak and to understand
means learning the language, whereas reading and writing implies that the
language is already known and that we are using its graphic representation.
In this topic we'll concentrate on the oral language, analysing in the first
part the main characteristics of it and the differences with the written language.
In the second part of the topic, we'll go into detail about both types of oral
language, listening and speaking skills, examining some of the activities we can
do in order to improve them. Well take into account that listening is a receptive
skill, while speaking is a productive skill.
1.- Characteristics
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III.- LISTENING
1.- Definition of the process
Firstly, the pupils have to identify the phonic and syntactic patterning, that
is, to recognise the familiar elements in the mass of speech without being able
to recognise the interrelationships within the whole system.
Then, the pupils must identify and select them without retention, that is,
listening for pleasure with no questions to be answered.
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There are some guidelines that may be useful when planning how to
develop pupils' listening skill, which well mention as follows:
Firstly, we must try to give children the confidence; the SS should be told that
they cannot always be expected to understand every word.
Secondly, we must help the SS to develop the strategies for listening; the most
important strategy is the use of "intelligent guesswork", that is, they can use
their background knowledge to work out the meaning of a word. They can
also use other strategies such as predicting, working out the meaning from the
context, The SS should be encouraged to notice the body language or the
way the speaker use his/her voice.
Finally, we must explain them why they have to listen; this means spelling out
which part of the message they need to focus on and what they are going to
do before listening, while they listening or after listening.
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We will now focus on two of the aspects when planning a lesson, the
listening subskills and the listening materials.
Talking about the listening materials, the most useful ones are the songs,
the video recordings, the tapes and the teacher.
Songs are an important source of motivation. They may be used to change the
pace of the lesson or to introduce cultural aspects. They reinforce the learning
process since they are very useful to review and learn vocabulary,
pronunciation, grammatical structures and patterns.
Video recordings: When using the video it is essential to choose the right
technique depending on the purpose: recognition, production or a
combination of both. There are several reasons for using video to develop
listening skills:
Tapes: We can use tapes adjusting the level to the pupils needs.
The teacher: as a matter of fact, can also provide input. The pupils listen to
the teacher most of the time, so he / she must have a good pronunciation.
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Pre-listening activities
These activities aim to warm SS up and prepare them to achieve the most
from the passage and to arouse their interest. We can distinguish three types of
pre-listening activities: prediction activities, vocabulary exercises and grammar
exercises.
The SS are told the topic of the listening passage and are asked to guess some
of the words or phrases they think they might hear.
The teacher plays the first few sentences of the recording and challenges the
SS to work out what is going on. The SS call out their ideas, which are
discussed.
The SS are given a list of words that might occur in the listening text and are
asked to listen for which ones occur and which do not.
The pupils do a picture and word matching exercise. This has two advantages.
Firstly you can bring certain words into the forefront of the SS minds, and
secondly, you can ensure that they know the meaning of new words. It is not
necessary that all the words which appear in the exercise should appear on the
tape.
While-listening activities
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Completing diagrams
Problem solving activities in which SS match or recognise information in a
text, for example:
- The SS compare what they hear with the information given to them
in a picture. They listen to see how far the information the speaker
provides agrees with, or contradicts, the information they were
originally given.
- Another problem-solving activity is storyline pictures sets: the SS
listen to a story or set of instructions referring to a number of
pictures and are asked to recognise the pictures described and to put
them in the correct order according to the passage.
Post-listening activities
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IV.- SPEAKING
As follows, we'll concentrate on the speaking skill. During the first half of
this century, this skill was neglected, since in the FL teaching, the emphasis was
on the written skills. Moreover, speaking has received more attention in the last
twenty years.
Although in the Direct and the Audio-Lingual method the emphasis was
on oral communication, students could not do free activities until they have
mastered the new language in controlled exercises, in drills. Now it is accepted
that some sort of dynamic and meaningful exercises should be included in
speaking lessons from the beginning.
When SS are learning a FL, they want prompt results and speaking is the
aim when they come to class. They want to speak and that's the most important
thing to them. When listening, the input received can be in a higher lever than
expected; in contrast, when speaking, the speaker choose the language according
to his/her level and that's an easy aspect in comparison with listening.
Although the speaker can choose the level, speaking is one of the most
problematical skills since successful oral communication involves many things:
The main goal of speaking will be fluency, which can be defined as the
ability to express oneself intelligibly, reasonably, accurately and without too
much hesitation.
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Speaking activities fall into the following three categories: activities based
on repetition and imitation, controlled activities and autonomous interaction.
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Controlled activities
Model dialogue and key words: SS work with a set of 4-5 dialogues related
to the same theme together with a list of key words which they can use to
produce different dialogues.
In gapped dialogues one of the speakers has to supply the missing utterances.
The speakers missing words may also be cued by indicating what functions
he has to express, e.g.
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Autonomous interaction
Discovering identical pairs: one S has to find which of four other has the
same picture as his.
Discovering missing information: two SS each have an incomplete table
and each has to get missing information from other.
Discovering secrets (guessing games). These games are accuracy-
focussed games chose purpose is to reinforce what has already been
taught. For example Twenty questions (one player thinks of a famous
person or place and the others try to find out what by asking no more
than twenty questions).
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V.- SUMMARY
To summarise, in this topic we have dealt with the oral skills (listening and
speaking), which, in the Foreign Language Area curriculum, are stressed over the
written skills (reading and writing). We've given some guidelines in order to
make a proper planning and we've suggest some of the activities we can do when
teaching both skills.
VI.- REFERENCES
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