TEPS

Topic 2 Methods and Techniques of Teaching English for Primary School Students

Indra Wahyu Herdana 08DBR Metacognitive Awareness Metacognitive awareness in a language learning context lets someone know that s/he is a learner. It exists in mind and is considered as the key to successful language learning. In the context of Teaching English for Primary School, the teacher has a crucial role to play. S/He is responsible in building metacognitive awareness in pupils mind because it cant be developed by any teaching situations and teaching materials. The teacher should also encourage the pupils to reflect critically on what they are doing and why, in order to plan and direct their own learning. Cognitive Strategies Cognitive strategies help students to understand why they are learning a foreign language at school. In the context of Teaching English for Primary School, these involve them in doing things with the language and their learning material and relate to specific activities in specific skills areas such as reading or listening. These also let them to think how they learn, how and when to review, how to evaluate and monitor their learning and to decide what they need to do next. Cognitive strategies include activities such as memorizing, sorting, classifying, matching, predicting, risk-taking, organizing work, and using a class library or dictionary. In some skills it is the often the nature of the task which will determine the type of strategy to use. The implementation of cognitive strategies related to TEPS can be seen from the following examples. The teacher is going to teach listening skill and will use picture dictation as the activity. So s/he may let the pupils listen for specific information and transfer spoken information into pictorial form to show understanding. It is said before that different skills and activities will lead us to different type of strategies to use. Thus, when the teacher meets, for

TEPS
Topic 2 Methods and Techniques of Teaching English for Primary School Students

Indra Wahyu Herdana 08DBR example, speaking as his/her skill focus which is going to be taught, s/he may take action rhyme as the activity and determine the strategies such as practising pronunciation and rhythm, and also s/he may let the pupils memorize vocabulary through actions and coordination. Socioaffective Strategies These strategies will involve pupils in collaborative and cooperative language-learning activities in class. Through these, pupils are expected to have an awareness of how to behave in class, towards the teacher and towards each others; to build class, peer, teacher and individual respect; and to learn to interact and cooperate together in activities. In the context of TEPS, socioaffective strategies help pupils to build their own responsibility for their own learning by working independently of the teacher for part of a lesson through working with each other in pairs or groups activities, project work, interviews and survey, etc.