Week 3
This week has been dedicated to the things I like the most in the classroom: listening and speaking skills. They are necessary skills, yet the most difficult ones to teach from my point of view. Some students have a kind of intuition when they approach these skills, so for some of them practicing these skills in the lessons is natural. Sadly, this is not the case for most of our students. They make a big effort, and some of them seem to improve very slowly. We've been shown some websites where students can practice these skills. We've read very interesting articles about using technologies to enhance speaking and listening and about using authentic materials in the lessons.
I consider there has to be space for all kinds of listening in the EFL classroom. I normally base my classes on one book, the listening material which is included in it is really easy to follow. The listening exercises are normally recorded by actors who are reading a script, what means that the recordings are very clean, without any background noise, the conversation participants project their voices very well, and speak clearly and slowly. As a result, the student only has to strive for doing the task well. However, authentic materials are very difficult to understand, the speed of speech of some native speakers, as well as the accent or the background noise may disturb EFL students. Moreover, the listening activities in books have been selected to practice a certain pattern in language, so students have more context and more information about what they are going to hear in the listening activity. When using authentic materials the teacher has to devise appropriate pre-listening activities to introduce the new vocabulary and grammar structures included in the recordings, this first part of the exercises is vital to get the students engaged. I normally set speaking tasks for post-listening activities, based on the previous listening exercise. After the exercise you realize that the students only listen to English programs because they want to get a pass mark in the listening test, so the difficult thing is to show the students what they can do to listen to the radio for fun, for the sake of doing it, the most difficult thing for me as a teacher is to create the need of listening and speaking in the foreign language.
I've discovered Delicious! It is new to me, but I find it quite useful to share your bookmarks. Thanks to all my classmates for being so generous and share all those wonderful links.
I've read some previous final projects for this course, and I think it is amazing how global a learning community may be. We are teachers from very different parts of the world, and dedicated to different education levels, yet we all have thousands of things to share and to discuss about.
Begoña
Spain