Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (24 page)

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?
Question mark:
This mark shows the end of a question.

Is that statement true?

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!
Exclamation mark:
You use this mark to show that there’s stronger emotion than usual, or surprise, in the statement.

I just don’t believe it!

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@ :
I know this
at
sign isn’t punctuation, but I included it here because it’s become so ubiquitous, meaning that it’s everywhere!

Don’t be lazy about using question marks and capital letters when you write on the board. Many teachers take these things for granted only to wonder why their students read and write so poorly. Students quickly pick up your bad habits.

From the first lessons you’re likely to teach whole phrases such as, ‘How are you?’ and ‘I’m from England’. Get your students to repeat whole sentences as they read from the board and you point out the words one by one. That’s not to say that students should only read the words one by one. Aim for fluent, connected speech. They then learn to recognise the words and also how to use the appropriate intonation for a statement or question.

You certainly don’t want your students to read like robots. So don’t slow down too much when you read aloud. You find that you start to sound unnatural if you do and you won’t be using the typical rhythm of the language.

Encourage students to chunk words together too. In this way they’re less likely to translate word for word, which often leads to them losing the sense of the sentence.

Higher-level students can also work with individual sentences. For example, they can analyse a list of newspaper headlines or short advertisements. The
puns
(jokes based on words that look or sound the same but have different meanings) and other forms of word play in these short texts are a real challenge for learners. On the other hand, when they get the sense of them, students feel a real sense of accomplishment. Collect any good examples you come across for use in your lessons.

Scores of words sound or look the same in English. If students aren’t paying attention to the context, they may get completely the wrong end of the stick.

Pay attention when teaching:

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Homophones:
Words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. For example, both here/ hear are pronounced /

hiə/ and sight/site are both pronounced /sait/.

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Homographs:
Words that look the same but sound different and have different meanings. For example, bow /baυ/(to bend from the waist as a sign of respect) and bow /bəυ/ (a decorative way of tying a ribbon).

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Looking at length

Once students are comfortable with sentences, give some consideration to the length of the text you want to use in your lessons.

You can use readers, especially designed for language students, containing short stories and novels. These slim, pocket-sized books are written to match the various levels of EFL courses. They’re best used at home but can provide short extracts that you can use in the classroom, safe in the knowledge that the level of English is just right.

The majority of texts EFL teachers use in a lesson are between three and six paragraphs long.

The EFL classroom is generally a fun and lively place in which to learn. So think carefully before introducing a long text that requires extended periods of silence while students read. Shorter texts, or texts you can deal with in stages with periods of discussion in between, tend to be more appealing.

Judging interest and relevance

Now we’re all proud of Will Shakespeare, but pause for a moment before you reach for a volume of Hamlet. Is the effort of translating ‘To thine own self be true’ actually worth it for a student who simply wants to serve British holi-daymakers in his café?

Ask yourself, ‘What’s the aim of this lesson?’ If the text practises vocabulary or grammar the class has recently covered, and if it seems pretty interesting or relates to something the students need to know in the future, you’re on the right lines.

So if you have a nifty recipe for shepherd’s pie that you fancy using in class, don’t be put off just because your students are unlikely to make the dish.

Think about what kind of language your students are practising. Verbs like chop, slice and mix are useful for anyone who cooks. On the other hand, you may be using your recipe to demonstrate how to describe the process of doing something (first . . . , and after that . . . , and finally . . .). Or perhaps you feel your students need a little more cultural awareness. It’s perfectly valid to have as an aim something that’s not based on grammar and vocabulary, providing that the level of English in the text is appropriate.

Other texts suitable for beginners are timetables – where students need to say what time something happens – shopping lists and menus where the vocabulary is limited but the class can practise saying prices and calling out individual items. You may be surprised how useful authentic English texts can be for practising in class.

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Put together a selection of these text types:

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Diary entries

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Emails

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Cartoon strips

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Food labels and ingredients

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TV guide listings

Working with the Text

Students should be ready for the text and have a purpose for reading in the form of a task or question. You need to have a strategy for dealing with vocabulary and to design a follow-up activity to expand on the same theme.

If you follow these steps, your reading lessons can really open the door to a world of English texts and literature to your students.

Getting ready to read: Pre-reading tasks

Everyone needs a reason for reading, even if it’s just to pass the time of day.

Don’t just hand out a text and expect students to get stuck in. Have them do a bit of preparation first.

A pre-reading task whets the appetite and prepares the mind for the text that follows. As the name suggests, the task doesn’t involve reading the text but is connected to the main topic of the lesson.

So what kinds of pre-reading task can you use? You can have a discussion about the author. Find out what the class knows about him or her. On the other hand, if the text represents an aspect of English speaking culture that’s unusual for the students, have a pop quiz about it or bring in some pictures.

Before reading an article from
The Sun
newspaper, have a class discussion about what tabloid newspapers are, and how they differ from broadsheets like
The Times
. Identify the new vocabulary in the text and put six or seven of the new words on a worksheet with their definitions. If you mix things up, you can ask students, in pairs or small groups, to match the words to their definitions.

You can also ask what the words may have in common too.

List all the numbers or locations in the text. Students can make up their own story with them and then read the text afterwards to see whether their ideas were similar to the text.

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Finding your way around

Helping your students to identify the structure of a reading text is a useful way of focusing the mind, so be aware of how the text is put together. This means looking first at the title and pictures that introduce the topic. Next, read any subheadings or just the first line of each paragraph, which should each contain a slightly different idea to the previous one. Is there an introduction and conclusion? Point these out too.

Now that you’re aware of how it all fits together, you can make the text less intimidating for your students by showing them these signposts. Reading in another language can seem really daunting but once students know how to find their way around the text they should be more positive about this skill, especially if they’re likely to enter higher education in English.

Getting the gist

You get the gist of a text by
skimming
it, or reading through it fairly quickly to form an impression of what it’s about. After the pre-reading task, students should glance through the whole text quickly.

An analysis of the structure, which I talk about in the preceding section, involves skimming.

Try giving your students a multiple choice of answers and ask which places, numbers or characters are mentioned in the text. They can find the answer by glancing through without reading each line.

Set a time limit of just a few minutes for all skimming activities.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty

After the students take a good overview of the text it’s time for a closer look at the details. This is called
scanning.
Students can’t spend as much time as they want analysing every word in the text but they do have more time than the skimming stage. They now read to find specific, not general, information.

A typical comprehension exercise involves scanning, whether it involves true or false questions, multiple choice or filling in missing words.

It’s more fun if students read different texts in groups and write their own comprehension questions to test their classmates.

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Another more detailed scanning activity is called
multiple matching.
This is where you match a variety of paragraphs and specifications together. Say the class is reading film reviews, the students can then match an appropriate film with the profile of a person you’ve given them. For example: John is a horror fan but he doesn’t mind science fiction. His girlfriend Penny likes American films but prefers unknown actors. Read the six film reviews and decide which film they could see together.

With three or four questions like this the students match information together and test their comprehension.

Predicting

Another skill worth making use of in reading lessons is
prediction
. If you can make a fair stab at what’s coming next, it shows you’ve understood what’s happened so far and builds up excitement. Any self- respecting novel does this at the end of each chapter. So why not choose a text with a decent storyline? Instead of having long periods of silence in the classroom, the students can read smaller sections and then debate how the plot is going to develop.

For example, here’s the introduction to a short story with a prediction question:

Ravi was awake. He opened his eyes slowly and pushed his arms straight.

It was already too hot, at least 30 degrees, and the city streets were full of men and children rushing along to catch the crowded buses. Ravi’s stom-ach was rather noisy this morning, so he decided to . . .

Prediction questions:

What did Ravi decide to do? Compare your ideas.

What did your classmates predict?

Now read the next paragraph to find out what Ravi decided.

Use an overhead projector so that you can uncover one paragraph at a time, or alternatively, fold the text handout so that each fold contains one key section for consideration.

Summarising

Summarising
is a valuable skill for students. A summary explains or shows what the whole text is about but in a brief way. You can have them do it verbally, in the form of a diagram or in writing. Even children can summarise by drawing a picture based on what they’ve read.

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Some ideas for summarising are to have students read separate related texts, which they then explain to each other. Give your students a table to fill in with key points or ask them to give a one-minute presentation in front of the class.

Bring in a handful of film reviews. Divide students into groups, with a member for each review and have each student read a different review. Hand out a table such as the one in Table 10-2. As each student tells the group about her review, the others can listen and complete the table with all the films.

Table 10-2

Reviewing Films

Name of film

Genre

Plot

Star

Rating

Vampire Attack

Horror

Vampires invade

Brad Cruise

*****

London looking for

more victims.

Love In London

Romance

Two tourists from

Denzel Snipes and

***

different worlds meet

Jennifer Streep

and fall in love in

Trafalgar Square.

Handling Vocabulary

You can handle new words in a reading exercise in a few ways:

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Get the vocabulary out of the way from the outset by teaching it in the pre-reading stage.

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Let the students read first and work on the meaning of individual words afterwards.

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Don’t deal with vocabulary at all so that students learn to find their own coping strategies.

In the first two cases beware of wasting time on words that can just as well be ignored. Even native speakers encounter words they’re unfamiliar with and may not look up them up if they’re still able to understand what they’re reading.

The next sections explore each option in turn.

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Before you set off

You can make new words a pre-reading task (see ‘Getting ready to read: Pre-reading’ earlier in the chapter). This works well if students aren’t used to reading in English and need a little reassurance that they can do it. This technique makes sense especially when a new word occurs so frequently in the reading that the meaning is necessary to make any sense of the thing.