Teaching English as a Foreign Language for Dummies (33 page)

Owner Mrs Smith

Area Manager Mike Smith

Figure 14-1:

A business

English

activity.

Manager Paul Jones

Manager Richard Taylor

Manager John Jones

Other simple forms of questions to get at the main idea of a dialogue may be:

✓

Do the speakers in the dialogue agree with each other or not?

✓

How many speakers are there?

✓

Where do you think they are?

Get students to tick off the things they hear, using words or pictures.

I had a class of children listen to the story of Red Riding Hood. They knew the story but didn’t realise what it was because they weren’t able to translate the title. They were very keen to find out if the English language characters did the same things as the characters in their version. I gave them a worksheet with the words
grandfather, wolf, big ears, big teeth
and
big feet
on it and told them to tick the things they heard in the story.

Listening for detail

After the students have a chance to listen to the text once and get the gist of it, you can prepare to go a bit deeper by setting a more detailed listening task for the students to tackle while listening to the recording a second time. This time the students can listen for more specific information based on particular expressions the speaker uses.

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Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

Listening activities to try

Here a few suggestions for you to try in your

ones in other cultures so the students may

listening skills lessons:

want to tell their own afterwards. If you

✓

can’t find a professional recording, get a

Working with a picture. Students can

friend to read and record it for you.

examine a picture to see if it matches up

to the listening text. Does the picture show

✓ Songs: Music is great for fixing words in

the correct number of people in the right

your mind. It’s a painless way to practice

place? Is each person in the picture wear-

grammar. I recently used Beyonce’s ‘If I

ing the clothes the listening text described?

Were a Boy’ to practise the second condi-

In a picture story students can choose the

tional tense.

picture that doesn’t fit. They may have four

✓ Physical response: Get students to follow

pictures that show scenes from a story but

instructions through movement. They can

one picture shows the same characters

practice words like prepositions and parts

doing something that doesn’t happen in the

of the body. They can also manipulate

story. By listening carefully the students

objects in accordance with the listening

can weed out it out.

text.

✓ Labelling: Students put labels on various ✓ Dictation: This traditional activity can be liv-parts of a diagram based on what they

ened up by dictating a diagram for students

hear. Suppose the listening text describes a

to draw.

machine with four of five distinct parts and

only one part is labelled on the diagram. As

✓ True or false: Have a series of true or false

the students listen to the text they hear that

comprehension questions after listening for

Part A is rectangular not round, or that Part

detail.

D is the only one connected to Part C on the

✓ Gap fill: Leave gaps in the tape-script or in

right. By listening to the text the class can

the summary you prepare.

identify and eliminate the various parts.

✓

✓ Putting information in order. The listening

Following a map: After a description or

text may describe a process such as baking

directions, X can mark the spot.

a special cake. On the students’ worksheet

✓ Short teacher monologue: Tell a story about

you list all the stages in the wrong order.

an episode in your life while students take

As they listen, the students can number the

notes. They can ask you questions about it

stages of the process from first to last.

afterwards or retell the story to each other.

✓ Complete information on a timetable or

✓ Traditional stories: Folk tales and fairy stories

schedule.

are great because there are often similar

Students don’t need to understand every word. After all, in real life we often just let phrases go over our heads. You may understand a particular expression only after hearing it many times – this is a natural way to acquire language. So instead of analysing the text to death, just choose specific things you want to highlight.

Chapter 14: In One Ear, Out the Other: Learning To Listen
207

Keep in mind that you always set the task before playing the text for the second time. Then the students listen, and have a little time to reflect on their answers. After that, have a feedback session. You can carry out reflec-tion and feedback in a variety of ways but it should happen immediately after the listening. It’s quite tricky for the students to recall the nuances of what they’ve heard on the following day, for example.

Your task may be comprehension questions based on the grammar and vocabulary in the text. It doesn’t have to be so traditional though. From time to time you can use a text to focus on pronunciation and intonation too. The objective can be for the students to listen carefully and then read a section aloud themselves.

Look for the nearby sidebar, ‘Listening activities to try’ for examples of activities to use.

Planning Follow-Up Activities

Round off your lesson with a follow-up activity. This helps to conclude the lesson in a balanced way because not everyone is good at learning through listening and some may not appreciate your chosen listening text as much as other classmates. After all, students have different styles of learning.

When you finish with an activity that focuses on a different skill, more students have a chance to shine. You can personalise a theme from the listening text by having students do a quick writing exercise based on the topic the listening text explored.

After having the class listen to an interview with Madonna, you can say something like, ‘Now that you’ve listened to an interview with an American artist, I would like you to think about a very popular musician in your country. Make notes about this musician for two minutes including the reason why she is so popular in your opinion and say whether you have any music by her at home.

Then give a 90-second presentation to your group.

This kind of activity is also appropriate for written homework and your follow-up activity may include a plan that leads to composition writing.

Other ideas for follow ups are:

✓

Making predictions:
Ask students to speculate about what happened after the clip finished. This kind of question lends itself to role-plays, students preparing quiz questions, and story writing.

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Part III: Teaching Skills Classes

✓

Reading a book related to the listening text:
Listening texts that involve a popular personality or event are useful because you can often find other material based on the same topic, such as biographies or con-spiracy theories. Books and articles maintain the students’ interest after a relatively short listening text. They provide more cultural input and an opportunity to put to good use the vocabulary they encountered during the listening tasks.

Films are often based on books and if you use a movie clip for the listening activity, you can check whether the book exists as a
graded reader
(a short book written especially for EFL students at a particular level) and get students to compare the film and book version of a particular scene.

Ask whether the director did a satisfactory job. They can try directing another scene to be acted out by classmates.

Part IV

The Grammar You

Need to Know – and

How to Teach It

In this part . . .

Teaching grammar needn’t be a slog, even if you’re not

much used to it yourself. While this book doesn’t

claim to be a definitive grammar textbook, Part IV gives

you the knowledge you need to be able to teach grammar

effectively and suggests ways to make grammar teaching

interesting.

Basic sentence structure, the use of adjectives and

adverbs, and the many and various verb tenses which

help to make learning and teaching English such a joy –

they’re all here. And of course I show you how to deliver

the seemingly driest factual info with a dash of humour

and fun.

Chapter 15

Stop Press! Student to Deliver

Sentence

In This Chapter

▶ Looking at the building blocks of sentences

▶ Understanding prepositions and articles

▶ Describing adjectives and adverbs

▶ Joining up with conjunctions

Around the world there are thousands of languages, each with its own grammatical system. This means that students can easily get it wrong when they try to put words together to make a sentence in English. So in this chapter you find out about the structure of sentences. Although entire grammar books devote themselves to the subject, this section introduces a few points that students can use to improve spoken and written fluency.

English is basically an
SVO language
– in a simple sentence it’s
s
ubject first, then
v
erb, then
o
bject.

Starting with the Basics: Subjects, Verbs

and Objects

‘Things’ and ‘doing words’ are the explanations for nouns and verbs you may remember from your school days but you have to be a lot more detailed than that to help your students. Actually, nouns are words that tell you the names of people, places and things such as
, office
and
desk.
A
verb is word that describes an action such as
to laugh
and
to watch.
Verbs can
describe a state of being too, such as
I
am
happy
. Then there are pronouns, which are words you use to replace nouns in a sentence such as
it
and
they.
I go into these in detail in the following sections.

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Part IV: The Grammar You Need to Know – and How to Teach It
Thinking about subjects

A
subject
is basically a word telling you what or who is doing something, or what thing, or who, the sentence is about. For example:

Peter
loves ice cream.

The word ‘Peter’ is the subject word because he is the one who ‘loves’.

You use the
subject pronoun
when you don’t say the name of the person or thing. For example:

He
loves ice cream.

Instead of saying ‘Peter’, the subject word is
he,
which is a subject pronoun.

By the way, subject pronouns are sometimes called personal pronouns and here they all are: I, you, he, she, it, we and they. You should point out that ‘I’

is always a capital letter.

Students may think that one or two subject pronouns are missing when you first write them out like this. That’s because in lots of languages there are different versions of ‘you’ depending on whether you’re talking about one person or more than one, or whether you’re speaking to a respected person or a pal.

In addition to this, in some dialects and varieties of English, people say ‘you all’, ‘you guys’ or ‘youse’, but you don’t teach these as standard English.

Some native speakers use the subject pronoun ‘one’. For example they may say, ‘One drinks white wine with chicken’. Although the sentence is correct, it doesn’t sound very modern and if students say it they can sound rather pre-tentious. So you’re better off not teaching ‘one’ as a subject pronoun unless your students come across it and ask you for an explanation. Encourage them to use ‘people’ or ‘you’ instead.

Students get mixed up for various reasons when they use subject words. For example:

✓

In some languages you can make a sentence without using a subject word at all. So, you can effectively say: Peter loves ice cream. Prefers vanilla.

Of course, this second sentence is incorrect in English because in English you must have a subject word, but it may well look fine to a student.

✓

Sometimes the subject word is not in first place in a sentence. Of course, that’s where students expect it to be so they panic when it’s not there.

Chapter 15: Stop Press! Student to Deliver Sentence