 Hello, this presentation is going to covers the teaching of productive skills. To start with, if we think about the way in which you learnt your first language, most of us go through a particular process. Firstly, we listen to those around us. After that first silent period of listening to other people, then we start to make utterances. Having learned to speak to a certain extent at least, we then go on to learn how to read and to write. And this process that we go through is actually covering the four skills that we're trying to teach with our English students. So we have listening, speaking, reading and writing. If we group those skills into their different types, then the two skills of reading and listening are known as receptive skills, whereas the skills of speaking and writing are known as productive skills. In this session we're going to focus on the production skills and have a look at how to create a lesson for that. So we'll focus first of all on a speaking skills lesson. And perhaps a starting point for this would be to ask a question which is why do we speak to each other? The reason that it's important to ask ourselves this question is that whatever answers there are to this should be present in our lessons. So why do we speak to each other? Well there are a multitude of answers to that, but when you boil them all down to their essence they probably actually come down to one of two things. We communicate to each other via speaking because of either a need. We need something, we want something or a desire to achieve something. Before we move on to the planning of a lesson for speaking skills, something that we need to look at first is the idea of the accuracy versus the fluency of speaking. Accuracy relates to the correct usage of grammar and vocabulary, whereas fluency relates to our ability to continue speaking without any interruption. Now ultimately within a whole ESA lesson or within language learning itself fluency and accuracy are equally important. Within an ESA lesson however depending upon which stage we're at in that lesson then we're either focusing on accuracy or we're focusing on fluency. Remember in the ESA lesson in the study phase this is where we're looking at the target language, where we're doing our language learning so it's very important in this stage that we focus on the accuracy of the language. Whereas in the activate stage we're trying to get the students to use the language in a realistic way and what we want them to do there is to focus on fluency. So speaking activities will come in many different forms but we can generalise them into three basic types. Controlled activities tend to be used in the study phase and here the teacher will be helping the students in terms of what they need to say and how they go about saying it. So there's a high level of structure within a controlled activity. A guided activity has slightly less structure than this and it can be used in either they study all the activate stages themselves. The final type of activity or class of activity is called a creative activity and this one would be used in the activate phase. In a creative activity we're giving a scenario or a very small amount of structure and we're asking the students to actually create their own answers to this particular question. Regardless of whether your activity is controlled, guided or creative there are a number of things that you need to make sure are in place before you could expect the students to actually start them. So the first thing goes back to the reasons why we communicate in the first place. There is little point asking our students to create a speaking activity unless there is some need or desire to do that. So we have to make sure that we generate interest in this particular activity before we actually start. The second thing, do our students have the language knowledge that is necessary in order to be able to complete such a speaking activity? If they have a lack of grammar knowledge or a lack of vocabulary knowledge around this particular speaking activity it's going to be very very difficult for them. Thirdly, when asking the students to create language in terms of a speaking activity it's always very useful to put them in pairs. By putting them in pairs you allow them to interact and therefore gain even more speaking practice but also you reduce stress because all of the effort is not concentrated on a single individual. So let's consider now a typical speaking lesson and the stages that we need to go through from the very start until the finish. Before the lesson even takes place there are a number of things that you need to have considered. Obviously you need a very clear idea of what it is you're expecting the students to have to do and they need to know why. It's very important before you ask them to do an activity that they have an understanding of the purpose of that activity. You should secondly have had a thought about what they already know. Link to that is will it be necessary to do any form of pre-teaching before I can expect them to do this activity? Finally we need to make sure that we have prepared all our materials and our instructions for this particular activity. So we'll consider a straight arrow ESA lesson the focus of which is to be speaking skills so we'll start with our engage and in a typical lesson what we might do is ask our students about the weather in their country and if they know anything about the weather in any other countries. So throughout this engage phase what we can be doing is to be drawing information out from the students getting that information up onto the board and starting to generate some interest in the topic itself. Once we're satisfied that all the students have been engaged and that they've been given the opportunity to say something we can move on to our study phase. Here it may be necessary or useful to actually pre-teach some gaps in knowledge that have been shown from the engage phase and those gaps in knowledge may include actual grammar structures or indeed useful vocabulary and it's very important that before we move on to doing any forms of activity that we check their understanding of this material so we need to do some study exercises. It's also very useful if you leave this information up on the board for all of that study period. Those study activities can just be the normal types of gap fills or matching activities and as always we need to demonstrate those activities elicit correct answers before we actually give out the material and once they are doing the activity monitor when it's complete we can then feedback and correct as necessary. The final stage of the lesson will be the activate and the activate phase is going to form the main speaking activity within the lesson so it's very very important that here we do a good demonstration of what it is that we're expecting them to do that we elicit the type of target language we're expecting them to produce from the activity so one way we could go around it is to firstly form pairs each pair is going to be given a card and onto that card they're going to write a country and a month what the teacher can then do just to add a little bit of spice to it is to collect all of the cards in shuffle them around and then redistribute them to the pairs so that they get a card that doesn't have their country all their month on it what they're then going to do is to be asked to create a weather forecast for that country in that particular month now obviously this will be written down and once all of the students have completed their forecast what we can then do is the main speaking activity where they would actually read out this particular information so obviously we would need to feed back on that afterwards if there are any common mistakes between all of these feedback sessions then we can cover those after the session has finished we're now going to move on to the second of the productive skills which is writing and again we'll look at the background too and create a typical lesson for a writing skills session one of the things to be aware of in a writing skills lesson is that writing tends to be more formal than spoken English so there will be some differences between the two such as writing very often uses less contracted forms and so on but having said that, there are many similarities between the two particular skills so many of the considerations that we had for a speaking skills lesson will also apply here to a writing skills lesson within writing skills itself there are some sub skills that we may want to teach and those sub skills could include but are not limited to handwriting, spelling and punctuation now handwriting tends to be a personal thing but it is very important for our students to get handwriting practice to make sure that they are forming the letters correctly and so on and so forth spelling, obviously with the English language not being phonetic spelling can often be a problem for all levels of students we take a simple example obviously the spelling differences between those two even though they actually sound the same, bow and bow the spelling is completely different so this can often create problems for our students finally punctuation we should be aware that many languages have a very different punctuation system to that of the English language and some languages have no punctuation whatsoever if you are teaching students with a different punctuation system or no punctuation then obviously our system within the English language can be quite difficult there are different types of writing that we can do within each of these particular skills and they would be categorised as either situational or creative a situational piece of writing refers to a different type of writing that might take place for example the way in which we write a postcard would probably not be the same as the way we would write a formal letter and the way in which we write a formal letter would probably not be exactly the same as we would write an email whereas in a creative situation what we are actually doing is things like stories the creation of dialogues and quite possibly even the creation of poetry so let's have a look now at what might take place in a typical writing lesson and again we are going to use the format of a straight arrow ESA lesson our first stage is to go through the engaged language and if we think back to what we said before what we need to do is to try to generate interest so an example here could be we show a picture first of all taken from a newspaper or magazine and then we can ask the students some questions from looking at the picture we can ask them if they can tell us what is actually happening now as shown by the picture then we can generate a bit more interest by asking them to give us ideas about what they thought was happening before this picture took place and what happened after so here we are just trying to build up the idea of a sequence of events taking place they can see the picture and that's the middle event but they've also got a picture in their mind now of what happened before or could have happened before what happened in the picture and then what happened afterwards so what we can then do is to move on to our study phase so for the study phase what we're going to do is to show them the idea of a cartoon strip in the cartoon strip what there's going to be are some people with speech bubbles and this is going to represent where dialogue will appear and in the bottom there are these rectangular boxes where there will be descriptive things happening so it will explain the actual situation that these people are in so we get across the idea first of all that these are for speech and these are for description and we can then show them a blank one of these cartoon strips and try to elicit from our students what could possibly be the people be saying and in what actual situation are they in in order for them to say that once we've gone through that we can move on to our first study activity and in the first study activity they'll be given a cartoon strip which either has the dialogue missing or it has the descriptions missing and the idea is that the students fill in the one that's not there the second study activity can then switch that around so if the dialogue is missing this time they have to fill that in and so on and so forth remember for each of those activities that you need to demonstrate elicit a correct answer before we give out the material then monitor, feedback and correct for the final stage in the activate what we're going to then do is to put those two ideas from the study phase together and we're going to give them a cartoon strip which has neither the situational description of the language or any dialogue in the speech bowls and the students are going to have to fill in both of those bits of information once they've done that they can then read those back to us for their feedback and we can correct any common mistakes between them hello this presentation is going to have a look at the idea of receptive skills and how we can go about teaching receptive skills lessons there are two receptive skills and they are reading and listening if we think about first of all why do we read or listen then there are probably two main answers to that firstly it could either be for entertainment or it could be for a specific purpose within the reading and listening areas there are a number of sub skills that we can teach our students firstly what we can do is to show different examples of reading so let's say for example that we had just bought ourselves a new video camera and along with that video camera came a whole book of instructions in order to find out how to get that camera working then we would need to very carefully read each page of that brochure and that would be what is called detailed reading now unfortunately most of us don't get our video cameras working straight away because we don't do that detailed reading we tend to do something which is slightly quicker which is called scanning and in scanning what we're trying to do is to look for specific information the other type of quick reading that we do is something called skimming and what we're doing in skimming is we're trying to get a general overview of what the text is actually saying other types of reading skill that we can actually teach is reading for prediction so having read a certain amount of various texts we can then say what we think is going to happen next and the final one for deduction so from the information that's been given can we make some form of inference for example about who actually wrote that before we go into looking at the actual receptive skills lesson it would be worth thinking about what potential problems there could be in these lessons so what things could go wrong in a reading lesson well firstly the students when they are reading in a language that is not their native language they tend to read every word as a separate piece and by reading word to word it's very difficult to get an overall impression of what that particular text is saying secondly the sentence length in a lot of articles that we will get will be very long and many of our students will not be used to that structure of language so here it's important to have a think about the way in which the text has actually been written and will it be fairly easy to read the final thing is the actual structure of the article itself so how is it written is it very formal in the form of a postcard or an email and are the students familiar with that type of writing some of the problems that occur with listening perhaps the most difficult thing is the fact that in a listening lesson the information is in the form of a continuous stream this means that a certain word will enter into our ear pass through our brain and then that word has then gone so unlike reading where if we are scanning through what that means we can go back in a listening lesson once something has been said it's gone so it's very difficult to get that information back second problem that can occur in a listening lesson is when the information is presented too quickly so for many students the actual speed of speech can be a problem one final potential problem that could occur could be that due to the teacher's accent very often our students are used to us as their teacher we're speaking to them every day but if we play some information from a CD or a tape recording of a different situation with different people then they may not be used to those particular accents however when we consider that there are these potential problems one thing we can do is to think about ways in which to avoid them so some of the ways in which we can avoid these problems occurring in the first place is to pre-teach the vocabulary that's going to be required in the particular activity and the grammar now having said this it doesn't mean that if we think about a particular article that they're going to read or a listening activity that they're going to listen to they don't have to know every single word in there but they do need to know a certain number of words in order to actually make sense out of it secondly most of the materials that we'll be using both reading and possibly for listening will be what's called an authentic material in other words it's a real piece of material from a newspaper or magazine that hasn't been created for a particular class and so we need a very careful selection of text in terms of what vocabulary is in there what actual language use is in there and also the way in which it's been written so the careful selection of texts we need to be careful about the choice of topic is it something that our group is going to be interested in is it something indeed that they're going to know anything about one of the most fundamental things that you can do to avoid problems is to create interest before you start the actual lesson it's very very difficult for students just to go straight into a reading or listening activity without any interest having been generated so let's have a look at a typical receptive skills lesson the main focus of this lesson is going to be reading although there will be some listening involved as well and it's going to be a patchwork ESA lesson as a patchwork lesson it will start off with an engage and this engage what we're going to do is to play an extract about Elvis Presley and it's going to be an Elvis Presley song and we're going to ask the students if they know who it is and if they know anything about him to help generate the interest in this we can also ask them what they'd like to know about him what we can then do is just to introduce them to the text that they're going to read for detail later on but just at this stage we'll do a quick skimming or scanning exercise to find some information from that particular text here it's important that that skimming or scanning exercise is at the most a couple of minutes so that we don't give them an opportunity to read every single word within the text from that point we can then move on to our first study activity and in this particular phase of the lesson it would be useful to pre-teach some language so this would include names of things like Graceland and so on and so forth as it relates to Elvis Presley so do some pre-teaching and vocabulary and then do a check of understanding once we're sure from that study phase that they have an understanding of the vocabulary required then we're going to move on to our first engage and the first engage activity is going to ask them to read the first text that they had during the engage phase at this time read it for comprehension again before we start this activity it's very important that we do a demonstration and elicit a correct answer before giving out the material once they completed the reading for comprehension then we can go on to our study which is to ask a series of comprehension questions by using a worksheet and again before we actually start this activity we need to demonstrate the purpose of the activity elicit correct answers and then give out the material once they've completed the second study activity and we've gone through our feedback and correction we can then go on to our first activate and what we're going to do in the first activate activity is ask them to write a short biography for Elvis on completion of the writing phase they can then feed that back and we can have a look at any common errors that's created from this particular activity and study those errors once we've done that we can go on to the final phase of the lesson which will be our second activate activity and that final activity we're going to put the students into pairs and we're going to ask them to write an autobiography which doesn't contain the name of the person they're writing about what we can then do is to get them to read out their biographies and we can ask the class to guess who it is to write the section on the teaching of productive skills and the teaching of receptive skills our activate activities will usually involve some form of game and our final consideration here will be the use of games in the classroom we could start with a definition of what we actually mean by a game and it basically has three components a game is an activity that has rules it should have for its purpose in the classroom a teaching point and by nature of the fact that it's a game it should also include an element of fun so that will be our working definition for a game that we're going to use in the classroom there are many different types of games and they range between the competitive to those which require cooperation and there are all sorts of games that involve both of these together so what we'll do is to consider two well-known games from a long list that we could give such as Scrabble, Monopoly, Tic Tac Toe, Jeopardy and so on and so forth we'll have a look at those two games and see how they can be adapted for classroom use so let's take a common game that's been played over the years which is called Noughts and Crosses Tic Tac Toe what we're going to do is to adapt this game for classroom use so we've taken the normal Tic Tac Toe or Noughts and Crosses grid and we've just numbered out each of the particular squares what we can then do is to form teams and those teams can then be asked a series of questions and they get to choose which question they want from one to nine so let's say for example they choose question one that could be on anything that they have studied grammar or vocabulary if they get that question correct and say they are the Noughts or the zeros then they get to put their mark here what the next group will probably do is to try to block them in some way by choosing this one, this one or this one and again their choice relates to some grammar or vocabulary point so here is a very simple use of Noughts and Crosses for teaching language the next example of a game that we can adapt very easily for classroom use is the game of Jeopardy and in this particular game what we can do is to have a set of levels for our questions say one through five where one is going to be the easiest example and five is going to be the most difficult and then in each of these sets of boxes we can have various grammar points such as tenses perhaps moles vocabulary and maybe even conditionals so what the students can do is they can pick a particular topic first of all and within that topic they can pick the level of the question that they want and then we can have a set of cards that have been created to fit into these slots and we can ask them that question at that level so a very simple adaptation of the game Jeopardy has a very good revision game for our students