Teach English in Dashi Jiedao - Chongqing

TEACHING PRODUCTIVE SKILLS SPEAKING AND WRITINGTeaching productive skills in an EFL or ESL class is necessarily in every lesson. Although, it is clear that speaking, before writing, is the skill that most of students want to develop. This is the reason why writing is seen as the Cinderella of the other three skills. Besides that, writing is a tedious process that requires students to generate, organize ideas, write drafts, review, and write a final draft. Although speaking is may be found easy by many students, there is a group of students that find speaking difficult especially if they feel afraid of committing mistakes. Consequently, we as teachers have to be aware of our students? needs, fears, and learning preferences so that they can feel motivated in learning the language and engaged in lessons. To make this possible a teacher has to apply some approaches such as the product and process approach for writing, and communicative teaching approach, lexical approach, audio-lingual approach for speaking. The product approach in which students are encouraged to imitate a model text, previously read and analyzed. The organization of ideas becomes a very important part of this approach and it is emphasized on a final product. In contrast to the product approach, the process approach is focused basically in the process which will lead the student to end in a final product. In this approach the teacher does not play the role of someone who sets students a writing topic and receives the finished product, but he turns into someone who provides help ad direction through the processes of pre-writing, writing itself and editing. Personally, I am more inclined towards the process approach, when teaching writing, since it provides students move from one stage to the other. Starting from the generation of ideas, teachers can provide students with three different techniques, Brainstorming, Listing, clustering and freewriting. Teachers may require from students to learn how to use each one, but it will depend on the students which one he or she wants to use. There are some other steps students have to follow to end in the final product such as the outline, drafting, editing which can be done with help from their peers or teacher to conclude in the final product. What moves a teacher make decisions when delivering instructions? What moves a teacher stop a student to correct or provide feedback? What make a teacher choose a method or technique to deliver a class? Questions like these make me think that in every decision and movement a teacher males, this must have a purpose or a reason. The different methods and techniques that an effective teacher could choose to deliver a class must have a basis in the different approaches and language research. The translation Method where classes are taught in the mother tongue, with little use of the target language, is a method is not so popular now, but still used. The Audiolingual method started during World War II to make armed forces learn a new language fast. It is characterized because structural patterns are taught using repetitive drills and there is much attention on errors. The PPP approach is an approach widely used that works through three stages; the presentation, practice and production. The Communicative Language Teaching is characterized because it focuses more attention on learning to communicate through interaction in the target language. The Task-based approach follows certain stages as the pre-task, task, planning, report, analysis and practice. Error correction is another aspect we pay attention, so we have to make the difference between mistakes, meaning and form. This will depend on the objective of the lesson. In a lesson, it is more common to see teachers correcting form like grammar, pronunciation or the wrong use of a word. When correcting form, we can also focus our attention on global and local errors. Global errors will not let the student be understood, so he will have to paraphrase or say his idea again. Local errors, in contrast, are the most common errors that most teachers pay attention. So the use of different techniques like peer correction, class correction, self-correction, or correction from the teacher has to be chosen by the teacher. For correcting mistakes or errors in speaking, a teacher can use echoing, paraphrasing, repetition, facial expression, or symbols. For writing mistakes, we could use symbols or marks, known by our students, or to describe what kind of errors they committed, but not simply correcting them since that will not require student?s awareness of their mistakes. We always have to be aware of error correction to avoid fossilization, but error correction must not stop fluency. In brief, there are several approaches and methods that a teacher can use to teach a language productive skill, but it is the teacher?s responsibility and decision to choose the correct. And I think a teacher should use more than one when delivering a class. Moreover, the best language teachers are generally dynamic and they tend to experiment with their teaching methodology. It means that we as teachers should see teaching methodology as our own personal domain, but open to outside feedback.