Teach English in Xingfeng Zhen - Tianshui Shi

Receptive and productive skills are both equally important but teachers need to emphasize different things when teaching different skills. Accuracy is very important in writing whereas fluency and expression are much more prized in the realm of speech. Just like students need to be taught to be okay with not understanding every word they read, students must also be taught to be okay with not always saying everything correctly when they speak. Even more important than knowing what to emphasize when teaching a skill, teachers must always try to awaken a desire to communicate in the students. In other words, interest is the key to the successful learning of the productive skills. This can be verified by the two main purposes of speech and writing: to fulfill needs and desires. When a teacher plans a speaking lesson, the activities within it can be controlled, guided, or creative. These different types often are all used by the end of a full lesson. Creative speech is most often produced in the activate stage because the emphasis there is not on accuracy but on fluency. Following this same reasoning, a controlled speaking activity is best used for a study phase because its focus is on correctness. Writing skills are also very important and can be broken down into other skills. Although writing is generally a formal undertaking, the situational context will dictate the level of formality required with the writing. Handwriting, punctuation, and spelling all affect how a written text is perceived and these skills should always be improved when possible. UNIT 13 Teaching pronunciation and phonology The teaching of pronunciation can only be done well when drawing from a solid understanding of English phonology. Many teachers avoid this because it can be hard to understand as a native speaker. Most native speakers never contemplate their language in this way. This being said, everyone can look at examples of the phonological aspects of their language and work out the meaning of them by saying the examples out loud. This strategy can help teachers understand their native language better and will later lead to the teachers? students also examining English better. This works for all aspects of phonology. Students and teachers can be easily taught about stress and intonation by seeing visuals and listening to properly intoned speech. While articulation may seem like a daunting subject, the IPA can still those fears. Upon learning the International Phonetic Alphabet, a native speaker and say examples of words of different articulation methods?alveolar fricative, bilabial plosive, etc.?and feel the place and mode of articulation. Through repetition and drilling, students can also begin to feel these sounds. Relating a phoneme and its phonetic symbol to an example word and vice versa can help students get closer and closer to more native pronunciation. When they can properly produce that word, i.e., all the phonemes that said word is comprised of, the student can then apply those phonemes to other words. This is all possible with a general understanding of the IPA and consonant and vowel articulation. The use of visuals is also very helpful in guiding ESL students? tongue placement and mouth shape. UNIT 14 SUMMARY Coursebooks and lesson materials There are many different materials that teachers can use while teaching English. E.g., whiteboards, visual aids, DVDs, coursebooks, workbooks, etc. Just as is necessary with teaching activities, variety is key with materials. Materials must be varied to prevent predictability and to ensure a balanced covering of all skills: productive and receptive. Whether selecting coursebooks to be used for a class or which materials to be used for a lesson, the language level of the students and their predicted interest level must be taken into account. The relevance to the students' needs must always be considered when choosing materials as well. Materials are generally sorted into two large categories:authentic and non-authentic. Authentic materials are made for native speakers and are not designed with language learning in mind. Non-authentic materials are modified authentic materials for the purpose of language learning or materials created with this same end. As students advance more authentic materials should be used as they are more motivating and allow the students to use the language in native contexts. Unit 15 SUMMARY Evaluation and Testing There are many different types of tests that teachers can give their students. The tests can have many purposes. Before teaching students may receive placement tests. These tests ensure that the students are in the proper course and in this manner they receive the most effective education for their skill level. In a similar vein, students often complete diagnostic tests to allow the teachers and school to know exactly which grammatical concepts, vocabulary, and structures the students know and which they don't know. This creates insight into which direction a course needs to go and can better allow teachers to predict possible problems and plan more efficiently. Whilst teaching a course, many teachers give progress tests at varied intervals throughout the year. These are best done as formative assessments. That means that the information gleaned from the tests, what the students remembered and forgot, should be fed directly back into instruction. These progress tests should not serve just to see which students excelled during a particular instruction period, but rather to allow the teacher to modify instruction to cover topics that need reinforcing and move past topics that the students grasp. There are many external examinations that the typical ESL student may be preparing for. In order to prepare them the best possible, practice exams are given to familiarize them with the structure of the exam and gauge the content level and difficulty. It is important to note that these exams are often very high priority for many language students at private and specialized English language evening schools. Whether the students are or are not planning on taking external exams, e.g., the TOEFL or Cambridge English language tests, the teacher must still have a system of evaluation and feedback in place to make sure the instruction has been effective and to guide the students in their learning. Unit 16 Summary Conditionals and Reported Speech A very common grammatical concept taught in the ESL classroom is how to form conditional sentences. These two-clause sentences can be very troublesome as learners must navigate the many grammatical changes within these sentences. There are many different types of conditionals and each have their own grammatical patterns. They are as follows: zero, first, second, third, and mixed conditional. The conditional clauses are often referred to as \"if\" clauses. This is because they contain the word \"if\" the majority of the time. These \"if\" clauses represent some condition, often hypothetical, that will cause another event to occur. This other event may range from fact to impossible fantasy. In all of these cases this consequential action, based of the hypothetical clause, forms the main clause. While these grammatical structures are necessary to a well-rounded understanding of English, they can also be applied to another aspect of English: reported speech. Properly restating what someone has said, changing the grammar as necessary, can be quite difficult for those who are learning English. To aid in the learning of these complex changes, it is best to teach them slowly, one at a time, and practice them often.