Teach English in Dangzhai Zhen - Zhangye Shi

Speaking and writing are used for the same purpose ? to communicate. Writing is the most difficult skill, requiring a greater degree of accuracy. Speaking requires a greater degree of fluency. There are four mainly reasons why people communicate with each other: they have some communicative purpose, they want to say something, they want to listen to something, they are interested in what is being said. Teachers have to create the need and desire, in the students, to communicate. Accuracy and fluency activities are equal important. They both come into different stages of a lesson. Accuracy activities are usually part of the study phase, and they are concentrated on producing correct language. Fluency activities are part of activate stage, and they are concentrated on allowing the students to experiment and be creative with language. Speaking activities in the classroom include controlled activities (accuracy based activities, language is controlled by the teacher, e.g. drilling, prompting), guided activities (accuracy based but a little more creative and productive, e.g. model dialogues, guided role-play), creative communication (fluency based, the output is created by the teacher but the content of the language is not, e.g. free role-play, debates, discussions, simulations, information gap, communication games). There is a variety of reasons why many students are reluctant to speak in the classroom: lack of confidence, fear of making mistakes, lack of interest in the topic, peer intimidation, cultural reasons, previous learning experience. The first aim for the teacher is to create a comfortable atmosphere, where students are not afraid to speak or make mistakes, and they can enjoy communicating with the teacher and their fellow students. Some techniques help to encourage student interaction: pair-work, group-work, controlled and guided activities before fluency activities, make speaking activities purposeful, change the classroom dynamics, careful planning, with certain activities you may need to allow students time to think about what they are going to say. Writing differs from speaking not only in grammar and vocabulary but also in handwriting, spelling, layout and punctuation. Handwriting is a personal issue but poor handwriting may influence the reader in a negative way and so the teacher should encourage the students to improve it. Spelling in English is made difficult by the fact that many words that are pronounced the same are written differently and some words are written the same way but pronounced differently. A single sound in English may be written in different ways. That?s why the teachers need to draw the students? attention to the different ways of pronouncing the same letters (or combinations of them) and have the students do exercises to discover spelling rules. After students have completed a piece of written work we should get them to check it over for grammar, vocabulary usage, punctuation, layout, spelling and style of writing (formal/informal). Creative writing activities include stories, plays and poetry. Games are one of the important activities in the classroom. Many games can be adapted to English teaching. There are two kind of games: competitive games where players or teams race to be the first to reach the goal, and co-operative games where players or teams work together towards a common goal. These activities can be broken down into linguistic and communicative games. Games are popular not only with children but also with teenagers and adults. Games should be a part of syllabus, they can provide useful controlled practice and free practice material.