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Unit 12 - Teaching Productive Skills: speaking and writing (including games) A concise overview of the 12th unit: ? What is the difference between accuracy and fluency activities? ? Which is more important? ? Speaking activities in the classroom ? Encouraging students to speak ? Techniques to encourage interaction ? A typical free/creative speaking activity lesson ? Guidelines free/creative speaking activity ? Handwriting ? Spelling ? Layout and punctuation ? Creative writing ? A typical creative writing activity lesson ? Games in the classroom Speaking and writing ? communicate purpose. Writing is more difficult skill, requiring a greater degree of accuracy. Speaking requires a greater degree of fluency as the speaker doesn?t have time to plan the answer. What is the difference between accuracy and fluency activities? Accuracy activities ? producing correct language (study phase) Fluency activities ? allowing the students to experiment and be creative with language (activate phase) Which is more important? Accuracy and fluency carry equal importance. Speaking activities in the classroom: ? Controlled activities ? accuracy based activities ? drilling and prompting ? Guided activities ? accuracy based but a little more creative ? model dialogues and guided role-play ? Creative communication ? fluency based activities ? free role-play, discussions, information gap, debates, simulations, communication games. Encouraging students to speak: The teacher should create a comfortable atmosphere, where students are not afraid to speak or make mistakes, and enjoy communicating. Techniques to encourage interaction: ? Pair-work ? Group-work ? Plenty of controlled and guided practice 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 A typical free/creative speaking activity lesson: ? Engage ? Study ? Activate Guidelines free/creative speaking activity: ? Before the lesson ? During the activity ? After the activity Writing skills: Spelling, handwriting, layout and punctuation. Handwriting: Handwriting is a very much personal issue, the teacher should always encourage the students to improve it. Spelling: spelling in English is made very difficult by the fact that many words that are pronounced the same are written differently (waste/ waist, etc.) and some words are written the same but pronounced differently (read/read). Layout and punctuation: Different layouts of writing (business letter, e-mails, etc.), style of writing (formal/informal). Creative writing: Typical creative writing tasks may include poetry, stories and plays. A typical creative writing activity lesson: ? Engage ? Study ? Activate Games in the classroom: A game is an activity with rules, a goal and an element of fun. There are two kinds of games: competitive and co-operative. Certain conclusions can be drawn as follows: Speaking and writing are equally important productive skills and are used for communicating purposes. ?The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.? (Unknown) This quote perfectly describes the part about encouraging students to speak. The teacher should create a comfortable atmosphere, where students are not afraid to speak or make mistakes, and enjoy communicating.
