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Teach English in Chengwuxianzhanglou Zhen - Heze Shi

Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in Chengwuxianzhanglou Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Heze Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.

There are four basic skills in any language; Receptive skills – Reading and Listening, and Productive Skills – Speaking and Writing. All are equally important and wherever possible we should try to incorporate all of them into our lessons if we want to have a balanced approach. This summative task will focus on the receptive skills which are reading and listening. Usually new learners develop these skills first and so they have to be taught with patience and made very clear so that they build a foundation for the student’s future communication. Developing receptive skills can be particularly challenging especially when communicating with a fluent or native speaker. Although starting a conversation may be done with relative ease, maintaining one poses greater challenges. The main problem is learners usually learn key phrases like greetings and general questions but if they have to now continue the conversation after these ‘Key Phrases’ they tend to freeze and are not able to continue the conversation. Most likely learners may not recognize features of connected speech or idiomatic language which may lead to an unsuccessful interaction. Similarly, with reading, if the language or grammar is too complicated it makes the text unintelligible. The key difference between listening and reading is that when learners listen to information, they have much less support than when they are working with the written word on the page. Listening requires ‘real-time’ processing of language, and once the message has finished, there is no easy way to go back and check for meaning, as there is during reading. The best way to improve receptive skills is from exposure whether from an enjoyable authentic text or a quality ESL text book. For example, television, music, books and magazines are great ways to build vocabulary while incidentally promoting learner autonomy. Coursebooks can provide a base for this and are adapted for an ESL learner, whereas authentic materials provide exposure to real language use. One of the main reasons for getting students to listen to spoken English is to let them hear different varieties and accents – rather than just the voice of their teacher. In today’s world, they need to be exposed not only to one variety of English. British English, for example but also to varieties such as American English, Australian English, Caribbean English, Indian English or East African English. When people of different nationalities speak to each other, they often use English too, so that a Swiss flight attendant might well have to understand a Japanese woman’s English variety, just as an Argentinian might need to be able to cope with a Russian’s version. So generally, as a teacher when teaching these skills, one has to be able to consider all the above facts when planning their lessons. The key to fluency is constant exposure to the language. Furthermore, the exposure must be graded to each level so as not to overwhelm the students but to provide them with real life exposure at every stage of their learning. This is also true for the reading part. If this is done correctly this will help the students with not only their fluency but also their self-confidence and in extension this will improve their English


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