Teach English in Shijing Zhen - Linyi Shi

Reading is one of the key skill in language learning. It reinforces the skills students acquire in speaking, listening and writing. On the other hand, it really isn't enough just to put a book or short text in front of students and ask them to read, whether silently or out loud. You can help students develop a host of sub-skills through activities around reading. And, you can make life easer by selecting reading material that's both at the right level and somewhat interesting. You can choose from an immense variety of things to read in English-novels, blogs, ads, newspaperes, magazines or just flashcards- the list is endless. Choose a pice of written that your students are likely to be interested in, even if it's just a couple of words long and written on the board. They should be able to understand most of the words on a printed page expect for a handful of new words, which you have a strategy for dealing with. The alphabet is the most basic reading text you can choose. Make sure that everyone in the class can recognise and say the letters out loud. Pay particular attention to the vowels. Even higher-level studens get them wrong. practise the alphabet in a fun way by using populer acronyms or abbreviations and see if the sudents know what they mean. For example: BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation. DVD: Digital versatile disc. SMS: Short message service and so on. After all, English is notoriously difficult to spell and pronounce even for native speakers, so reading aloud can be very daunting for students. These simple examples of English spelling rules make a world of defference to people learning to read in English. The letter 'e' after a vowel and consonant together softens/lengthens the vowel sound. Compare rid and ride, mad amn made, or cut and cute. When the letter 's' is between two vowels, it's pronounced like 'z', rise, present and pose. At the begining of aword gn,kn, and pn are pronounced /n/. Wh is pronounced /w/. There's no need to pronounce 'h'. Wr is pronounced /r/. The 'w' is always silent. In order for students to understand complete sentences on paper, they need an idea of sentence structure and punctuation.Fom beginner stage, point out what apostrophs, commas and other marks do. Using slow deliberate change in your intonation as you read often makes this clear. From the first lesson you're likely to teach whole phrases such as 'How are you?' and 'I'm from England'.Get your students to repeat whole sentences as they read from the board and you point out the words one bu one.That's not to say that students should only read the words. Aim for fluent, connected speech, they then learn to recognise the words and also how to use the appropriate intination for a statement or question. Once students are comfortable with sentences, give some consideration to the length of the textyou want to use in your class.Students should be ready for the text and have a purpose for reading in the form of a task or question. You need to have a strategy for dealing with vocabulary and to design a follow-up activity to expand on the same theme. If you follow these steps, your reading lessons can really open the door to a world of English texts and literarure to your students. Helping your students to identify the structure of a reading text is a useful way to focusing the mind, so be aware of how the text is put togeter. This means looking first at the title and pictures that introduce the topic, next read any subheading or just the first line of each paragraph, which should each contain a slightly different idea to the previous one. When students are able to listen to texts in English and get the sense of them , they feel a real sense of achievement.But how can you train your students to listen without them feeling overwhelmed? When you teach listening skills, it pays to remember that it takes most people a little time to tune in before they listen well.Students need to pay full atention and have had some practice time before they can cope with detiled information in a foreign language. Music, films,podcasts and broadcasts are very populer with students,exept the odd few who prefer grammar tables and 'serious' work. In a lesson you can only usually deal with a few minutes of listening text at a time, so select clips from longer recording that appropriate to the level and interesting to analyse.If your students have Internet access you can set longer listening task as homework.They can listen to extract of 20 minutes or so in preparation for aclass discussion the following lesson.Hearing authentic listening material designed for native speakers is very motivating for your students,but you face a serious problem where there are many accents to deal with. A good way to deal with unusual accent is by adapting a tape-script for your students.This means turning it into a 'fill in the gaps' type exercise where students can read along and just fill in certain words pronounced in a fairly regular way. In most cases you play listaning texts twice within the lesson.The first time students get the idea of what the text is about and on the second occasion they listen for more detiles . A task or activity aimed at getting the gist should be relatively easy but not obvious.So if you are presenting a Madonna interview,ther's nopoint asking 'Who is Madonna?'.It is not even necessery to listen to the text to get the answer. Listening and responding to a visual image is a useful way of exercising listening skills because students don't get tangled up with reading and writing, which may create anxiety or distraction. Listening activities should practise just that,listening. Avoid trying to test reading or writing skills at the same time by using complicated grammaticalstructures or unnecessarily difficult vocabulary in the quetions. After the students have a chance to listen to the text once and get the gist of it, you can prepare to go a bit deeper by setting a more detailed listening task for the students to tackle while listening to the recording a second time.This time the students can listen for more specific information based on particular expressions the speaker uses. Students don't need to understand every word.After all. in real life we often just let phrases go over our head.You may understand a particular expression only after hearing it many time-this is natural way to acquire language.So instead of analysingthe text to death ,just choose specific things you want to highlight.