TEFL Chesterfield Michigan

Often times, a language course will focus mainly on teaching grammar, vocab, writing, and speaking. The first japanese course I took at my university certainly emphasized those areas, but luckily, my second teacher knew to give some time to teaching those areas, and I could feel the benefits from it. I believe this approach comes from the belief that if those four areas are the primary focus, then the “passive” skills of reading and listening will occur naturally and will become second-hand as they seem to do with the learner's first language. What this approach fails to consider is that these skills aren't “passive” but are in fact “receptive” skills. These skills dictate how well we receive and process the information that we take in through reading and listening. Listening and reading require many of the same skills so many of the techniques are used to teach them. It's important to choose reading or listening material the students have some knowledge about and to preview the material to let them “anticipate the content they are about to listen to or read” (68). The book Becoming a Language teacher: A Practical guide to Second Language and Learning uses the term “advance organizer” to describe the same role that ITTT's reading material described as pre-teach and encourages the teacher to go through that phase with the students before reading or listening to something new. During the listening or reading the book also suggests using visual aides or other tools to help make the material more comprehensible. Before, I had mainly considered visual aids as a way to teach vocab or to grab the students' attention. The “recall” phase is also something I had not considered, but think is a good idea. It could serve a student well to have the chance to collect their thoughts by writing them down in their native language before moving on to questioning them about the material using either recall questions or inference questions; recall questions being questions that can be answered simply by repeating directly from the speech or text and inference questions requiring the students to understand the question before answering. Another thing to remind the students to pay attention to during listening portions is the intonation the speaker uses, which could offer insight or meaning to what is being said. Just as important to the actual teaching is keeping expectations at a realistic level, as failing to meet unrealistic expectations can damage a student's enthusiasm. The unrealistic expectations of the students they they're expected to understand every word to construct the meaning of a sentence with “bottom-up processing,” while most times, they'd be better served taking a top-down approach and take in the gist of the sentence as a whole by applying their background knowledge to the task at hand. This isn't to say that every problem can be solved that way, but “it is important to explain the purpose of listening [and reading] activities and suggest appropriate strategies” (72) for each. While there are similarities between the teaching techniques of listening and reading, it's important to also keep the differences in mind. Reading material has the advantage of a student being able to mull over a part that may be giving them a little trouble if they have the time to figure it out. With listening material, on the other hand, isn't as forgiving and will proceed with or without the student's understanding. For this reason, it's important to plan time to replay the listening material to give the students a chance to catch anything they missed. There's a lot to consider when teaching reading and listening. I could easily have gone on about the stages of reading and listening that students go through while learning the language and how to plan lessons around that, when and how to choose either created or authentic materials, and the different types of reading and listening exercises, but I didn't have enough room to do so with the seven-hundred words I'm given to do so. Citations Horwitz, E. K. Becoming a Language teacher: A Practical guide to Second Language Learning and Teaching. Allyn & Bacon, 2008. Print.