M e t h o d o l ogy for Teaching English-2

M e t h o d o l ogy for Teaching English-2

Organising student practice

There are many ways to organise student practice of new language.
Amongst them are:

Open class

All students listen to the teacher or to the contributions of individual students. This is particularly appropriate when the teacher is introducing new topics before pair/group work and also when getting students to report back after closed pairs/group practice.

Open pairs

Two students are chosen by the teacher to ask and answer while the rest of the class listen. It is often a good idea to choose students from very different parts of the class so that the rest of the class can hear what is happening and feel included. This often provides a good model and clarifies instructions before a ‘closed pairs’ activity.

Closed pairs

All students work with a partner. This encourages maximum practice and is particularly appropriate for dialogue work. It is important that the teacher monitors the different pairs as they are working and doesn't spend too long with any individual pair.

Group work

This is best for activities which involve the collection or discussion of ideas. Students work in small groups and usually report back ‘open class’ to share their ideas with the class as a whole.

‘Mingle’ activities

These allow constant repetition of a particular question or collection of the opinions of many students. Students stand up and walk from one student to another, asking and answering as required - they ‘mingle’! These activities are effective with classes where furniture can be moved out of the way to allow for free movement around the room. Clearly, activities like this (especially with a large class) need to be set up carefully with clear instructions given.

Giving examples

It is always a good idea to give students an example of any exercise or practice activity that you want them to do. It is much easier to understand a practical example than a verbal one. If, for example, you want them to do an exercise where they have to choose the correct tense in a series of sentences then ask students to look at the first one and say which tense they think is correct. Confirm the correct answer and then let them continue.

Classroom management

If your class is large and mingling is not possible, put students in groups of four or five. They take it in turns to ask the question while the others listen and write the answers, or they ask:
• the student on their right.
• the student on their left.
• the student behind them.
• the student in front of them.
If you are setting up a pairwork activity and you have an odd number of students in your class, put three students together where possible. This will leave you free to monitor the other students. It may, however, sometimes be more appropriate for you to act as a student's partner, in order to balance the numbers and help that student with particular problems.

Exploiting listening and reading texts

When you are going to use an extended listening or reading text rather than a few individual words, there is a basic procedure which it can be helpful to refer to and follow if appropriate. This is a model procedure which can obviously be adapted if necessary but it does provide a generally sensible starting point.

Establish context

In real life, whenever we listen or read anything, we know what the context is, we are aware of the situation, the location, the kind of conversation, for example. These factors affect our ability to understand and make sense of what we hear and read. In class, it’s necessary to introduce the students to the context before they listen or read. The context can be elicited or prompted from earlier work, the course book, pictures, discussions and so on. Without ‘setting the scene’ like this, the tasks can become unnecessarily difficult.

Pre-teach vocabulary

It is useful to teach certain key items of vocabulary before students begin a listening or reading activity. For example, if they are going to listen to a conversation about people smoking, it may be necessary to pre-teach ‘to smoke’, ‘a cigarette’, ‘to give up’ and so on.
When pre-teaching language it is important to establish the meaning clearly.  students via prompts such as mime, pictures, definitions or whatever seems most appropriate. If no students are able to
provide the new word then, of course, you will need to supply it. Having supplied it, write it on the blackboard for students to make a note of.

However, be careful not to swamp the students with new vocabulary. There may be many words the students don’t know, but focus only on those that they will need to complete the task you are going to give them. Seven or eight new vocabulary items is probably more than enough for a pre-teach stage.

Set gist questions

We need to give students a reason to listen or read. There is little point in asking the students just to read a text, for example. When native speakers read, they know what they are reading and why. There are different kinds of reading. For example, the way you find a number in a telephone book is very different from the way you read a newspaper. So the students need to be given some purpose for their reading or listening.

This can simply be done through the setting of gist questions. Gist questions are general questions that refer to the overall meaning of the text. They are usually not too difficult. The students listen or read only for that information.

If you don’t set gist questions, students may try and read all of the text in detail, focussing on trying to understand every word. It is worth letting the students know that they do not need to understand everything because:
• That is not how we listen/read in real life.
• It is extremely difficult to do and can, consequently, be quite demotivating.

Play tape/read

For a reading text, set a short time limit. This again will encourage the students not to try to understand everything.

Check in pairs

After the tape has finished or the time limit is up, let the students check with each other to see if they have the same answers. This gives the students the opportunity to speak. Also, if they have confirmed the answers with their partner, then they will be more confident if asked to answer in front of the whole class.

Check answer in class

Elicit and confirm the answers in open class. Set more detailed questions
Now that the students are familiar with both the context and text, they can be given more detailed comprehension questions to answer. These questions will require the students to identify specific pieces of information and can be different types. For example:

• Comprehension Where did Jim go?
• True or False Jim went to Russia
• Multiple choice Jim went to a) Russia b) China c) Canada d) Romania

Play tape/read again

For a reading, set a longer time limit at this stage. Because the questions are more detailed than gist questions, they will require more careful reading.

Check in pair s

Again, after the tape or time limit, let the students compare their answers with a partner. Monitoring carefully will let you know whether the students need to listen again or have more time for reading.

Check answers in class

Elicit and confirm answers in open class. In this stage, be prepared to play or focus on passages in the text which apply to the particular questions you set............................