III. Listening, Oral Work, Reading, and Writing

What are your challenges when teaching the listening, speaking, reading, writing skills? In what ways can the ideas presented in chapters 3 through 6 help you to teach the four skills better?

One challenge in our kindergarten practicum was that the pupils were very young and restless. They hadn't developed these skills, for that reason, they were not able to understand all the activities in English that we asked them to do as they didn't have any idea about the English Language neither. Also, they had big problems at the time to pronounce any word in English. Another challenge was that the children couldn't read and write, that is why, we had difficulties making our students work in class, and sometimes we didn't know how to present them the topics.

With this experience, we learned how to teach, what kind of activities we have to do or what we can do to improve the students' skills through easy and funny activities. Also, we learned what we don't have to do because as we know, the children are like little sponges that try to imitate all that they observe from other people. We as future teachers should know how to take the control when the things go in a bad way with the students.

What kind of resources we can use to develop each skill:

Listening: mime stories, drawing and telling, songs and reading stories.

Speaking: drawings, chain work, dialogues and role play work, using objects, free activities, pair and group work.

Reading: look and say, reading a story, reading a text based or the child’s language.

Writing: organizing and copying, copy book, free writing activities.

The ideas that we showed you before help us to teach in a better way, doing the students to be happy and get fun at the same time that they are learning a new language. If they learn in a very creative way, they are going to understand easily, and they are going to be more interested in practicing the things that you taught them before.

Mention 8 activities from chapters 3 through 6 that you haven’t tried in your classes. Which of the 8 activities may work in your teaching context? Which of the 8 activities may not work in your teaching context? Explain why they may or may not work.

We didn´t put in practice the following activities:

v Reading story

v Rhymes

v Using a pet

v Silhouettes

v Straight copying

v Whole sentence reading

v Matching

Activities that may work

v Reading story

v Silhouettes

v Using a pet

We consider that these activities can work if we apply them with patient and enthusiasm. For example, reading story: this can be a good activity to carry out in the classroom because if you not only read the story but also do mimics, gestures and funny movements, you are going to catch the pupils` attention, and they will be concentrated in what is going to happen later. Doing the activity in this way, the children are going to understand in a better way.

Activities that may not work

«  Straight copying

« Whole sentence reading

« Matching

 These activities may not work in our teaching environment because some children cannot read and write, and we have to take all those things into account at the moment to plan the activities for the class.