Week 3 Discussion: Oral Aural Skill Building

 

1.     Developing Listening Skills with Authentic Materials:
http://www.elthillside.com/up/files/article4.doc

Firstly, thank you so much Robert to help us.

I`ve read an article about Developing listening skills with Authentic Materials.  This is the first time that know that a human being uses 40% in listening; 35% in speaking; 16% in reading , and 9% in writing. I know now that authentic texts are any spoken texts, delivered via technology like radio, television-video and the Internet ( CD-ROM ).

 I recommend this URL because I can find some suggestions how develop listening skill through Radio, TV/Video, The Internet/CD-ROM , each of them have some stages. For instance, Pre-, While-, and Post-listening activities and make some advice as to how they can be used with authentic materials delivered through technological media, Internet/CD-ROM

Ø    - Radio: with an intermediate group of learners about to listen to a radio program on travel we might adopt the following procedure.

Ø   - TV/Video : with elementary-level we might consider the following out-of-class activity.

Ø    - Internet/CD-ROM : With an advanced group of learners we might consider having extended critical and creative discussion about the news.

To sum up, to produce a real interaction an communication is necessary the human beings , web sites can help us with extra resources, as I mentioned videos, audio material, music, news, but this is the weakness I could notice around de web, it was really useful in pronunciation exercises, but in real communication I agree with the author of the article that the speaking skill is still weak.

2. Speaking lesson plans at One Stop English

(http://www.onestopenglish.com/skills/speaking/teaching-ideas/).- 

In this URL we can find tips and tricks to help you prepare for English speaking practice in the classroom. There are a lot of activities like Drama activities, First day, Get out of the classroom 1, Get out of the classroom 2, Dramatic dialogues, Using OK. Besides, I  searched by  Skills section for over 3,000 innovative and engaging materials, including teaching ideas and downloadable activities for listening, reading, speaking, writing and pronunciation skills, as well as articles with lots of practical ideas to integrate these skills into your lessons, all written by our team of expert authors. This section also contains an extensive bank of Vocabulary materials, plus our popular weekly and monthly

For me I recommend the 6 speaking activities for the FIRST DAY OF CLASS: They are:

1.     In common.  (Elementary +, 10-20 minutes)

2.     Tell me about me. (Pre-Intermediate + , 30 minutes)

3.     Make the Rules. (Intermediate +, 30-45 minutes)

4.     A good way to learn English is. (Intermediate +, 10-20 minutes)

5.     Variations on the Name Whip. (All levels, 5-15 minutes)

6.     Funny Holidays. (Intermediate +, 30 minutes)

Actually,  we are able to explore more creative ways of teaching listening and speaking  in and out of the class using authentic materials. We must offer a richer language learning experience for our learners and create good listeners and speakers.