V. LISTENING, ORAL WORK, READING, AND WRITING

V. LISTENING, ORAL WORK, READING, AND WRITING 

Describe your own experiences when teaching these skills. Which is the most difficult skill to teach? Contrast your own experience as a Kindergarten teacher in El Salvador with the theory given in the books.

In the first place, kindergarten is so much fun. It can be difficult to teach a second language to children still trying to grasp their own and who cannot yet read. It can also be really enjoyable because these students have the flexibility to learn languages more quickly and are usually very enthusiastic. We as teachers have realized that students at that age do not have long attention spans and are easily distracted, so we had to try to capture their attention most of time.

Secondly, we can say that listening was the language skill which learners usually found the most difficult. This often was because they felt under unnecessary pressure to understand every word that they listened. One important thing that we had to take into account was to encourage pupils to participate in each class. We played a song in the majority of the classes to help the students to learn and remember certain vocabulary for instance, head, shoulders, knees and toes,getting dressed,hello family, the jungle song for children, among others. We used songs in our lessons for speaking practice since it was less intimidating to sing-a-long with the class than to speak individually.

Thirdly, in the oral work what is important with beginners is finding the balance between providing language through controlled and guided activities and at the same time letting them enjoy natural talk. Sometimes we told them: listen to me please and they realized that meant “pay attention”. Speaking is perhaps the most demanding skill for the teacher to teach. It was the skill which students found easy.

In their own language children are able to express emotions, communicative intentions and reactions, explore the language, among others. In the book we found some ways to present new language orally such as: a mascot, drawings, puppets, silhouettes, dialogues, whole class activity and groupwork, and so on. We take into account that the level of language input (listening) must be higher than the level of language production expected of the pupils. So we made many speaking activities used in the first levels that enable pupils to participate with a minimal verbal response. The book of Teaching English to children says:

Writing is not always easy however, writing has certain characteristics which seem to make it difficult for pupils to get to grips with, and many children take a long time to master the skill of writing. We realized that at this stage, pupils make some mistakes when they write something; we were sensitive in his/her correction and did not necessarily insist on every error being highlighted. Copying is a fairly obvious starting point for writing; it helped the students to consolidate learning in the other skill areas.

 It was an activity which gives the teacher the chance to reinforce language that has been presented orally or through reading. There were difficulties at the moment of writing, but we were so patient with them because they are children and it is the first time that they learn English. Teaching preschoolers requires a high energy level and you may feel silly at first but these students can be a real pleasure to work with and they will certainly appreciate your efforts.

Which of activities featured on chapters 3 through 6 did you try in your classes? Did they work? Explain why they did or didn’t work. Did you make any changes to the activities? Explain which changes you made, and how they affected the way you ran the activity.

Overall what we taught at kindergarten was quite limited. We covered topics such as body parts, colors, numbers, animals, fruits, greetings, clothes, professions, among others. We introduced new vocabulary slowly and did lots of practice activities each day however, some activities worked and some other did not. Every lesson was focused on listening, reading, speaking and writing.

First, Listening is the first skill that children acquire first, especially if they have not yet learnt to read. We applied some listening activities that found in the book of Teaching English to Children firstly, ‘listen and do’ activities here we choose some activities to apply in the classroom such as: Instructions: here students were able to understand when we explained them what they had to do, put up your hand: students did not anything about pronunciation, but there was easy for them because when they listened “X” sound they repeated the word, Mime stories : It was required to be patient because sometimes pupils did not the meaning of some words and they try to figure out them for that reason we as teacher had to do many gestures and movements in order to students could do the action, Drawing: It was easy for them because they had many ideas in mind when they saw some drawings on the board and it was easy for them to identify what each drawing refers to.

Listening for information: Sometimes students lost the general idea because they were accustomed to listening information in Spanish, but we tried to explain it. Listen for the mistake, listen and color: It worked a lot because we could apply it in the majority of the classes, Filling in missing information: It didn’t work because students cannot read yet in Spanish, So it was a problem because they couldn’t do the activity. On the other hand, we have ‘listen and repeat’ activities: they were great fun and gave the pupils the chance to get a feel for the language.

We choose Rhymes, songs and exercises and they were the most useful activities because understand could understand a little bit about the vocabulary that we develop in the classes. Finally, ‘Listen to stories’ telling stories, creative stories and reading stories, they were useful because in that way we could capture their attention and they gave us ideas that they tought in each story. We established a story-telling routine which created an atmosphere.

In the Oral work we took into account to apply corrections, but we use them when they were necessary, presenting new language orally was something difficult because sometimes students were not paying attention, and the next day that we asked for the previous class some of them had already forgotten the topic.

Listen to me please was something that we said when students were not paying attention to the class; using a mascot, drawings, silhouettes they confused, puppets were useful and worked a lot because students were happy when we showed some of them in classes and in that way we created a good environment in each class. Controlled practice, telling the time, show images students knew how much time each activity took. Guided practice it sometimes worked, but some students when finished the activity before the other ones and they start talking, dialogues and role plays did not worked because students did not to work with their classmates, so we decided to apply another activity in which they could work.

Reading we decided to apply some activities such as: phonics this approach is based on letters and sounds and students could recognize the correct sound of the words. Look and say worked a lot is something that we said to the students in each class, when students listen the expression they look at the board they said the word that was there, Using lots of flashcards were useful and students liked them, language experience approach did not work because students were not able to read when we wrote a sentence on the board.

Reading stories were funny and students paid a lof ot attention. Nursery rhymes or songs did not work because they could read yet and they got angry. Reading aloud, Reading cards was essential and we applied them in all classes that we taught. Controlled writing activities, dictation, matching, organizing and fill–in exercise did not work because students were no able to do it and starting doing a mess in the classroom.   

There were difficulties in writing, but it is still useful, essential and enjoyable part of the foreign language lesson. Writing activities helped to consolidate learning in the other skill areas. We used some activities with beginners such as: we decide to apply copying from the board It was useful because they thought that the letters that appeared in a boy were drawings so that’s why they decide to do it, and then we praised them because they said they could write and finally they could do it.

Matching didn’t work because pupils couldn’t find match pictures with texts they got frustrated. We took into account some things that we did such as: display the material whenever possible, concentrate first on content, make sure that it spring naturally from other language work, encourage but don’t insist on re-writing, keep all the pupils ‘writing. On the other hand things that we did not do such as: correct all the mistakes that we could find, set an exercise as homework without any preparation, announce the subject out of the blue and expect pupils to be able to write about it.