Listening, Oral Work, Reading, and Writing

      

There were many challenges to face while doing oir practices, specially those realted to the four macro skills of English. When it comes to writing, reading and speaking, the children may feel overwhelmed for all the words they don't know. If we talk about a skill that children can easily develop, we must talk about listening. Children seem fascinated when they listen to their teacher speaking English; they always want to know the meaning or the translation of words.

     We all know that the learning of a new language begings bay being expose to the target language. This is why we, as group, consider that we must pay attention to the listening skill. Obviously, we need to accompany listening activities with visual aids for children to learn new words at the same time they see the real objects.

    Most of the time we were running our practices, we used coursebook material. This was a good tool for teaching because every content children were studying was there; we just needed to make some arrangements to suit the contents to our way to teach.

    We all agree that the activity we use the most was individual work. We worked with small groups of students, and that gave us the chance to make them work by their own. We consider this activity worked because we make them use their own ideas and not their classmates'. 

     Some of the activities we did not put into 

practice are:

1. writing activities
2. reading activities
3. getting feedback from learners
4. increasing student-student interaction
5. small groups discussions
6. pairwork grammar activities
7. working with individual differences
8. organising students into levels

     The first four activities are the most suitable in our context. We need to make more emphasis in reading and writing activities to help our students get involved and exposed to English. By getting feedback, not only do we get to know what we did good or bad, but also students remember what they learned and how to express knowledge in their own terms. Increasing student-student interaction can help students know their classmates opinion and learn vocabulary that they probably did not know.

    

     The last four activities would depend on the amount of students you have in your class. If we have a large group of students, we may choose to work in small groups or pairs. Organising stundents into levels and working with their individual differences may work with students from a higher level. If we put labels to children, they may feel bad or sad. It would be better to work with the group as a whole.

     At the end, we need to find a way of teaching that best suit our personality and vision as teachers. We can do a research looking for the best methods, but we can also create our own style.