A CH I N G T H E F O U R S K I

TE
LLS:
Reading, Writi n g S p e a ki n g,
a n d Li s t e n i n g

Thelma R. Villanueva
 Listening, speaking, reading and
writing: the four cornerstone skills of
English. Welcome to my report,
which shows you how to master
delivering skills skillfully
.
 A.READING SKILLS
Reading is one of the key skills in language learning. It
reinforces the skills students acquire in speaking,
listening and writing.
You can help students develop a host of sub-skills
through activities around reading.
 1. Choosing a Text

Choose a piece of writing that your students

are likely to be interested in and is at the
right level for them, even if it’s just a couple
of words long and written on the board.
 2.Starting with the ABCs
The alphabet is the most basic reading text
you can choose. Actually you can organise
the letters of the alphabet in a memorable
way to help students pronounce them
accurately.
 3.Reading whole words

The teacher would hold up flashcards

and the kids shouted the words out. In
EFL, lower-level students learn word by
word too.
4.Graduating from words to sentences
with the help of punctuation

In order for students to understand

complete sentences on paper, they
need an idea of sentence structure
and punctuation.
 5.Looking at length
You can use readers, especially designed for
language students, containing short stories
and novels. These slim, pocket-sized books are
written to match the various levels of EFL
courses.
 6.Judging interest and relevance

Ask yourself, ‘What’s the aim of this lesson?’ If the

text practices vocabulary or grammar the class has
recently covered, and if it seems pretty interesting
or relates to something the students need to know
in the future, you’re on the right lines.
 7.Working with the Text
Students should be ready for the text and have a purpose for
reading in the form of a task or question. You need to have
a strategy for dealing with vocabulary and to design a
follow-up activity to expand on the same theme. If you
follow these steps, your reading lessons can really open the
door to a world of English texts and literature to your
students.
 8.Getting ready to read: Pre-
reading tasks
A pre-reading task whets the appetite and
prepares the mind for the text that follows.
As the name suggests, the task doesn’t
involve reading the text but is connected to
the main topic of the lesson.
 9.Predicting
Another skill worth making use of
in reading lessons is prediction.
 10.Summarizing
Summarizing is a valuable skill for
students. A summary explains or shows
what the whole text is about but in a
brief way.
 11.Handling Vocabulary

You can handle new words in a reading exercise in a few ways:

✓ Get the vocabulary out of the way from the outset by teaching
it in the pre-reading stage.
✓ Let the students read first and work on the meaning of
individual words afterwards.
✓ Don’t deal with vocabulary at all so that students learn to find
their own coping strategies.
 IDEAS FOR READING LESSONS

Some authentic pieces of writing you can use in the classroom

include:
✓ Classified ads: Students can discuss things they’d like to sell or buy – a
bike or a piece of furniture, for example.
✓ Problem pages: Tell students about a problem you have and ask for some
advice Role-play talking about various problems and giving advice.
✓ Tourist information: Collect or download leaflets on various tourist
attractions in an English-speaking country. Find out what students already
know about these places or whether they’ve visited them. They can write their
own tourist information to follow up.
✓ Film blurbs: Examine the blurb (the information on the back cover) of a
DVD. Skim by looking at the length of the film, the actors and director but
B.WRITING SKILLS
It is rather daunting to produce written
work in a foreign language, but with some
guidance your students can go from good
sentences, to paragraphs, to texts with due
attention to style and formality.
 1. Putting Pen to Paper

By the time you start getting into writing, your

students should have had a chance to listen, speak
and read the language to some degree. They have
also copied information down, but actually writing in
their own words is more of a challenge.
2.Paying attention to basic writing skills

Point out the errors or else they may

become engrained (especially poor
spelling) and if a student’s handwriting
may cause a problem for native English
speakers, let the student know.
 3.Completing sentences
When students have the hang of basic
sentence construction, they can start working
on the content by using a wider range of
grammar and vocabulary. They can
incorporate more adjectives and adverbs to
create interest.
4. Moving on to paragraphs

Your next task after your students can write

a good sentence is to show the class how to build
sentences into a paragraph and convey the basic
rules and tips for doing so.
5. Structuring a Writing Lesson

For a writing lesson to be successful, you

need to set the writing task up so that students
are clear about what they have to do and how
best to tackle it.
6. Energizing the class with
pre-writing tasks
7. Setting the writing task and explaining
the stages

After preparing the students’ minds for the task,

you need to tell them what it is, whether they will be
working alone or collaborating with someone else,
and how long they have to complete it.
8. Registering the Right Degree of Formality

The formal word for showing the degree of

formality in English is register. It is an aspect of
language teaching that you should not overlook. Any
errors in this area are particularly noticeable when it
comes to writing.
 SAMPLE WRITING ACTIVITIES

Writing activities can begin with a single letter of the alphabet and later
develop into formal, lengthy texts.
✓ Advertisements
✓ Application forms
✓ Articles
✓ Biographies
✓ Book/film reviews
✓ Composition (setting out an opinion or argument)
✓ Descriptions of a process or diagram
✓ Dictation. The students write down what the teacher reads aloud to
practise their spelling and punctuation.
 SAMPLE WRITING ACTIVITIES

✓ Emails
✓ Formal and informal letters
✓ Instruction sheets
✓ Memos
✓ Notices. Students can prepare notices giving information for use in the classroom, for
example about upcoming events.
✓ Poetry: Get students to write a short poem or limerick. You can provide a list of
rhyming words to help them.
✓ Projects: Students can do more extensive work over a period of weeks on one topic.
They can use English to explore and explain something which interests them.
✓ Reports: After finding out information on a particular topic students can present this
in a concise and formal way as though they were giving feedback to an employer.
✓ Stories Choose the activities which your students are most likely to need in the
future.
c. Speaking skills
Speaking is the most important skill in English lan
guage teaching. It’s almost impossible to have true
mastery of a language without actually speaking i
t.
 1.Getting Students Talking

In general, to encourage speaking in the early stages

of a course and with students who are a little timid, give
plenty of guidance on what the conversations should be
about. You can give students a list of questions to ask each
other or specific topics and lots of language input first.
2. Warming up
3.Talking about communicative activities

This kind of activity has been popular for

many years now in TEFL. Communicative
activities generally involve pairs of students
sharing information with each other to complete
a task.
4.How About You? Extending Conversations

Communicative activities are rather controlled

and often involve repeating the same grammar
over and over again, so you need to work your
students into more conversational dialogues.
 5. In My Opinion – Agreeing,
Disagreeing and Negotiating
a. Expressing an opinion
The way we differentiate between a fact and an opinion is by
tacking on little expressions that alert the hearer to what’s
coming. You say things like:
✓ I (don’t) think.
✓ I (don’t) believe.
✓ In my opinion.
✓ How about this.
b. Interjecting, rephrasing and summing up

In a conversation you do more than give an opinion then

keep quiet. Sometimes you interrupt to add something
important, explain in other words to make the point clearer,
bring things to a close and so on.
 ACTIVITIES TO TRY

Activities to help your students understand pronunciation, stress and

intonation may include the following:
✓ Use a map of local train stations and streets to practice saying place
names. You can swap the names for phonemes and see if students recognize
them.
✓ Play a homophones games. Homophones are words which sound exactly
the same but have different meanings, such as here and hear. Say the word
and see if students can come up with both spellings and meanings. You’ll be
surprised to find that students often don’t know that certain words are
supposed to sound the same.
✓ Have your students put on a mini-play. Drama is fun and encourages
students to use good intonation.
 D. LISTENING SKILLS

When students are able to listen to texts in

English and get the sense of them, they feel a
real sense of achievement. But how can you
train your students to listen without them
feeling overwhelmed?
 1.Structuring Your Lesson

When you teach listening skills, it pays to remember

that it takes most people a little time to tune in before they
listen well. Students need to pay full attention and have
had some practice time before they can cope with detailed
information in a foreign language.
2. Choosing a Listening Activity

a.Finding material from the real world

b.Choosing the material from course books

c. Using CDs and DVDs for authentic listening

 3.Whetting Students’ Appetites

In the real world listeners

usually have a sense of purpose
for listening. So before you play
your text, you need to prepare
your students.
 a.Motivating students to listen
Before you turn on the machine, provide some information on:

a.1 ✓ Context and background: Talk to the class about the speakers, the
situ- ations referred to, the time period, location and so on.

a.2 ✓ Type of listening text: As there’s a vast array of text type to choose
from, try giving the students a multiple choice task by asking them, for
example, to identify whether they’re listening to a poem, story or play.
4.Running through some
pre-listening tasks

a.Predicting
b.Brainstorming
c.Discussing
d.Questioning
5. Come Again? Repeating the text

a.Listening for the basic idea

b.Listening for detail

 6. Planning Follow-Up Activities
Round off your lesson with a follow-up activity.
This helps to conclude the lesson in a balanced way
because not everyone is good at learning through
listening and some may not appreciate your chosen
listening text as much as other classmates. After all,
students have different styles of learning.
 Listening activities to try
1. Working with a picture.
2. Labelling
3. Following a map
4. Short teacher monologue
5. Traditional stories
6. Songs
7. Physical response
8.Dictation
9. True or false
10. Gap Fill
11.Putting information in order.
 REFERENCE:
Teaching English as a Foreign Language
FOR DUMMIES by Maxom, Michelle
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
The Atrium Southern Gate Chichester
West Sussex PO19 8SQ England
Thank You for Listening!

Thelma R. Villanueva