Lesson Plan: Teaching Listening - Assignment Example

Lesson Plan Teaching Listening Aims: to acquaint teachers with different purposes of listening activities and strategies that improve listening skills Time: 45 minutes 1. Discussion Ask participants how they rate their listening experience as foreign language learners. Can you think of any difficulties they have encountered? What strategies or techniques have they used to overcome these difficulties? 2. Activation of prior knowledge Explain to participants that the first exercise was aimed to activate their prior knowledge about listening process. Tell them they are going to listen to a text about the purpose of activation of prior knowledge and answer a few questions. Text: Activation of prior knowledge for improved listening comprehension. Source: Steven Brown, Teaching Listening (pp. 2-3). Questions: 1) What is prior knowledge? 2) How top-down processing is different from bottom-up? 3) Why did the author give the clerk a one-schilling coin? 4) How listening is different from reading? 3. Different purposes of listening Ask participants to match three different purposes with the examples of different exercises. 1) listening for main ideas 2) listening for details 3) listening for making interferences a) Listen to the instructions how to get to Tom’s house and complete the map below. b) What’s the main idea of the author? c) Do you think that Mark has enjoyed his holiday? Why? 4. Ask participants to prepare in pairs listening tasks that involve different listening purposes. Later, as they read their tasks, other participants guess what the purposes of different tasks are. 5. Give participants worksheets in which they need to match the key words and concepts from this lesson with their definitions (prior knowledge/top-down/bottom-up/ listening for main ideas/listening for details/listening for making interferences). Lesson Plan 2 Teaching Speaking Aims: to acquaint teachers with different kinds of speaking activities and strategies to improve skills. Time: 45 minutes 1) Ask the participants to work in pairs. They should discuss different aspects of speaking in a foreign language and think of possible strategies to improve them. Which of them do they consider the most important? - grammar accuracy - fluency - correct pronunciation - a wide vocabulary range - communication efficacy - selection of appropriate words and expressions according to the social context, audience, situation. - coherence (organizing thoughts in a logical and meaningful sequence). 2) Explain to the participants the following concepts: a) language input Content-orientated Form-orientated b) language output Structured Communicative 3) Which of the aspects of speaking can be improved by communicative output activities? And by structured activities? 4) Ask the participants to classify these tasks into communicative output and structured output activities. - discussions - grammar exercises - interviews - role play - pronunciation drills - loud reading 5) Explain to the students the notions of talk as communication, talk as transaction, and talk as performance. Match the characteristics of different kinds of speech with the three groups. - has mainly social function - involves negotiation and digression - uses conversational conventions - has mainly information focus – uses an appropriate format - may be formal or casual - maintains audience engagement - the focus is on the message, not participants - uses an appropriate opening and closing Statement of Purpose I am genuinely interested in applying for the fellowship in the EL Fellow Program as it would enable me both to develop my teaching skills and to share my knowledge and expertise with other teachers. I have always been very fond of English language and literature. Working as a teacher of English allows me to share my passion with my students and help them to develop their own, unique ways to learn English. I find language learning fascinating process, which enables learners to discover different cultures and, thus, look at the world from a different perspective. Learning a different language makes us more tolerant and open to the world. I am aware of a great responsibility for my students’ meaningful and enjoyable learning’ experience I bear as a teacher. Consequently, I am continuously improving my teaching skills to be able to provide my students with the best teaching methods and practices, appropriate to their expectations and needs. Participation in the program would allow me to share my ideas, knowledge and skills from other teachers and, in the same way, learn from their teaching experience in a stimulating, multicultural environment. I would be very glad to improve my expertise in such areas as ESL instruction, development of materials and curriculum, supervision, test design, assessment, evaluation, and research. I am a hard-working , motivated person, willing to teach and learn at the same time. I am convinced that I can both contribute to and benefit significantly from participation in the EL Fellow Program. Applying fellowship experience Participation in the EL Fellow Program would enable me to improve my teaching skills and, thus, to provide my students with a more rewarding and enjoyable learning experience. As I work with adult learners from all over the world, I deal with a wide variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds, motivations, and needs. Fellowship experience with teachers from different countries can help me to understand my students and specific problems that speakers of different languages face when learning English. All the skills I am going to learn during the fellowship can contribute to the quality of my teaching and, thus, benefit my students. To start with, getting to know new instructional methods could help me to provide my students with teaching methods, approaches and techniques that would suit best their learning expectations, learning styles, and capacities. Furthermore, I could learn how to develop enjoyable and attractive personalized learning materials that would respond to my students’ needs as well as the curriculum that takes into account continuous improvement of all learning skills. The courses in the area of supervision, test design, assessment and evaluation would enable me to evaluate my students’ progress towards their educational goals in the most valid and reliable manner. Finally, learning about the latest developments in the research concerning English teaching I can apply these findings into my classroom. I would be grateful to participate in this highly enriching experience that can significantly contribute to my personal and professional goals. - References: Brown, S. (2006). Teaching Listening. New York, Cambridge University Press Kayi, H. (2006). Teaching Speaking: Activities to Promote Speaking in a Second Language. The Internet TESL Journal, XII (11). Retrieved from http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kayi-TeachingSpeaking.html on 21 February 2010 Richards, J. (2008). Teaching Listening and Speaking: from Theory to Practice. New York, Cambridge University Press Read More