Teaching and Learning Spoken English - Assignment Example

Teaching and learning spoken English Introduction This paper provides the actual tasks of the English language lessons discussed in the previous essay on teaching and learning spoken English. It includes the procedures for assessing the students and for evaluating the project as a whole. It looks at the problems that might inhabit the project and suggests ways for overcoming these problems. Some changes have been made on the design of the lessons as presented on the previous paper; therefore, the lessons will include a grammar and vocabulary lesson, a listening and comprehension lesson, and a pronunciation lesson. Assessments will be conducted within the two hours provided for each lesson. Aims, objectives, rationale and tasks of the lessons The proposed unit of work will consist of three lessons. These lessons will be topic-based such that students will learn both speaking and listening skills through five main topics that are common in real life. The topics include disasters, field trip, our environment and its problems, problems of diseases, and inventions. Each lesson will last for two hours, and will include a 20 minute session for assessments. Lesson one: enhancing grammar and vocabulary Aims and objectives The aim of the first lesson, grammar and vocabulary, will be to enhance the speaking skills of learners through proper use of grammar and vocabulary. The specific objectives for this lesson are intended to cover both grammar and vocabulary. They include the following: To learn the roman numbers and the English alphabets. To learn and use various grammar forms and functions: To learn what verbs, tenses, nouns, adjectives are and apply them in sentences. To learn and understand the use of various English articles. To learn and understand the use of idioms To understand the functions of auxiliaries To learn how to use these aspects of grammar to construct proper sentence in English. To introduce to learners to a number of vocabularies, including phrasal verbs, derived words, and collocations. To enhance the vocabulary of learners through the matching opposites practice. The rationale The rationale for this lesson is that it allows students to learn grammar and English vocabulary as well as be able to use them appropriately. These two aspects of the English language are very essential in developing speaking skills. In other words, to speak effectively one must have some vocabulary to use in speech and know how to connect them appropriately to give proper meaning. Tasks of the lesson The lesson tasks would be organized into five categories of activities (The National Capital Language Resource Center, 2004). The first part would involve preparation of the class. Here, the instructor would explain to the learners the goals, objectives and activities of the lesson. The teacher would also attempt to elicit the learners’ knowledge of the lessons topic. The preparation phase would be followed by “presentation of the linguistic and topical content of the lesson” (The National Capital Language Resource Center, 2004). This will involve mainly a deductive approach. Therefore, the teacher would give overt, direct explanations and instructions the students of various aspects of grammar, including grammar forms and functions (Byrd, 1998). The teacher would explain to students the meaning of nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections well as describe their use. The teacher would also explain the meaning and use of various grammatical functions, including subject, predicate, direct and indirect objects, noun phrase, complement, appositive, perfect, passive, modal, operator, adverbial, adjunct, determinative, coordinator, subordinator, and interjector. These explanations would also include appropriate examples to strengthen the understanding of these grammar aspects (Byrd, 1998). The third phase of the lesson’s activities will be practice, where learners would work on various tasks in small groups (Byrd, 1998). Therefore, it will be mainly a deductive task. The activities will include reading a passage or passages that incorporate various aspects of grammar taught by the teacher. The teacher would then provide a number of exercises and questions for students to work on. This approach would also be useful also as part of the students’ assessment. However, the last phase of the lesson would involve assessment and evaluation of the students work. The evaluation would be essential for a number of reasons: it will strengthen the material presented in the lesson, it allows the teacher to monitor each learner’s progress, and allows the teacher to provide appropriate feedback activities (The National Capital Language Resource Center, 2004). Grammar charts and form-function diagrams will be used to aid the learners envisage grammar more easily. The grammar trees would be useful in assisting the learners to distinguish between grammatical function and grammatical form. The activities with the form-function trees would involve students writing sentences on a piece of paper and labelling all the grammatical forms on top of the sentence and grammatical functions below the sentence. Various grammar charts such as verb formation charts could also be used to aid in understanding, for instance, verb tenses. Vocabulary A number of vocabularies will be introduced to the class. These will include speak, old, right, foot, sister, wife, black, cool, clean, small, woman, boy, buy, short, big, large, brother, mother, father, husband, man, long, tall, yes, no, water, name, dishonest, unhappy, inappropriate, and amoral. The teacher will offer explain the meaning of collocations and derived words and give examples. However, the main task will be characterised by the participation of the students. In small groups, the will be provided with worksheets of several vocabulary. They will then be required to find and match the opposites of the provided vocabulary. To add on to this task the students would be required to provide the synonyms of the given vocabulary. Table 1: Tasks, activities, and input of the grammar lesson Tasks, activities, input Time period Presentation of grammar aspects 20 minutes Passage reading 15 minutes Grammar practice 20 minutes Presentation of vocabulary 15 minutes Vocabulary practice 25 minutes Assessment and evaluation tasks 25 minutes Lesson two: enhancing pronunciation The aim of this lesson is to allow students to speak and communicate effectively through proper pronunciation. The specific objectives will include the following: To learn and understand the consonant and vowel sounds To enhance recognition and pronunciation of single words To learn the syllable structure of the English language Introduce the notion of stress timing The rationale for this lesson is to allow students to produce words properly so as to enhance meaning and promote understanding of spoken contents. This lesson will help the learners to localize the common little variations in pronunciation between words. It will also aid learners to understand the deeper aspects of ordinary silent vowel sounds that are common to production of English vowels. Tasks This lesson will be structured similarly to the grammar and vocabulary lesson. It will include five parts: preparation, presentation, practice and assessment. Therefore, the teacher will prepare the class by intruding the aims, objective, and tasks of the lesson. Thereafter, the teacher will provide brief direct explanations of various vowel and consonant sounds as well as sound of some words. The instructor will also provide appropriate examples of sounds and pronunciations. The pronunciation practice will involve a number of activities. These will involve mainly pronunciation practice through minimal pairs. The minimal pairs refer to pairs of words that differ in terms of one of their phonological elements. Several examples of minimal pairs would be written on board, where after, the instructor would demonstrate the proper pronunciation of the each word of the pairs. The instructor would then rouse the learners to provide examples of other minimal pairs that have similar phonemes as ones discussed. Sheets of minimal pairs would then be given to students. Working in pairs, each student would then reproduce the minimal pairs. This reproduction of minimal pairs would be repeated about fives or as necessary, and ultimately the students would exchange their minimal pairs among each other. The students will also record their speech. This will involve reading a passage aloud to record the speech. The speeches of the learners would then be evaluated by the instructor. This will also be one part of the assessment in this lesson. Multiple choice tests will also be used to test the aspect of pronunciation taught in the lesson. Table 2: Tasks, activities, and input of the pronunciation lesson Tasks, activities, input Time period Presentation of sounds and patterns 20 minutes Minimum pair pronunciation activities 30 minutes Recording of speeches 35 minutes Assessment and evaluation tasks 35 minutes Lesson three: enhancing listening and comprehension skills The goal of this lesson will be to improve the listening skills of learners. The following specific objectives will assist in achieving the goal: To understand the aspects of effective communication To enhance hearing, comprehension, and judgment aspects of listening To introduce students to note taking as an aspect of listening skill The rationale for this lesson is to enhance the listening skills of learners because listening constitutes an essential part of effective communication. Tasks The lesson will also be structured into five phases. The initial phase will include introduction of the lesson goals and tasks by the instructor as well as eliciting students’ knowledge of the lessons topic. The instructor will also provide direct explanations on aspects of effecting listening and how to take notes. The idea of open and closed questions will be described. The instructor will ask the learners to state the distinction is of the two questions. The learners will be grouped into pairs to practice various listening skills, including hearing, comprehension, judgement, and note taking. Two sets of instructions will be provided to the students, who will work on the exercises within 10 minutes. The class will then get back together for a discussion. F urther activities of this lesson will include dictation, listening to a recording, and taking notes. Dictation The instructor will dictate a passage to the students for them to write down what they hear and comprehend. The teacher will also provide questions related to the passage to test the students hearing and understanding abilities as well as test their judgments. This will be useful for the instructor in providing assistance to the students. Listening to a recording This activity will be used to derive specific information, and infer relationships and meaning. The students will listen to a recording of a conversation between a British man and a woman without taking notes or doing any other activity. The students will then be asked to call out words that they will remember, while the teacher writes them on the board. The learners will be paired. The teacher will write some simple questions regarding the recorded conversation for students to answer. The questions will involve identification of the characters mentioned as well as their relationships. The teacher will then review the answers together with the whole class. The recording will then be played again for students to make notes of specific themes implied in the conversation. The students will compare their notes against each other and again with the class. The answers will be written on the board, and the teacher will conduct a review of the form and tense. Students will be asked to remember specific words, phrases, and themes. The recorded conversations will be played again for the students to identify specific words, phrases, and themes. They will ask the teacher to pause every time they hear the specific word, phrase, or theme previously discussed. The students will also be required to take notes of the recording. The students will also be involved in some post-listening activities. In pairs, the students will practice the conversation of recorded script with their partner. A copy of the recorded script will be provided to the students. An assessment will also be conducted. Table 3: Tasks, activities, and input of the listening and comprehension lesson Tasks, activities, input Time period Presentation of listening skills, including hearing, comprehension, judgment and note taking 20 minutes Exercises and discussion 10 minutes Dictation and exercises 25 minutes Listening to recordings 25 minutes Practice with scripts 15 Assessment and evaluation tasks 25 minutes Assessments and evaluations The students will be assessed to determine their level of acquisition of various speaking and listening skills, while the project will be evaluated to determine its success. These assessments and evaluation will be related to the set goals and objectives. The assessment will be divided into three short sessions. Two sessions of the assessment will focus on acquisition of speaking skills; one will test on grammar, while the other assessment will test on pronunciation. The third session will involve test on listening skills. Assessment Skills Aspects to be Assessed Duration First Speaking skills Grammar and vocabulary 15 min Second Pronunciation 15 min Third Listening skills Listening skills 15 min Assessing what students have learned in completing the project A fact-based assessment approach (Ferman, 2005) will be adopted in testing what students have learned. This will involve testing whether the students can recall various aspects of grammar, pronunciation, listening, and vocabulary. The students will be assessed on their grammar skills and vocabulary through cloze tests, multiple-choice tests, and strip stories (Bailey, 1998). A cloze test refers to a section of text that has one or more blanks (a word or words removed from the text), while strip stories refers to passages that dissected into various sentences. The students will be given cloze tests to fill in the blanks with the appropriate word or words, and with strip stories to put back the dissected sentences into the appropriate order. They will also be required to choose the correct answers of the multiple-choice questions. All the three tests will be part of a single assessment that will evaluate the students against their acquisition and understanding of grammar forms and functions as well as their mastery of the English vocabulary. An atomistic approach will be employed in assessing the students’ proficiency in English pronunciation (Szpyra-Kozłowska et al., N.d). Therefore, they will be tested on their correctness of production of specific consonants, vowels, stress, intonation, and rhythm at both isolated words level and sentence level. Recording of the students’ speech samples will be obtained by the assessor who will late listen to them and rate the pronunciations. Since this approach is time consuming (Szpyra-Kozłowska et al., N.d), the rating of the pronunciations may be done outside the time period allocated for the project if the number of students is large. The listening skills will be tested through dictation. The teacher would read a passage aloud and learners would write what they hear. The teacher would also ask some questions related to the passage to test their understanding of the passage and see whether the students are able to make correct judgements about the subject matter of the passage. Moreover, test questions would also be read aloud; through this, the teacher would be able to evaluate the learners’ ability to comprehend. Assessing students’ performance on the project The assessment of students’ performance on the project will involve not only involves tests, but also a standard rubric that clearly describes the expected proficiency. The tests will include tasks or problems that the learners can come across in real life situations. A debate on a topic, group presentation and class participation will be used in assessing the students. Their responses will be weighed against a rubric for the project’s curriculum. The rubrics used to evaluate the students’ performance will be mainly analytical such that various aspects of the skills learnt are covered; separate, multiple scales will be used to provide multiple scores. The table below show a samples rubric that would be used in evaluating the students’ performance on both speaking and listening skills. Skills 4 3 2 1 Score Grammar Grammar leant in class is used to converse effectively. Experiences some minor difficulties while using the grammar aspects leant. Several minor difficulties (communication breakdown) due to grammatical inaccuracies Grammatical errors greatly causes communication breakdown Comprehension Able to interpret speech at both sentence level and passage level without difficulties. Able to interpret speech at only sentence level with minor difficulties. Strains to interpret speech at sentence level Greatly strains to interpret speech at sentence level Vocabulary Uses adequate vocabulary to convey ideas fluently Some minor difficulties results from inappropriate use of vocabulary Slight difficulties results because of inadequate vocabulary Communication is seriously impeded because of lack of vocabulary Fluency Speech is articulate and connected Speech is articulate, but has occasional disruptions Speech is not articulate due to minor constants disruptions Speech is greatly impaired due to major constant disruptions and influence by the native dialect Pronunciation Pronunciation is clear for all statements and words Pronunciation is clear for most statements and words Pronunciation is not clear for some statements or words Pronunciation is not clear for most statements and words Listening Learner responds to questions with correct answers and acknowledges every statement Learner responds to most questions correctly and acknowledges most statement Learner fails to respond to some questions with appropriate answers or does not acknowledge some statements Learner fails answer most questions and to acknowledge most statements Evaluating the success of the project work The evaluation of the success of this project work will be mainly goals-based. The project will be examined to determine if the goals and objectives set have been met (Fitz-Gibbon & Morris, 1987). Therefore, the scores of the students’ performance (assessments) as well portfolios of the students work will be used to provide data for the evaluation (Ferris & Hedgcock, 1998). The average scores of all the students will show the level of success in transferring various skills to students. The portfolio of students’ work will include samples of their class work and checklists of their progress in both speaking and listening skills. Therefore, the portfolios will be useful in gauging how well the project has helped learners attain the intended skills. Anticipated problems in carrying out the project work and solutions A number of anticipated problems might be experienced while conducting this project. One main problem would be the difficulty of conveying instructions and messages to students who have had no prior experience with the English langue. Even more challenging is that the students speak varying languages. Therefore, the teacher would have to look into the need of each and every student to device ways that would make them understand the lesson. Use of various aids, including body language and graphical images to communicate might be necessary. The challenge is to present material in a simplified manner for the learners to understand, but not too simplified to loose its value (Harris, McLaughlin & Still, N.d). There are also the challenges of cultural background and variations, and learners’ negative attitudes. The cultures and attitudes of the learners may affect their motivation. Some communities place low value on learning and therefore students from such background might be unmotivated to learn. Moreover, certain cultures consider certain things to be inappropriate, an aspect that might affect the learning. For instance, viewing as inappropriate when an older person is taught by a younger person could present a challenge. Time limitation might also be a problem in carrying out the project. The six hours duration allocated for the project might not be enough to achieve the intended goals, including assessing the students and providing feedback. The intelligence levels of the learners might also be a problem. Thus, students with low intelligence quotient might be slow in understanding the lessons materials thereby disadvantaging other learners who are quick to learn. Resources necessary to carry out this project work A number of resources will be required to conduct this project. First and foremost, skilled human resource will be necessary to teach and assess the students. An appropriate learning environment with chairs and desks for students to use will also be necessary. A blackboard, tree diagrams, and grammar charts will be used by the teacher in offering illustrations to the entire class. Black board pens will also be used in writing on the board. A voice recorder and player will be needed to record students’ speech for the assessor to listen to them. The learners will also be required to have a standard English dictionary and writing materials, including pen and exercise books. Text books will also be used by students as reference resources and to supplement the lessons tasks (Byrd, 1998). Conclusion This paper has provided the actual tasks of the English language lessons discussed in the previous essay on teaching and learning spoken English. It includes the structure of each lesson, including their goals and objectives. The procedures for assessing the students and for evaluating the project are also presented. The paper also looks at the problems that might inhabit the project and suggests ways for overcoming these problems. There are changes to the initial lesson structure that have been adopted in this paper. The three lessons are grammar and vocabulary lesson, listening and comprehension lesson, and pronunciation lesson. Assessments have been included within the hours provided for each lesson. References Bailey, K. M., 1998. Learning about Language Assessment: Dilemmas, Decisions, and Directions. Boston: Heinle and Heinle Publishers. Byrd, P., 1998. Grammar in the foreign language classroom: Making principled choices, Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Ferman, I., 2005. Performance Assessment and the English Curriculum, English Teachers' Association of Israel, Vol. 16, No. 3, pp.18-20. Ferris, D. & Hedgcock, J., 1998. Teaching ESL composition: purpose, process, and practice. New York: Routledge. Fitz-Gibbon, C.T. & Morris, L.L., 1987. How to design a program evaluation, Vol. 3, California: SAGE. Folse, K.S., 1998. Clear Grammar 1: Activities for Spoken and Written Communication, Vol.1, Humana Press, New York. Harris,C., McLaughlin, B. & Still, M., N.d. Modals: a balancing act. http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwesl/issue1/modaltoc.htm#Introduction, [17 October, 2010]. Newton, J., 2008. Teaching ESL/EFL listening and speaking, Taylor & Francis, New York. Szpyra-Kozłowska, J., Frankiewicz, J., Nowacka, M., & Stadnicka, L., Assessing assessment methods – on the reliability of pronunciation tests in EFL, N.d., [Online], www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/johnm/ptlc2005/pdf/ptlcp37.pdf [11, [October 2010]. The National Capital Language Resource Center, 2004. The Essentials of Language Teaching, web. http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/planning/lessongoals.htm, [17 October 2010] Read More