Listening, Oral Work, Reading and Writing

The four macro skills are listening; speaking, reading and writing and, the challenges of teaching them are many. For example, teaching English as a foreign language to six year old children is difficult because they do not understand what we are teaching or saying.

Listening

Listening is the language skill which learners usually find the easiest. The teacher plays an important role; the challenge for these is that the teacher must help pupils prepare for the listening task well before they hear the text itself. First of all, the teacher must ensure that the pupils understand the language they need to complete the task and are fully aware of exactly what is expected of them. During the listening, the pupils should be able to concentrate on understanding the message, so make sure they are not trying to read, draw and write at the same time. Always give a second chance to listen to the text to provide a new opportunity to those who were not able to do the task. We tried lots of activities to teach listening to our pupils; for example mime stories and drawing. It was really nice because students paid attention and participated a lot. We make just necessary changes in these activities because it is difficult to make all students concentrate on what in in front of them and create a peaceful atmosphere with 40 students. Another activity that may work in our teaching context islisten and color; we think that is a good activity for children, for they like to do it. Unfortunately, we could not try in classes because of the time. On the contrary, listen for the mistake is a difficult activity for young learners; that is why, we could not try it.

Speaking

Speaking is the second macro skill. It is perhaps the most demanding skill for the teacher to teach because students are afraid of committing mistakes, so they do not talk too much; if they talk, they do it in their mother tongue.  We used lots of activities such as songs and poems. Pupils learnt a song and sang it. We used this as listening and speaking activity because they learn to speak by listening. This helps pupils to master the sounds, rhythms, and intonation of the English language through simple reproduction. The games and pair work activities; on the other hand, encourage the pupils to begin to manipulate the language by presenting them with a certain amount of choice. Another activity that may work in our teaching context is having a mascot. This could help because children like to interact, ask question and play; nevertheless, it is an activity we could try. On the other hand, an activity we think cannot be useful for teaching English to children is role plays. For doing this activity, students must have vocabulary that beginners do not have; they are not ready for doing this, and if they feel nervous, they would not learn.

Reading

Reading just as listening is the main source of language when pupils start to learn a new language. It is kind of difficult to teach because students get bored quickly.In order to make reading an interesting challenge as opposed to a tedious chore, it is important that pupils do not labor over every word, whether they are scanning the text for general meaning or for picking out specific information. We have to keep in mind lot of thing when we are teaching English as a foreign language specially for teaching children; one of the things is choose texts consider not only their difficulty level, but also their interest or their humor so that children will want to read for the same reasons they read in their own language: to be entertained or to find out something they do not already know. We used reading a story from a book; this activity helped us a lot because it was new for them to read an English book, and they enjoy it.For children not to get bored quickly, we gave them little book with wonderful stories. Besides, we tried reading a class story; it was difficult because we had too many students; however, it worked. They participated, and some of them were performing the things their classmates were saying.Furthermore, we have more activities we could not use but it may work such as reading texts based on the child’s language. We think it may work because children like to give their opinion. As with listening activities, it is important to spend time preparing for the task by using the illustrations or the texts they could read and,we did it just silent reading because we think reading aloud inhibits most pupils and forces them to concentrate on what they are saying as opposed to what they are reading and the meaning is very often lost. This could happen when the pupil who is reading makes a mistake and all his or her classmates start laughing and bothering.

Writing

Writing was the most difficult part for our pupils; even though, they progress from writing isolated words and phrases, to short paragraphs about themselves or about very familiar topics (family, home, hobbies, friends, food, etc.). Since many pupils at this level are not yet capable either linguistically or intellectually of creating a piece of written text from scratch, it is important that time is spent building up the language they will need and providing a model on which they can then base their own efforts. We could not try many writing activities; we just tried matching. Even though it worked; it was difficult to explain what the pupils were supposed to do. Although dictation is a good activity and may work with our pupils, we could not try it because of the level of our children. One of the activities we think may not work is dialogues because our pupils´ vocabulary is limitated.