Reflective Comment

Material Design

Lesson Plan

Journal

My role as a teacher I felt it was quite difficult because being in front of the class made me feel a little nervous, but I gave my best effort and the class was given in a good way. I did not face many problems,because choosing the indicated material and create the context to infer the topic was easy,the audio of the exercise was ok, the only thing I found wrong in me was that I repeated many times if the students were understanding the exercise and the topic,which was not correct because I could be kind of bothering them.

As a role designer I think it was not as difficult as a teacher,but it took many hours to choose the right material according to my unit that was "Attraction", the only thing was a little difficult to me was when I had to record the instructions of my exercises, but I think I did it well.

Theoretical Framework

What is listening comprehension?

1. Mention one of the problems a L2 learner face.

A: That, even if we have carefully rehearsed a particular utterance and manage to produce it to a native speaker, it may well result in a torrent of language from the other person.

2. What do you think about native speaker's accent?

A: That the accent is something distinctive of a speaker.

3. Are there listening problems if you don't have a good English level? Explain why?

A: Yes, because there are some skills needed to be develop in order to be able to understand and reply a message.

4. What is the listener as tape recorder about?

A: This analogy suggests that, as long as the input is sufficiently loud to be recorded and does not exceed the length of the available blank tape, then the message will be recorded and stored, and can be replayed later but doesn't mean the message was really understood.

5. What do you understand by listening comprehension?

A: When the L2 speaker keep in mind what he/she is listening to.

6. What is the problem with the tape recorder in the comprehension of the message?

A: Is that it does not capture all the relevant features of comprehension

7. What are the difficulties a student has in a listening activity?.

A: That if the student doesn't have a previous knowledge or at least know something about the treaty context won't be able to use the information to solve assessments or whatever it involves.

8. How can we avoid the difficulties?

A: Practising.

9. Do you think it is important to learn a second language?

A: Yes, absolutely because the requirements of today's world are increasingly high.

10. What does 'the mental model' listening involve?

A: Refers to listener's coherent interpretation.

11. What do you understand by 'coherent interpretation'?

A: It is when we combine the new information in what we have just heardwith our previous knowledge.

12. What is the effect listening has on speaking?

A: That we sometimes reproduce what we hear.


Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

Principles for designing listening techniques.

1. In an interactive, four-skills curriculum, make sure that you don't overlook the importance of techniques that specifically develop listening comprehension competence.

Each of the separate skills deserves special focus in appropiate doses.


2. Use techniques that are intrinsically motivating.

Appeal to listeners' personal interests and goals, taking into account the schemata and cultural background(s). Then, once a technique is launched, try to construct it in such a way that students are caught up in the activity and feel self-propelled toward its final objective.

3. Utilize authentic language and cotexts.

The relevance of classroom activity to their long-term communicative goals.

4. Carefully consider the form of listeners' responses.

We can infer that certain things have been comprehended through students' overt (verbal or nonverbal) responses to speech. It is therefore important for teachers to design techniques in such a way that students' responses indicate wether or not their comprehension has been correct.

5. Encourage the development of listening strategies.

Most foreign language students are simply not aware of how to listen. One if your jobs is to equip them with listening strategies that extend beyond the classroom.

6. Include both bottom-up and top-down listening techniques.

Bottom up processing proceeds from sounds to words to grammatical relationships to lexical meanings, etc., to a final 'message'. These techniques typically focus on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language.

Top-down processing is evoked from 'a bank prior knowledge and global expectations' and other background information that listener brings to the text. These techniques are more concerned with the activation of schemata, with deriving meaning, with global understanding, and with the interpretation of a text.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

What makes listening difficult?

Clustering: this action makes difficult the listening because the student picks up many words so this avoid to retain  the idea.

Redundancy: makes the student does not get the information because of the redundancy in the conversation and also the words used to see if someone is understanding, for example:

"you know", "I mean", etc.

Reduced forms: are the contractions that a native speaker does so the learner cannot get the right word, for example:

I'll (I will), she'd (she would), he's (he has), it's (it is), they've (they have).

Performance variables: are the hesitations, pauses, and corrections commonly made by native speakers, and in this par can be included  physical difficulties to speak like stammering made no only by native speakers.

Colloquial language: if the students do not have a previous knowledge about the English or American culture, they will have difficulties to understanding the conversation because they could use an informal language as idioms, phrasal verbs, slang, etc.

Rate of delivery: it is the speed which the conversation is made and if the student does not have a good level he/she will not understand.

Stress, rhythm and intonation: these aspects do the students can infer or guess the information by the way that the speaker speaks, but at the same time can be great trouble to understand.

Interaction: if we want to learn how to listen, we also have to learn how to respond.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Types of classroom listening performance

• 
  
  Reactive: this role of the listener is to focus in the pronunciation and cannot get the meaning.

• 
  
  Intensive: this performance just focus on components like phonemes, words, intonation, discourse markers, etc.

• 
  
  Responsive: the listeners process the information faster and form good answers of  what they have understood by asking questions, giving commands and seeking clarifications.

• 
  
  Selective: the purpose of this performance is to be able to find important information like dates or facts in a large conversation.

• 
  
  Extensive: to get the main idea or the purpose of an extensive listening by integrating others interactive skills like taking notes and/or discussion.

• 
  
  Interactive: this performance included the  previous five but this must be integrated with speaking skill.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Listening techniques from beginning to advanced

Bottom-up: this technique means if we got the  bottom that is vocabulary we can have a good performance in listening in order to speak that is the up part. It is focus on sounds, words, intonation, grammatical structures, and other components of spoken language.

Top-down: this technique happens when the students have to extract some information form their background and contextualizing it in the text in order to understand what the listening is about.

Interactive exercises: this technique integrates the four skills, no matter whether are focusing in just one skill.

Reference: ANDERSON, Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press.

Microskills of listening comprehension (adapted from Richards 1983)

1. Retain chunks of language of different lengths in short-term memory.


2. Discriminate among the distinctive sounds of English.


3. Recognize English stress patterns, words in stressed and unstressed positions, rhythmic structure, intonational contours, and their rolein signaling information.


4. Recognize reduced forms of words.


5. Distinguish word boundaries, recognize a core of words, and interpretword order patterns and their significance.


6. Process speech at different rates of delivery.


7. Process speech containing pauses, errors, corrections, and other performance variables.


8. Recognize grammatical word classes (nouns, verbs, etc.), systems (e.g., tense, agreement, pluralization), patterns, rules and elliptical forms.


9. Detect sentence constituents and distinguish between major and minor constituents.


10. Recognize that a particular meaning may be expressed in different grammatical forms.


11. Recognize cohesive devices in spoken discourse.


12. Recognize the communicative functions of utterances, according to situations, participants, goals.


13. Infer situations, participants, goals using real-world knowledge.


14. From events, ideas, etc., describd, predict outcomes, infer links and connections between events, deduce causes and effects, and detect such relations as main idea, supporting idea, new information, given information, generalization, and exemplification.


15. Distinguish between literal and implied meanings.


16. Use facial, kinesic, body language, and other nonverbal clues to decipher meanings.


17. Develop and use a battery of listening strategies, such as detecting key words, guessing the meaning of words from context, appeal for help and signaling comprehension or lack thereof.




Reference: ANDERSON Ann and Tony Lynch (1993), Listening, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press. Pp. 267.

READING: IS A MULTIFACETED RECEPTIVE SKILL THAT INVOLVES  WORDS RECOGNITION, COMPREHENSION AND OTHER SKILLS LIKE WRITING AND SPEAKING.

READING PROCESS:

•  Identify the text's features like title,lenght and pictures. 
• Making guesses of what is the text about 
• Anticipation of where to look for confirmation of these hypotheses according to what one knows of such text types.
• Read again the text.

MODELS


TOP-DOWN: this is a skimming process to identify what is the global idea of the text.

BOTTOM-UP: this is a scanning process to ifdentify details of the text.

INTERACTIVE: this happens when the reader shifts from the top-down model to the bottom-up  to resolve the text's problems.

Reading skills

1. Recognising words and pharases in English script.

2. Using one's own knowledge of the outside world to make predictions about and interpret a text.

3. Retrieving information stated in the passage.

4. Distinguishing the main ideas from subsidiary information.

5. Deducing the meaning and use of unknown words; ignoring unknown word/pharases that are redundant, i.e; that contribute nothing to interpreting .

6. Understanding the meaning and implications of grammatical structures.

7. Recognising discourse markers.

8. Recognising the function of the sentence- even when not introduced by discourse markers: e.g. example, definition paraphrase.

9. Understandinr relations within the sentence and the text.

10. Extracting specific information for summary or note taking.

11. Skimming to obtain the gist, and recognize the organization for ideas within the text.

12. Understanding implied information and attitudes.

13. Knowing how to use an indez, a table of contents, etc.

Willis, Jane. Teaching English trough English.(1998) Edinburg,Ed. Longman: pp.192

READING STRATEGIES

• Efficient reading: choose the right amterial and have a purpose of the reading,also improve the reading speed.
• Word attack skills: learn how to identify main words and delete the words that are useless.
• Reading for plain sense,text attack skilss: understand how the phrases and sentences are formed so that Ss can have the right idea of the text.
• Understanding discourse: recognizing text organization and predictions of what is the text about
Skimming through th

Introduction of the Course

The Receptive Teaching Skills course is about the development of the learnes´receptive skills by using the theoretical elements and transforming them in didactic classes in order to practice and to develop the activities related to the listening and writing skills.

The objectives of the course are:

• To analyze the methodological  techniques to favor the development of strategies of comprehension and to evaluate them from the positions of the structuralism and the context.
• To design teaching strategies and material for the auditive comprehension and practice them during the classes.

Program of the course