TESOL Hailun

Unit 12 was a lesson about teaching the productive skills of Speaking and Writing. Here are a few points from the lesson: When speaking is being taught, there are two types of activities to consider, activities that will promote accuracy and activities that will promote fluency. Both are equally important. Accuracy activities are usually part of the Study stage, and fluency activities are generally part of the Activate stage of the lesson. It was noted that students can be reluctant to speak in the classroom due to shyness and fear of making mistakes. Techniques to encourage their participation were discussed and include pair-work and group-work. Plenty of time teaching guided practice was also listed as helpful. Writing Skills are different from speaking skills because grammar tends to be more formal and there are punctuation, spelling, handwriting, and layout skills involved. A sample lesson was given for teaching each of these productive skills, and the use of games for teaching purposes was discussed. What I learned in this unit that was most surprising to me was that some languages do not have punctuation or even spacing between individual words! I can see how difficult it would be for these students to learn to write well using the English language. Our language is much more complication than I had originally thought it to be.