Teaching young learners listening and speaking skills презентация

WHAT IS LISTENING?
Listening is the process of attaching meaning to sounds. Although speaking is the most important communication skill, the ability to listen is more necessary in the process of learning. More importantly, the act of skillful listening is the basis for developing intelligence.

WHEN DOES LISTENING BEGIN?
Listening begins at birth, when someone first speaks to the newborn child – one of the first communication skills a baby learns. Although an infant’s attention span is quite brief, it does respond by gurgling, looking, turning its eyes and head and learning to recognize voices. That is why talking often to a baby is important. Intelligence grows only if someone speaks to a baby, eliciting a response.

WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HEARING AND LISTENING?
We HEAR with our ears, but we LISTEN with our minds. Everyday we HEAR many noises and sounds (birds singing, trucks passing, clocks ticking), yet we pay little attention to them because they are not essential to any special learning. However, we LISTEN to sounds and voices when we want to remember specific information for later use.

WHY DO WE LISTEN?
to learn,
to enjoy,
to act and react,
to appreciate, to make decisions,
to develop attitudes and values,
to recognize danger,
to get information
to develop thinking skills.

IS LISTENING EASY OR DIFFICULT?
Listening EFFECTIVELY is difficult, especially for young children. In school, for example, teachers have a relatively easy job in comparison to their students. They give information or directions and their task is largely finished. On the other hand, students must 1) listen to the information or directions, 2) remember every detail and 3) follow through by applying the information to the directions.

10 Rules of Listening in Young Learner Classes
1. Although listening is a receptive skill, the students are not and should not be passive while listening; in other words, they should be engaged and/or work in the listening task actively.
2. The students should be engaged with different listening tasks according to their age, learning style, listening capacity and phonological awareness.
3. The language teachers should train the students to listen to the English sounds carefully.
4. The teachers should train the young learners to follow simple instructions to get them ready to develop other language skills.

5. Different listening tasks should be addressed in class:
 Listen & Do
 Listen & Draw
 Listen & Colour
 Listen & Mime
 Listen & Predict
 Listen & Respond
 Listen & Write (needs literacy)
 Listen & Identify (may need literacy)
 Listen & Match (may need literacy)
 Listen & Complete (needs literacy)
 Listen & Read (model for pronunciation)

6. The students should be given a different task each time they listen to the same text. (i.e.:First, listen to have a general idea; second listen to complete the blanks; third, listen to check your answers)
7. Input through tapes, videos or teacher modelling should be provided; the audio tools should be in good quality.
8. The teachers should be aware of the importance of familiarity (with the context, language, task, voice ...etc.), difficulty (what is expected as the output) and teacher’s language (repeating, simplifying, and using gestures, intonation and formulaic expressions that help children to figure out the intended meaning)
9. It is important to embed listening into stories, games, routines, rhymes, songs. They may not understand every word, but they can understand the meaning from the context, visuals, and gestures as in real life.
10. Both bottom-up (requiring linguistic knowledge) and top-down (requiring world knowledge)listening should be addressed.

Listening - Using a song
Prepare the learners before they listen to anything.
Show them pictures of characters from the song.
If it’s a song about teddy bears then bring in some teddy bears to show them. If the teddy bears sing sections of the song then use them as puppets and make them actually sing the song. Use actions as much as possible to accompany songs so that the children can participate. This will help build their confidence, increase their enjoyment and give them extra clues as to the meaning of the words they are listening to.
They should predict, ‘imagine’, what they are going to hear. Again, sticking with the teddy bears, ask them if they think the teddy bear is happy or sad.
When they are listening they should always have something to do. They need a reason for listening. You could allocate part of the song to a small cluster of children so they have to listen out for their part and sing along to that part only.
Use the same song again and again. Listening is a difficult skill so building their confidence is vital at all stages of language learning. If they recognize the words they will be much more motivated. This is valid not only from a language point of view but also from a logical point of view. Listening to a song you know and like is always an enjoyable experience. Familiarity helps children feel secure.

Speaking is a skill, just like swimming, driving a car, or playing ping-pong. Too often, in the traditional classroom, the learning of English has been relegated to linguistic knowledge only, e.g. knowledge of vocabulary and grammar rules, with little or no attention paid to practising language skill.

Many language learners regard speaking ability as the measure of knowing a language.
Language learners need to recognize that speaking involves three areas of knowledge:
Mechanics (pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary)
Functions (transaction and interaction)
Social and cultural rules and norms (turn-taking, rate of speech, length of pauses between speakers, relative roles of participants)

Teaching Speaking For Young Learners
Knowing the Basics
Motivating Students to Speak
Strategies That Encourage Participation
Method to Speaking
Technique to Teach Speaking

Teaching Speaking For Young Learners
Teaching speaking for young language learners (YLLs) is an interesting and challenging duty for teachers for some considerations. In one hand, YLLs are individuals of very early age who are interested in many new things such as a foreign language, English. In this level, young learners seem to have the same proficiency in speaking that is novice level. The characteristic of novice level is the students’ ability to communicate minimally with learned material and oral production consists of isolated words and perhaps a few high-frequency phrases essentially no functional communication ability.

Knowing The Basics
Young learners are like sponges, they soak up everything we say and how we say it. Thus clear and correct pronunciation is of vital importance, since young learners repeat exactly what they hear. What has been learned at an early stage is difficult to change later on. One of the rules that apply here is: slowly and steadily, through constant revision and recycling.

always strive to achieve a positive and relaxed atmosphere in young learners’ classroom, as this proved a decisive factor in achieving maximum results. With the help of mixed activities, such as dialogues, choral revision, chants, songs, poems and rhymes students’ speaking abilities grow, their pronunciation gets better and their awareness of the language improves
Interaction is an important way of learning. Therefore, increased oral emphasis should be included in our teaching to give the students as much speaking time as possible.

Motivating Students to Speak
To motivate students in EFL contexts, teachers should include many activities and strategies that attract students’ attention and make them interested in the lesson.
Activities need to be child centered and communication should be authentic.
the teacher should consider in the activities: a focus on meaning and value, not correctness; a focus on collaboration and social development; the provision of a rich context, and teaching the four skills through a variety of activities.

Strategies that Encourage Participation
To motivate students in EFL contexts, teachers should include many activities and strategies that attract students’ attention and make them interested in the lesson.
The teacher can use the model for teaching young learners by using IPA (Imitating-Practicing control-Autonomy) as the other strategy. Children love imitating.

Method To Teach Speaking

Learning the Dialogues
Learning dialogues by heart is a definite no-no. It is much better and far more useful to substitute the words so that they are true to students and their world.
Student uses his/her own variation, there is an obvious transition from pure imitation to conscious changing, which speeds up remembering and offers varied communicative opportunities.
By imitating, sharing and discussing students benefit – modeling, understanding and picking it up seem to be natural..

10 Rules of Speaking in Young Learner Classes
Although it is a productive skill, the children may not feel ready to produce oral language, so teachers and parents should be patient.
Short practice activities can help students build productive language to use indiscourse.Speaking starts with practicing drills, set phrases (junks and formulaic expressions),repeating models, so it is important to use such activities to make them familiar with repetitive language. However, the language should be used meaningfully in the classroom, not just in isolated chunks.
Children need experience of a range of discourse types to increase their skills, so the tasks designed for in-class use should be varied.
The teachers should take into account the developmental stages in L1, those in L2, and students’ age to design the speaking activities.
Correcting each and every mistake is discouraging and they need help to acquire fluency. Before the speaking, we may teach them the necessary language and the vocabulary items to prepare them for the tasks.

Designing authentic activities, such as role-plays and dialogues based on real lifeconversations, motivates the students, so they willingly take the role of an imaginary person.However, the meaning and purpose of discourse needs to be made comprehensible to the learners.
The teachers should be aware of the problems young learners may have while articulating phonemes. It is important not to ignore the pronunciation, intonation and stress: Using tongue twisters, mirrors, imitating native speakers in movies can be some of the useful activities.
Speaking is not an individual skill; they need to be encouraged to practice in pairs and in groups.
A good speaking activity should involve all students not some of them.
When the class is noisy in a speaking activity, trying to shout over children is not a good idea: Using the lights, symbols or music may help.

Speaking - Songs and chants
Using songs and chants in class gives the children a chance to listen and reproduce the language they hear. They are working on the sounds, rhythm and intonation.
Remember when you speak or sing keep it simple but very importantly, natural so that when they copy what you say they can have a chance of sounding natural.

Speaking - Whole class chorus drills
If you have a large class make sure the language they produce is not just confined to stilted whole class repetitions of sentences produced by you. If the class tries to speak at the same time they automatically slow down and the intonation and rhythm are lost. Whole class repetition does of course have its advantages as it allows weaker students to build confidence with speaking without being in the limelight. Do chorus drills as described above but limit them and always move on to letting individuals speak.

Speaking - Real language
As with listening, make sure they always have a valid reason for speaking. The more realistic the need for communication, the more effective an activity will be. In other words get them to ask their neighbour ‘Do you prefer chocolate or strawberry ice-cream?’ rather than saying; ‘What’s my favourite food?' This last question is just asking the children to guess rather than think. Avoid getting them to repeat sentences such as; ‘What is my name?’ or ‘Is this a book?’ Not only do you know it’s a book, so the interaction isn’t very interesting, unless the book is hidden in a bag and they are having to work out the contents, but also the response is limited to a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Closed questions are ok to lead onto something more with low level learners but be aware of not using them too often.

Speaking - Further suggestions
Vary the types of speaking and listening activities you do. Keep them interested by introducing new approaches to speaking in class. This could mean talking to different people, talking to different numbers of people, speaking as a whole class, half a class or in small groups.
For different levels in the same class you can ask them to listen for different things. Ask the weaker ones to tell you how many teddy bears there are in the song and the stronger ones to tell you what the teddy bears are doing in the song.
To make one activity suit all levels ask them to practice saying between five and ten sentences. This way the quick finishers have more to do and the weaker pupils still feel they have achieved the task if they have practised only a few sentences.

Links
http://www.primaryresources.co.uk/music/pdfs/3teddybear.pdf - teddy bear song
http://www.songs4teachers.com/ - lots of free downloadable song lyrics
http://www.songs4teachers.com/kindergartensongs.pdf - a welcome song for the start of class.