III. Listening, Oral Work, Reading and Writing

What are your challenges when teaching the listening, speaking, reading, writing skills?

When we are teaching we do not have to be focus just in one skill, we know that it is important that our students develop the four skills. There were some challenges when we were teaching these skills, for example, sometimes we did not which activities we could develop, and we did not how to put into practice maybe an activity.

Giving the students a lot of listening activities is a good way of enlarging their vocabulary. On the other hand, it also helps the students improve their listening comprehension. So, we tried to teach this skill through songs, telling stories, listen and repeat activities, and so on.

Speaking can't be taught separately. It is often connected with listening. English is not our mother tongue, so for us it is difficult to speak a foreign language. One of the challenges that we had was that we had to pronounce every single word in the right way because then our students reproduced the sounds in the same way as we did it. That means that if we are making mistakes in the pronunciation then they are going to be making the same mistakes.

We as teachers have to be aware of all those things because we know that the aim of learning a language is to communicate.

Also, at this stage children sometimes do not know how to read or write even in their mother tongue, so it was another challenge for us to teach them those skills.

It is difficult sometimes because as we know there a lot of words in English that we do not read them as they are write or the words are not written in the same way as we listen to them.

We took into account some of the activities that are in the chapters 3 through 6, and they helped us a lot.

 For example:

-         Listen and draw: This is a very useful activity because children like to draw, so we told them what to draw.

-         Listen and color

-         Listen and repeat activities

-         Songs

-         Listening to stories

-         Using a mascot, one of us once make use of a little mascot to ask children the parts of the body; that activity really worked and was funny.

-         Use drawings to ask them some questions

-         Flashcards

-         Matching, etc.

Activities that we tried in our classes

We tried activities such as songs because we noticed that children really like to shake their bodies and to sing.

Maybe there were some songs that our children really did not know the lyrics, but they got engaged in all the activities and that was our purpose that they enjoyed it too.

We made use of a lot of drawings. They really liked to see a lot of draws and at the same time they really liked to color draws.

When we were teaching them the colors, we tried the listen and color activity. We said now you have to color the apple with red, the sun with yellow, the lemons with green, and so on.

Activities that we did not try in our classes

We did not try activities like role plays because we think that they are not able to do that. They do not have an extent vocabulary. Even they do not know some word in their mother tongue.

We did not try activities like to read something from a book, or even sentences because some of them did not how to read.

We did not try copying activities either. Some of them just knew how to write their names.

Put up your hand: kids put up their hands every time they hear a mistake that the teacher makes on purpose. Although this activity provides physical movement and gives the teacher a chance to play along with the pupils, not all the students have the level of English to understand what the teacher says. So we think this activity may not work.

Telling stories: although some of us did not try this activity, we think that it could work. But we think that the stories have to be short, known, and funny. And if we show them pictures, that will be better.

We did not try dictation or fill-in exercises. And we think that those activities may not work with our children because they are 5 or 6 years old, so they do not have the ability to write or read yet.

Group work, some of us did not try this activity. But we think it may work because even they are selfish sometimes and they do not like to share their own things, this activity will be very useful to teach them good values.