Developing language skills in the classroom

Developing language skills in the classroom

1. Reading for pleasure or information.

2. Thornbury (1997: 19). Usage: The extent to which the lnguage user demonstrates his knowledge of linguistic rules. Use: These rules asre used for effective communication.

3. Authenticity. Efl teachers express is how the reader responds to the text.

   • Expresing schok, horror, etc. --> The understanding.
   • Texts simplification might become more difficult at the end.

4. Types of question.

   • Widdowson (1978: 96). "The artificiality of the excercise". The difficulty the learner might have in trating the passage as authetic.
     • 4 types of questions: a)Wh questions. b)Polar questions (answer is outside the text). c) Truth assement (True or false). d) Multiple choice (choose a number of possible answers).
   • Grellet. She emphasizes the importance of integrating reding with the other skills- reading and writing, reading and listening, reading and speaking.

5. A top- down bottom- up approach.

   • Top - down strategies. Use macroleve ces to decode a text in order to acquire a more global understanding of its contents. Might include making hypotheses and anticipating contents of the text.
   • Bottom- up strategies involve the decoding of a passage step- by- step from small textual elements like words and phrases.

6. An active process.

   • Reading is a constant process of guessing, hypothesing, anticipating, confirming and predicting in which the knowledge "one brings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it". (Grellet 1981: 7).
     • Experiences of each person is triggered by the information that is presented.
       • Cooperative learning.
         • Methodology which emphasises the sharing of knowlege in groups within the classroom setting so that stronger, more able students assist their weaker classmates.

7. Activities. Greenall and Swan´s (1986: 3-5). Activities/ micro skills to be found in current reading materials in ELT:

   • *Extracting main ideas. *Reading for specific information. *Predicting. *Checking comprehension. * Inferring. * Dealing with unfamiliar words. *Linking ideas. *Understanding complex sentences. *Understading a writer´s sytles. *Evaluating the text. *Reacting to the text. * Writing summaries.
     • Integrating reading.
       • No problem with this type of integration, just so long as a teacher or a textbook writer is careful to specify the criteria and the weighting of the assesment.