Essential Teaching Methods: Grammar, Listening, and Civic Competencies
Direct Instruction Steps for Grammar Presentation
Follow these steps when presenting new grammatical structures using direct instruction:
- Motivate the teaching of structures by showing how they are needed in real-life communication.
- State the objective of the lesson clearly and plainly.
- Review familiar items (e.g., calendar, time, names of objects, auxiliary verbs in the target language) that will be needed to introduce, explain, or practice the new item.
- Use the new structure (adjective of color, for example) in a brief utterance where all other words are known to the students.
- Model the utterance several times.
- Engage in full class, half-class, group, and individual repetition of the utterance.
- Give several additional sentences in which the structure is used.
- Class and groups will repeat.
- Give several additional sentences on the board. Underline the new structure and (where relevant) use curved arrows or diagrams to illustrate the relationship of the structure to other words and/or parts of the sentence.
- Point to the underlined structure as you ask questions that will guide students to discover the sounds, the written form, the position in the sentence, and the grammatical function of the new structure (“What does this tell us?”)
- Help students (age 11 or older) to verbalize the important features of the structure. Use charts and other aids to relate to other familiar structures such as verb tenses.
- Engage the students in varied guided oral practices.
- Require the students to consciously select the new grammatical item from contrasting ones learned in the past.
- Have the students use the structure with communicative expressions and familiar or new notions.
Top-Down Listening Strategies
- Students first attempt to understand the overall meaning of what they are listening to.
- At lower levels, top-down processing may be hampered by bottom-up problems (not understanding individual words).
- Understanding the main message is the key to success.
How to Approach Top-Down Listening: Using Prediction
We, as teachers, should help students reduce their levels of anxiety when doing a listening task. We may help them predict what they are going to hear to help them get ‘in the mood’ of the topic and to help them activate their schema data (background knowledge of the topic). You may pre-teach vocabulary that you consider essential for them to grasp the meaning.
Getting the General Idea
It is a way of increasing students’ listening confidence. You should ask them just to try to identify the general idea of what is being said – the main purpose of communication.
Maintaining Attention
Students need to maintain their focus as they listen, even when the words are rushing past and they are struggling to keep up. To achieve this, you should prepare an interesting task so that they will focus on the activity and have to pay attention to the audio track to complete it. You may prepare activities such as listening for inference (working out what a speaker really means), filling in forms, drawing pictures, or following directions.
Multiple Listening
If students are to improve their listening skills, they should have the opportunity to listen to the same material as often as is feasible. Each time they hear an audio extract again, and with the right guidance, they will almost certainly understand more, and their knowledge of how words and phrases combine into a coherent text will be enhanced. One of our tasks, therefore, might be to design a range of activities that ask our students to return to the audio more than once. We need to be careful, however. If we ask the students to listen to something that, after more than one listening, they have lost interest in, our good intentions will have been in vain.
Working Together
Working together creates an interactive frame that helps to lower students’ anxiety because a problem shared is a problem halved. Besides, when students discuss their interpretations of what they have heard, they end up understanding it better.
Bottom-Up Listening Techniques
Learners concentrate on individual words, phrases, or sounds as a way of understanding the whole. This process is difficult because:
- Processing words and sounds simultaneously is a challenging task.
- Fluent speakers use features such as ellipsis, juncture, and assimilation, and beginners are not used to that way of speaking.
At lower levels, we need to focus on identifying sounds, words, and features of connected speech (linking-r, devoicing, etc.). Here are some useful techniques:
Dictation and Dictogloss
We can dictate sentences which contain features we want our students to get used to. We will read them as many times as they need so that they get the maximum practice. They can compare what they have written with other classmates. You can also use Dictogloss, which consists of reading a short text and asking them to write down as many words as they can – it is not traditional dictation because they are not expected to grasp every single word. They should compare what they have written with the text of a classmate, and in groups, they should try to reconstruct the original text.
Micro Listening
When we want our students to listen to a longer passage, it is useful for them to listen to small phrases and elements that cause them problems in order to help them become better at bottom-up processing.
Narrow Listening
We can have our students listen to a number of short listening texts on the same theme or topic or in the same genre. The more they do this, the more they will hear the same words and phrases cropping up again and again.
Transcripts
It is another effective way of helping our students since if we allow them to read the transcript, they will be able to associate what they have read with what they are listening to.
Competences for Democratic Culture Model
Values
- Valuing human dignity and human rights.
- Valuing cultural diversity.
- Valuing democracy, justice, fairness, equality, and the rule of law.
Attitudes
- Openness to cultural otherness and to other beliefs, world views, and practices.
- Respect.
- Civic-mindedness.
- Responsibility.
- Self-efficacy.
- Tolerance of ambiguity.
Skills
- Autonomous learning skills.
- Analytical and critical thinking skills.
- Skills of listening and observing.
- Empathy.
- Flexibility and adaptability.
- Linguistic, communicative, and plurilingual skills.
- Co-operation skills.
- Conflict-resolution skills.
Knowledge and Critical Understanding
- Knowledge and critical understanding of the self.
- Knowledge and critical understanding of language and communication.
- Knowledge and critical understanding of the world.
Effective Conversational Strategies
Real Talk
If students are to be involved in spontaneous face-to-face conversation outside the classroom with competent English language speakers, they probably need to be exposed to more than just the kind of questions that are commonly found in coursebooks.