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<h4>communicative context. You are left with a mainly linguistic exercise, which may give you some information about your learners’ current listening proficiency, but does not allow for the actual development of listening skills. A cycle of listening/answering questions / checking answers/listening/ etc. is really just testing listening skills and doesn’t help students learn how to develop their listening skills and improve their listening comprehension.</h4>
<h4>Good listening lessons will provide pre-listening activities to help students better predict what kind of information they will hear by creating a context and a purpose for listening. Better listening lessons will also help learners to clear up misconceptions and miscues as they listen. In other words, developing listening skills requires that students are provided feedback and supporting the process of listening, not just based on their comprehension after they have finished listening. When listening is approached in this way, effective strategies for listening can be discussed and applied during the process of listening, making it easier for students to understand the relevance of those strategies and how they apply.</h4>
<h2>How Can Teachers Help?</h2>
<h4>First, teachers need to encourage students to recognize that listening is a skill that takes practice. Students will not make significant progress unless they are willing to listen to English outside of the classroom, even though it is challenging for them.</h4>
<h4>Teachers need to provide effective listening lessons that help students gain confidence and learn strategies that they can apply in different situations.</h4>
<h4>For a general listening lesson, the following steps provide a useful format:</h4>
<h4>• Activate student interest and background knowledge with a relevant introduction</h4>
<h4>Keep the introduction fluency-focused to encourage more engagement with the topic. This helps warm students up to the topic. In the real world, we don’t usually listen to information without having some idea of what we are going to be listening to, and when given a choice, we don’t usually listen to things that aren’t of interest to us.</h4>
<h4>• Pre-teach vocabulary</h4>
<h4>Pre-teach vocabulary that is necessary for understanding the text, but doesn’t turn this into an exhaustive pre-listening activity. The goal is to move into the main focus of the lesson, not to get bogged down with a huge list of new words. If you have to pre-teach too much vocabulary, it’s possible the listening material or task is too difficult for the level.</h4>
<h4>• Give students a purpose for listening at each stage of the listening lesson.</h4>
<h4>From the students’ perspective, new listening is often a wall of words from which they are able to glean small bits of meaning. Help them breakthrough by giving them specific tasks for listening, especially at the lower levels. The first time they listen to a new text, give students 2-4 gist questions to ensure they have got the general idea of the listening text before you begin digging in more deeply.</h4>
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<h4>Read for more detail</h4>
<h4>After you are sure students have a grasp of the main ideas, you can begin to focus on reading for more detailed understanding. There are many different activity types you can use, but as for the gist stage, give students a specific task for each activity.</h4>
<h4>• Focus on language</h4>
<h4>• After students have worked with the listening text, you can focus in on a grammar or vocabulary point that is featured in the listening. This stage in the lesson can expand beyond the themes of the lesson and can help students build on the language they have worked within the lesson. You can also focus on specific features of connected speech so that students learn the ways that language changes when spoken naturally.</h4>
<h4>• Ask higher-order questions</h4>
<h4>Give students an opportunity to use higher-order thinking skills in English by including an opportunity for discussion on the ideas or themes addressed in the listening. Expand the topic beyond the strict limits of the listening text, and encourage students to make connections to their experience and to the world around them.</h4>
<h4>EncouragE Extensive Listening Outside of Class!</h4>
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<h4>Have a regular ‘In the News’ focus in class. Encourage students to share information that they have learned from current newscasts.</h4>
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<h4>Have students keep in a listening journal in which they note words and information that they have gleaned from their listening sources.</h4>
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<h4>Encourage students to listen to English for at least 15 minutes a day, even if they have difficulty understanding what is being said. Regular listening will help habituate their ears to the rhythms of natural speech, which will help in the long run.</h4>
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<h4>CHAPTER 8 - Teaching WriOng Skills</h4>
<h4>The macro skills of writing is the one most often ignored by teachers. To exacerbate this, students very often do not seem to be interested in practicing this skill. The balance between effort and payout is too skewed for most students: there is a much greater, more immediate reward in developing speaking skills in most everyday situations. The effort required to write coherently is much greater than that required for passable speaking.</h4>
<h4>One of the major reasons that writing is given short shrift in the classroom is that teachers do not know how to present and exploit this skill in a communicative and interesting way. Most likely, students have had boring writing lessons before and they do not see a meaningful purpose in learning how to write well. Only students who are taking examination courses (such as TOEFL, IELTS, FCE, etc.) seem to be interested in this skill, since they will need to write essays, for example, in those exams.</h4>
<h4>In ESL courses, writing should be integrated with other skills and linked to different activities in the lesson. It should also be related to a theme and have a communicative purpose. All this will ensure that your students will find the writing skill meaningful.</h4>
<h2>Examples of writing activities</h2>
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