Use of the Topical Project Work “My Body” for Developing All Language

The debate about use of authentic listening material is just as fierce in listening as it is in reading. If, for example, teachers play a tape of a political speech to complete beginners, they will not understand a word. If, on the other hand, students are given a realistic (though not authentic) tape of a telephone conversation, they may learn to gain confidence as a result. Everything depends on level, and the kind of tasks that go with a tape.

There may be some authentic material which is usable by beginners such as pre-recorded announcements, telephone messages, etc.

There are numbers of ways in which listening activities differ from otter classroom exercises: firstly, tapes go at the same special for everybody.Listening is special, too, because spoken language, especially when it is informal, has a number of unique features including the use of incomplete utterances, repetitions, hesitation, etc., experience of informal spoken English together with an appreciation of other spoken factors – the tone of the voice, the intonation the speakers use, rhythm, and background noise – will help students tease meaning out of such speech phenomena.

3.2 Developing Speaking and Writing Skills

Speaking and writing are the productive skills. Production processes control how well the child can reproduce the model’s responses.

There are three basic reasons why it is a good idea to give students speaking tasks which provoke them to use all and any language at their command:

1. Rehearsal: getting students to have a free discussion gives them a chance to rehearse having discussion in project work.

2. Feedback: speaking tasks where students are trying to use all and any language they know provides feedback for both teacher and students. Teacher can see how well their class is doing and what language problems they are having (that is a good reason for project lessons); students can also see how easy they find a particular kind of speaking and what they need to improve.

3. Engagement: good speaking activities can and should be highly motivating. Many speaking tasks (role-playing, discussion, problem-solving) can be used in the project work [6, 88]

There are four types of speaking activity:

information- gap

survey

discussion

role-play

One popular information-gap activity is called “Describe and Draw”. It has many of the elements of an ideal speaking activity.

One way of provoking conversation and opinion exchange is to get students to conduct questionnaires and surveys. If the students plan these questionnaires themselves, the activity becomes even more useful.

Role-play activities are those where students are asked to imagine that they are in different situations and act accordingly. Teachers can organise discussion sessions in their classroom, too.

Writing is a basic language skill, just as important as speaking, listening, and reading. Students need to know how to write letters, how to put written reports together, how to reply to advertisement – and increasingly, how to write using electronic media. Part of teacher’s job is to give students that skill.

There are four writing sequences:

postcard

altering dictation

newspaper headlines/articles

report writing [6,81-83]