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3UDC: 378.147
THE WAYS OF TEACHING LANGUAGE SKILLS FOR PRE-INTERMEDIATE
LEVEL STUDENTS
Artikxodjayeva Kamila Alisherona O'zMU, Xorijiy filologiya fakulteti, Xorijiy til va adabiyoti kafedrasi,2-bosqich magistr, kamila nice@bk.ru
Sarimsokov Hurshid Abdumalikovich Ilmiy raxbar, O'zMU, Xorijiy filologiya fakulteti, Xorijiy til va adabiyoti kafedrasi PhD,dots,
hurshidsarimsokov@gmail. com
Аннотация. Maqolada Pre-Intermediate darajadagi talabalar uchun o'qish, yozish, gapirish va tinglash ko'nikmalarini o'rgatishning bir qancha samarali usullari, shuningdek o'qituvchilar uchun reseptiv va produktiv usullar ham tahlil qilinadi va dars jarayonida to'rt usulni o'qitishda vujudga keladigan muammolarga yechim berib o'tiladi.
Аннотация. В статье проанализированы некоторые подходящие способы обучения чтению, письму и аудированию учащихся уровня Pre-Intermediate, а также продуктивные и рецептивные способы преподавания для учителей и решения проблем возникающие во время урока.
Abstract. The article analyzes some proper ways for teaching reading, writing, speaking and listening for Pre- Intermediate level students, also, productive and receptive ways for teachers. How can be tackled the problems which occurs during the lesson.
Калит сузлар: Ko'nikmalar, samarali o'qitish, yozish, o'qish, eshitish, gapirish, talaffuz, lug'at boyligi, so'zlashuv, audio/video materiallar.
Ключевые слова: Навык, продуктивное обучение, разновидности обучения, читать, слушать, писать, аутентичные материалы, словарный запас.
Key words: skills, receptive learning, productive learning, learning types, reading, writing, speaking, listening, vocabulary, audio/ video materials.
Introduction. Teaching language skills encompasses a multi-faceted approach to language education that focuses on developing students' abilities in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. These skills are essential components of language proficiency, as they enable individuals to effectively communicate and interact in a foreign language.
- Listening skills involve the ability to comprehend spoken language, ranging from formal lectures to casual conversations. Students can improve their listening skills through activities such as listening to authentic audio materials, engaging in listening comprehension exercises, and participating in conversational practice.
- Speaking skills involve the ability to express oneself orally in a coherent and effective manner. To develop speaking skills, students can engage in activities such as role-playing, discussion-based exercises, and guided conversations. Emphasis is also placed on pronunciation, intonation, and fluency in order to enhance overall communication ability.
- Reading skills involve the ability to understand written text, ranging from simple sentences to complex academic articles. Teachers can support the development of reading skills by providing students with a variety of reading materials, such as fiction, non-fiction, and informational texts. Reading comprehension exercises, vocabulary-building activities, and reflective writing tasks can also enhance students' reading proficiency.
- Writing skills involve the ability to express ideas and thoughts coherently and creatively through written text. Teachers can help students improve their writing skills by guiding them
through the writing process, including brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing. Additionally, providing feedback on grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structure can help students enhance their writing proficiency.
By focusing on the development of these language skills, educators can empower students to communicate effectively in a foreign language, leading to improved language proficiency and enhanced intercultural competence. Strategies, methods, and approaches to teaching language skills can vary based on the goals and needs of students, and effective language instruction involves incorporating a combination of activities, materials, and assessments to support students' language learning journey.
Main body. Teachers tend to talk about the way we use language in terms of four skills-reading, writing, listening and speaking. These are often divided into two types. Receptive skills is the term used for reading and listening, skills were meaning is extracted from the discourse. Productive skills is the term of speaking and writing, because for these skills the students actually have to produce language themselves.
It is certainly the case that when we speak or write we are produce language, and no one will argue with the idea that language activation takes place when we are doing this. But reading and listening also demand considerable language activation on the part of the reader or listener. We can not access meaning unless our brains are fully engaged with the texts we are interacting with. In the other words, we have to think to understand, using any or all of our language knowledge to get meaning from what we are seeing or hearing. But in any case, whether we are reading or speaking, we often mix what we are doing with other skills.
It makes little sense to talk about skills in isolation since, as Elly Hinkel points out "In meaningful communication people employ incremental language skills not in isolation, but in tandem". When we are engaged in conversation we are bound to listen as well as speak because otherwise we could not interact with the person we are speaking to (also some people, of course, are better listeners than others!). lectures frequently rely on notes they have written previously, and people listening to lectures often write notes of their own. Even reading, generally thought of as private activity, often provokes note taking, conversation and comment.
Writing, to is rarely done in isolation. Much of today's communication takes place in a digital environment so that when we are messaging, for example, we read what someone sends us and respond by writing (i.e. typing with one or two fingers) almost instantly. And even when we are writing on our own, we generally read through what we have written before we send it off. Sometimes, of course, this is not case when dealing with e-mails and text messages, but writers and texters often regret sending their messages in haste. If skill use is multi-layered in this way, it would make no sense to teach each skill in isolation- also we will have moments when we focused in one skill than any other.
Receptive skills and productive skills feed off each other in a number of ways. What we say or write is heavily influenced by what we hear and see. Our most important information about language comes from this input. The more we see and listen to (comprehensible) input, the more English we accure, notice or learn this input takes many forms: Provide massive language input, as does audio and video material both inside and outside the classroom, whether from TV or radio or from internet. Students are exposed to a variety of reading texts both in the classroom, if they are so minded, when they read extensively away from their lessons. They may also interrupt with other English speakers inside the classroom and outside.
But students get other input especially in relation to their own output. When a student produces a piece of language and sees how it turns out, that information is fed back into the acquisition process. Output- and the students' response to their own output - becomes input. Such input and feedback can take various forms. Teachers can provide feedback, not just when a
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student finishes a piece of work, but also during the writing process, or when acting as a prompter or as a resource, they offer ongoing support. (figure 4).
Many effective learning sequences will offer both skill integration and also language study based around the topic or other thematic threat. The following example shows how it might work at the Pre-intermediate level.
Stage 1. The students complete the following questionnaire about how they respond to physical appearance. This involves them in reading and speaking.
1. When you first meet someone, what do you look at first? a. Their hair b. Their face c. Their eyes d. Their mouth e. the clothes they are wearing. f. something else (please specify)
2. Which of the following will make you think most positively about someone (choose one only)?
a. they are well-groomed
b. they are well dressed
c. they have a good physique
d. they look interesting
3. think of two people that you find very attractive. Can you describe them?
4. think of two people whose appearance you find unusual or striking. What is the unusual/ striking thing about them?
'Other students' feedback
"other students participate
Student
modifies
his/her
understanding
" Student sees how it turn out
Teacher'
s
feedback
Output
Input
English language speakers in person English language media Audio/video for language learning Reading and pedagogic text The teacher
Figure 1. The circle of input and output
In pairs or groups, the students discuss their responses to the questionnaire.
Stage 2. The students now read the following text from the novel, written some years ago, about Cantonese couple living in London, where Chen works in a Chinese restaurant.
Working in the fields Chen had once had a physique which had been lean, tanned, and sinewy; Now it was almost impossible to see the outlines of his ribs for the plump flash which closed them. Not that he was chubby, just prosperous, as he was careful to explain to Lilly.
On Lilly there were two opposing views. Chen did not think she was pretty. She had a long, thin, rather horsy face, and a mouth that was too big for the rest of her features, and she smiled too frequently for a woman. She had a largish bust, and her hands and feet were a fraction too big to be wholly pleasing to her husband. It was her face, though which really led her down (Chen had decided), being over-ful of expression particularly her bright black eyes which she had a habit of widening and narrowing when listening to someone she found interesting. Probably there was too much character in her face, which perhaps explain the lack of Cantonese
male interest better than any particular wrongness of an individual feature or their relationship to each other. Westerners found her attractive, though. Lilly was unaware of this but Chen had noticed this with great surprise. That was if second glances and turned heads on the street where anything to go by.
From Sour sweet by Timothy Mo (Abacus)
Stage 3. The students answer comprehension questions about the text before discussing Chen's views of Lilly's appearance they talk about whether or not beauty is a cultural concept.
Stage 4. The students look for any language in the text which describes physical appearance. This leads on to a study section where they first discuss whether words like thin, slim, skinny, fat, stout or chubby have positive or negative connotations, and then go on to say whether words like lean, sinewy, handsome, pretty, weel-build and plain can be apply to men, women or both.
Stage 5. The students re-write the text from Sour Sweet as if Chen really approves of his wife's appearance.
Stage 6. The students write physical descriptions of well-known figures. The class has to guess who they are writing about.
Stage 7. The students listen to a dialogue about a police line-up before role-playing police officers taking witness statements based on descriptions of people they have supposedly seen committing a crime.
This sequence which would be in appropriate in a certain cultural context, Provides both study and activation. It involves students in reading, writing, speaking and listening. As a result, the students have been able to practice a wide range of language abilities A frequent distinction is made between top-down and bottom-up processing. In metaphorical terms, this could be likened to the difference between looking at a forest, or, instead, studying the individual trees within it. It has been said that in top-down processing, the reader gets a general view of the reading or listening passage by absorbing the overall picture. This is greatly helped if their schema allows them to have appropriate expectations of what they are going to come across. In bottom-up processing the reader or listener focuses on such things as individual words, phrases or cohesive devices or achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up a whole. A lower level, students are frequently preoccupied with bottom-up processing because they are having problem identifying individual sounds and words even when they read, they will be sub- vocalizing the words they see. This suggests that with lower-level students we need to concentrate on word and sound recognition and the connections between sounds and spelling. As students move beyond simple word and sound recognition, it is probably most useful to see act of reading and listening as well as speaking and writing as interactions between top-down and bottom-up processing. Although there are bright differences in reading and listening, the basic classroom procedure is the same for both of it.
A typical procedure for getting students to read a written text or listen to a recording involves Type 1 and Type 2 tasks. Type 1 tasks are those where get the students to read or listen for some general understanding or response, rather than asking them to pick out details or get involved in a refined search or analysis of the text. Type 2 tasks, on the other hand, are those where get the students to look at the text in considerably more detail, maybe to prompt more detailed responses, to gather specific information or to analyse language. Moving from the general to the specific by starting with Type 1 tasks and going on to Type 2 tasks works because it allows the students to get a feel for what they are seeing or hearing before they have to attack the text in detail, which is the more difficult thing to do.
Lead-in The procedure for teaching receptive skills generally starts with a lead-in. This is where engage the students with the topic of the reading and try to activate their schema. Our
schema is the background knowledge have of the world, the topic under consideration, the linguistic context that such a topic usually provokes, etc. This is the knowledge that allows many British, Australian, West Indian, Pakistani and Indian people to make sense of headlines like England in six-wicked collapse.
Comprehension/Response task once the students are ready to read/ listen, the teacher have to set some kin d of a task so that they will read or listen in a general way- trying to extract a mostly general understanding of- or response to- what, superficially, the audio or written text is all about.
Reading/ listening the students then read or listen to the text in order to complete the task that has been set, and then the teacher direct feedback. Students go through the answers in pairs or small groups. This is partly so that they get more opportunities to work together, and partly so that when the answers with the class, individual students do not get exposed as having failed at the task.
Text- related task Sometimes teacher set a set related task immediately after this type 1 task has been completed. A text-related task is any kind of follow-up activity, and might be either a more detailed response to the content or a focus on aspects of language in the text.
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