A CELTA TEACHER’S PERSPECTIVE ON CRITICAL THINKING TO DEVELOP WRITING SKILLS by Özlem Zengin
Since I first started teaching in the beginning of the academic year, I have observed that one of the most obvious challenges students have is developing their writing skills. Writing plays a crucial role in second language learning since it is through writing that the learners can get solid feedback on their progress. According to William Zinsser (1998), writing is “thinking on paper” and good writing must be based on good thinking. For the rest, click here.
Thoughts on the receptive skills
Receptive skills are our focus for the first course and we'd like to hear your views on teaching reading and listening. These are two skills that both pose similar challenges for the teacher (and the learner). They are both 'covert' and therefore hidden from the teacher's gaze. And one of the challenges is to try to get inside learners' heads to understand what they are doing when they read or listen. Another is whether we can impact on these internal processes to make learners read or listen more effectively. The questions of the helpfulness of strategy training for learners and what should we consider when teaching strategy are also at the fore.
Lots of questions, we know. Let's start the ball rolling with this one, what do you feel are the biggest challenges you face when teaching reading and listening? And, what steps do you take to overcome these challenges? Feel free to bring in any of the above issues (and others) in your post.
If you'd like to watch something to get you thinking, here's a clip or two focusing on listening.
Lots of questions, we know. Let's start the ball rolling with this one, what do you feel are the biggest challenges you face when teaching reading and listening? And, what steps do you take to overcome these challenges? Feel free to bring in any of the above issues (and others) in your post.
If you'd like to watch something to get you thinking, here's a clip or two focusing on listening.
And here are a couple focusing on reading strategies, both of which gives ideas for dealing with unknown vocab
Guest Contribution on Listening
A FRESH LOOK AT LISTENING Şule Aslan, BUSEL.
Listening is one of the most challenging skills, both to teach and to learn. Every student in my class had difficulty with listening and they could not go beyond answering comprehension questions or filling in the blanks. As there are no rules, as in grammar, or any ‘redos’ as in other language skills (i.e. re-reading or re-writing), they find listening especially frustrating. They never paid much attention to either pre- or post-activities, but focused only on while-listening tasks. They always felt nervous, fearful, and pessimistic, as if the listening tasks were testing their knowledge and they were being graded. Click here to read on
Listening is one of the most challenging skills, both to teach and to learn. Every student in my class had difficulty with listening and they could not go beyond answering comprehension questions or filling in the blanks. As there are no rules, as in grammar, or any ‘redos’ as in other language skills (i.e. re-reading or re-writing), they find listening especially frustrating. They never paid much attention to either pre- or post-activities, but focused only on while-listening tasks. They always felt nervous, fearful, and pessimistic, as if the listening tasks were testing their knowledge and they were being graded. Click here to read on
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