skkn HOW TO TEACH ENGLISH TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS COMMUNICATIVELY AND EFFECTIVELY

REASONS AND AIMS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH: In most English classes, teachers tend to overuse either English, which makes it difficult for slow students to understand, or Vietnamese, whi

HOW TO TEACH ENGLISH TO HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

COMMUNICATIVELY AND EFFECTIVELY

I REASONS AND AIMS FOR CHOOSING THE RESEARCH:

In most English classes, teachers tend to overuse either English, which makes it difficult for slow students to understand, or Vietnamese, which may distract students from learning the language To avoid this dilemma, teachers should be able to know how to use English properly, and adequately to teach their students

It is commonly known that most students are eager to learn English if their teachers use a good, “easy” English to teach them and this also makes them feel interested in learning the language From my experience, gathered from reading books and observing what my colleagues did, the following approaches are found to be really helpful for language teacher in this case Besides, the new series of textbooks presently used in Vietnamese high school are designed in view of communicative language teaching method Therefore, this writing is involved the comment on bottom-up and top-down strategies and the connection between these strategies and pair work and group-work tasks

In gerneral, the aim of this study is to encourage teachers and students to use as much English in the classroom as possible to communicate with each other Therefore, this writing introduce “How to teach English to high school students communicatively and effectively” This concerns with the teachers’ skills at employing pairwork and groupwork activities in the classroom In other words, the teachers should know how to organize pair and group work effectively and how to deal with initial problems that may arise

II BACKGROUND:

1 Pairwork and groupwork:

Foreign language learners, especially high school students are often shy, and find it hard to express themselves in the language in front of the public at the beginning stage Hence, the role of the language teachers is to make their students get used to the language and feel confident in using the language In this case, pair/group work activities do help as Ur (Ur 1998: 210) suggested

 Advantages, disadvantages :

For certain types of activity, pairwork and groupwork have number of advantages over working with the whole class together Teachers should be aware

of the advantages, the problems to find the solutions to these problems

Here are some main advantages and problems:

Advantages Problems

More language practice

Students are more involved

Students feel secure, confident

Students help one another

Save time

Noise Students make mistakes Difficult to control

………

2 Bottom-up and top-down strategies:

What are bottom-up and top-down strategies? As Harmer mentioned, “In top – down processing reader or listener gets a general view of the listening or reading passage by, in some way, absorbing the overall view of the picture” and

“in bottom-up processing, the reader or listener focuses on individual words and phrases and achieves understanding by stringing these detailed elements together to build up a whole” (Harmer 2001 p: 201) This is to say that top - down is the process in which students use their schematic knowledge to access

to the topic of the passage, and bottom – up is the process in which students use

their knowledge of language to explore the passage to have detailed ideas of the text

III PARTICIPANTS AND METHODS:

This research was applied to three classes of tenth graders ranging from fourteen to fifteen years old (10C1, 10C2, 10C3) Each class contains forty five

to fifty participants who are of mixed genders and language ability In terms of language competence, most of them might be considered as pre-intermediate students The methods used to conduct the study include:

- Observation

- Journal

- Dialogue

IV CONTENT AND APPLICATION:

1 A combination of the two strategies in teaching reading and listening:

Like other teachers, I had an experience of using both of these strategies, but separately, to teach receptive skills, i.e reading and listening skills Then I found that my students did not understand the topic clearly For example, when

I taught them the reading about “science “, I applied the top – down approach to one class and bottom – up approach to another class And then the results I got were unsatisfactory The students in the first class seemed not to know much about the “science world”, and the students in the other class just knew something about the vocabulary, but not the whole text However, after reading books and observing what some of my colleagues did in their teaching, I realized that we could make a language class become more interesting and effective by putting these two approaches together I also met this point of view

in Harmer’s book in which he pointed out, “ it is probably most useful to see acts of reading and listening as interaction between top-down and bottom-up processing” (Harmer 2001 : 201) Following are two suggestions of using the strategies in teaching listening and reading skills

1.1 The strategies in teaching listening:

Top-down processing

Expectations based on discourse and sociocultural

Expectations based

on prior knowledge

(content schemata)

Expectations based

on the assessment of context

Metacognition Interpretation of

spoken discourse (input)

Listening Strategies

Language knowledge (phonology vocabulary, grammar,)

Pragmatic

s

Bottom-up processing

1.2 The strategies in teaching reading

Expectations based

on discourse and sociocultural knowledge

(formal schemata)

Expectations based

on prior knowledge

(content schemata)

Expectations based on the assessment of context

Metacognition Interpretation of

spoken discourse (input)

Listening Strategies

Language knowledge (phonology vocabulary, grammar,)

Pragmatics

Top-down processing

Bottom-up processing

2 Organizing pairwork and groupwork:

The success of group or pair work depends on some extents, i.e the surrounding social climate, how habituated the class is to using it, the selection of

an interesting and stimulating task whose performance is well done within the ability of the group or pair, and especially effective and careful organization

2.1 Giving instructions:

The instructions that are given at the beginning are crucial If the students do not understand exactly what they have to do, there will be wate of time, confusion, lack of effective practice, or even possible loss of control Therefore, the teacher should select tasks that are simple enough to describe easily; and in monolingual classes, you may find it cost-effective to explain some or all in the mother tongue However, it is advisable to give the instructions communicatively rather than mere explanation before delivering materials or building groups And a preliminary rehearsal or ‘dry run’ of a sample of the activity with the full class can help to clarify things If your students have already done similar activities, you will be able

to shorten the process, giving only brief guidelines; It is mainly the first time of doing something with a class that such care needs to be invested in instructing

Try to foresee what language will be needed, and have a preliminary quick review of appropriate grammar or vocabulary Finally before giving the sign to start, the teacher should tell the class if there is a time limit, or a set signal for stopping, and say what it is If the students simply stop when they have finished the task, then tell them what they will have to do next It is wise to have a reserve task planned to occupy members of groups who finish earlier than expected

2.2 Process:

Teacher goes from group to group or pair to pair, to monitor, and either to contribute or to keep out of the way whichever is likely to be more helpful If you

do decide to intervene, you may provide general approval and support; help students who are having difficultly; keep the students using the target language; or tactfully regulate participation in a discussion where you find some students are over dominant and others are silent

2.3 Ending the task:

Draw the activity to a close at a certain point Try to finish the activity while the students are still enjoying it and interested, or only just beginning to flag

2.4 Feedback:

A feedback session usually takes place in the context of full-class interaction after the end of the group work Feedback on the tasks may take such forms as giving the right solution, if there is one, listening to and evaluating suggestions, pooling ideas on the board, displaying the meterials the groups/ pairs have produced The main objective here is to express appreciation of the effort that has been invested and its results Feedback on language may be integrated into this discussion of the task, or provide the focus of a separate class session later

3 The connection between the strategies and pair-work/group-work activities:

In terms of students’ point of views and communicative language teaching method, I have discovered that bottom-up and top-down approaches together help learners much more in learning the language if teachers link these approaches with pair-work and group-work activities In this case, students will find themselves free to talk and to communicate with one another in their own language, and they may also feel it interesting to put their heads together and try

to explore the reading text or the listening passage Accordingly, the students will become more active and confident to express their ideas, and this is one of the

goals of a language class Let us consider the following experiences as examples

of the application in the classroom

4 Application in the classroom:

4.1 Pair-work and group work in teaching grammar:

In order to teach the structure “used to /didn’t use to + inf” (Unit 4 English

10, part E language focus, exercise 2), we may do as following:

Exercise 2: Work in pairs, ask what your friends used to do and didn’t use to

do (Ask about food, sport, music, school, subject …… )

- Explain the structure by giving an example:

Ex: Tom often came to class late but now he doesn’t any longer

- Ask if there is anyone can express the sentence in another way

Teacher: Now, the whole class, who can put this sentence in another way? Just speak out

Students: …… (silent)

Teacher: Ok, now discuss with your friends beside you for one minute……

- Ask some group representative speak out their answers

- Give comment and correction (if needed)

Teacher: we can say “ Tom used to come to class late”

Teacher: Mai, what does “used to” mean?

- Follow the previous steps

- Help the students to understand the structure if their answers are wrong In this case the students can have chance to communicate with their friend freely in the language

Teacher: Now you are going to talk about things you used to do and things you didn’t use to do Look at the exercise What question can you ask?

Teacher: First, about food What food did you use to eat for breakfast when you were small, Hoa?

Hoa: I used to eat ……

- Teacher writes the basic question on the board:

What (food) did you use to eat?

- Teacher asks a few questions round the class to show the kind of conversation students might have:

Teacher: What kind of music did you use to listen, Huong?

Student: I used to listen to pop music

Teacher: Pop music? when did you use to listen to it?

( And so on with some others)

- Teacher may ask two students to have similar conversations, while the others listen

Teacher: Now, The first, third and fifth row turn back Ok, you are going to work

in pairs, talking to the one oposite you Ready? Ask and answer the questions (in the exercise) First, one person asks, the other answer (about all the topics) then change the role Start now

- Teacher moves quickly round the class, checking that everyone is talking (but do not try to correct mistakes, as this will interrupt the activity)

- When most pairs have finished, stop the activity Ask a few students what their partners said:

Teacher : Now, stop talking Mai, tell me about Huong What did she used to do? Student : She says she used to eat ice cream, listen to pop music and swim in the afternoon , she liked meat but she didn’t use to eat it

- Teacher gives feedback:

- Well done……

4.2 Bottom-up and top-down in connection with pair-work and group-work

in teaching listening and reading:

As shown in the charts (page 2 and 3), it is clear that teachers have to design tasks or questions which provide the students with schemata knowledge as well as details to help students comprehend the required texts fully For example, when I taught the listening lesson of Unit 1 in English textbook 10 (page 16), I conducted the lesson as following steps

First, in before-listening stage, I made use of top-down approach by making a general statement about the text “today we are going to listen to a short talk of a cyclo driver, Mr Lam, about his daily routine” This provides the students with “background” or “prior knowledge” of the text To some extent, they might have expectations as to what to listen to in the tape Then I asked the students to answer the following questions in groups to give them a chance to express their ideas as well as practice using the language and talking about the topic freely:

as you can

In the next stages, the students were asked to listen to the tape and do the True/False task and Gap Filling task which are involved in the application of bottom-up approach In this case, the students were asked to explore the text in a more detailed way

Another example to illustrate the use of these strategies in the classroom is related to the reading text of Unit 9 “undersea world” (English textbook 10) The steps to carry out the lesson are described as following

First, in while-reading stage, students were asked to read the whole text once quickly and answer the question “what is the main idea of the passage?” If

it is taught to students who are not quite good at English, this can be altered by a multiple choice question (MCQ) of the same content or “underline the sentences that show the main idea of the text?” In addition, the students were also asked to find out the main idea of each paragraph These questions, which are clearly based on top-down approach, gave the students a general picture of the text