Speaking, listening, writing and reading are the four language skills that determine a person’s capability at utilizing a language. When writing a lesson plan and preparing for a class, always keep in mind that you should aim to incorporate at least 3 of the 4 language skills in that class.
Speaking
Speaking is our primary way of communicating. This language skill is the most important of the four. It´s vital to ensure that every student if offered an equal amount of time to speak in each class. Speaking can be utilized through monologues, dialogues, describing, creating and answering questions. Speaking should be allocated the most amount of time within the class. Just always make sure that the students are doing most of the speaking and not you! Throughout the class, you should aim for at least a 60-40 student-teacher speaking ratio. Towards the end of your class when you undertake monologues and dialogues, you should aim for a 100-0 student-teacher speaking ratio.
Listening
Using film and music during class is a great way to practice the students’ listening skills, but we shall go into more detail on how to use film and music in a later chapter. Listening is best utilized whilst one student is speaking or completing an activity so that the other students have something to do.
Reading
We already looked into why reading is so important and how to teach a reading class. However, there is another reason why reading is very important. A teacher is only as good as their students’ parents believe they are. When a parent who doesn’t speak English wants to analyze their child’s ability and progress, all they can do is open an English book and ask their child to read a passage from it. Depending on how well they read, the parent will judge your teaching ability – and depending on how the parents judge and regard you, your school will also base their judgement of your teaching skills. If your students are amazing at listening and speaking but can’t read very well, the parents who don´t speak English will believe that you’re a bad teacher and their student simply isn’t progressing well enough. They will inevitably complain to the managers about you and then you will certainly have a problem. So for this reason if you have four classes a month with your students, allocate at least one of these classes to reading; if you have 8 classes a month then allocate two classes a month to reading etc.
Writing
With young beginners and little pre-school students, start with the basics. Focus on the alphabet and getting the students to progress from tracing letters to freestyle handwriting. Get little children to practice recognizing letters. This can be done by filling out worksheets such as connect the dots or a maze/labyrinth style worksheet where students must connect the letters of the alphabet in order to get out of the maze. Once students are familiar with letters, progress to words and sentences. Follow the same procedure as letters: first, get them to trace the words and sentences and then progressively in time get them to write sentences free hand.
Use the last 10 to 15 minutes to do writing because this is the point in the class where children are the most restless. By using this time of the lesson to write, the children are seated and calm. While your students are working, go to each student and get them to practice reading what it is they’re tracing/writing.
It’s important to add that even if your students haven’t progressed to writing and reading words, you should always ensure that they can write their name. Start this from day 1 with them by just helping them to spell their name and say it. By doing this at the start of every class, the students will begin to recognize the letters used to spell their name and the order in which they appear; and after a month or so they will be able to spell their own name.
For higher-level students, writing becomes a far more integral part of their learning. Similarly to younger students, writing can be focused on by using a worksheet towards the end of the class that reflects and summarizes the content you have taught during that class.
In addition, whilst you should still incorporate writing by using worksheets (in class and/or as homework), you should start to condition your students to write throughout the class. For example, if you need to quickly elicit a few verbs, firstly put the students into teams and challenge the teams to write as many verbs as they can. Alternatively, you can get your pupils to do a relay race in which one by one they run to the whiteboard, write a verb, run back to their team and high five the next person who runs to the whiteboard writes a verb and runs back to the team – the first team to finish wins. By doing these little exercises, the students are constantly practising their writing skills.
For really advanced students, you should begin to get them to write short length stories incorporating a beginning, middle and end. We shall look into this in more detail in the storytelling chapter.
