Teaching Receptive Skills

             Welcome back to a new blog Entry! This time we learn about teaching receptive skills.

                                                   What does teaching receptive skills mean?

You will probably remember in your first years of learning that your English teacher always brings their tape recorder everywhere for listening activities in the classroom. This is so important for the student to develop their comprehension through listening, it also can be by podcasts, music, movies, etc. 

Same as reading, students need to read so that they are able to improve their comprehension and their vocabulary, and others like communication skills. It is important that they know the differentiated instructions to meet the need of the students and in this way, you will have an impact on the learning of the students.

In each of these approaches, you will need materials, for listening the well-mentioned tape recorder, podcasts, videos, etc, and for reading you may have an easy reading, something short for better timing and comprehension, and information that can be productive and easy to soak by the student depending on their level. 

And that is a bit of what the receptive skills are about. I am pretty sure that this will help anybody to understand better and do a good job as teachers because the way you measure the success of teacher is by the progress of their students. 

Have a good time and I will see you in the upcoming Entries where we are going to develop all these activities in the classroom.

See you in a bit!!

Teaching Speaking

 Hi Guys! It has been a heavy week since I did not post anything. To be honest, I have involved myself in many responsibilities that I could not foresee the impact on a daily basis. But anyways, here I am to explain a bit about Teaching Speaking.

As natural speakers, we have three dimensions at the time of it for instance:

- Transactional or Interpersonal

- Interactive or Non-interactive

-  Planned or Unplanned

The speaking will be influenced by our environment and that is the conversation type we will have. For example, when I find my friend on the street it will not be a transactional o formal conversation, all the opposite. It will be the same as speaking with the President, it will not be a friend-to-friend conversation. Now, how is it in the classroom?

In a Classroom will be more common to make use of Role-plays. Not the only one but it is practical for students and easy to recreate by the teacher, and easy to understand by the students. Here students can practice their pronunciation and confidence in speaking with a friend or many of them. We can add other approaches such as grammar or vocabulary by speaking about something specific, it means, I can ask a simple question such as "What types of cars can you see on the street?" by asking this question we are asked to answer with a specific vocabulary and subsequently practicing the pronunciation for car brands. 

A new technique we learned was Jazz Chants, have you ever heard about it? 

It was created by Carolyn Graham who had the inspiration after listening to people on the streets playing jazz and practicing a bit herself. 

If you are curious about it I suggest you get more info but... In a nutshell, it is about following a certain rhythm, the rhythm of Jazz, and explaining that the English language follows these 4-period rhythms where you practice your pronunciation and I dare to say your intonation too. 

As part of the activities, we created a Chant by giving a sentence. It was fun and interesting to apply in future classes. So, it will be all so far and I hope we keep on track for the last weeks of classes. 

See you next Entry!

Body language & coordination, and improvisation

This class was another day of practice and how to become a better teacher by knowing what they are willing to do in order to be great in their field. 

We started with a keeping focus activity. For this, we did two rows where we had a classmate face-to-face so we could be serious for a minute. It was very hard, especially with that friend of yours, but I did it. Following that activity we did something similar and we walked around without losing eye contact with the person. 

Next. We had to express emotions. I can say it was a really good activity to get out of their comfort zone, especially for those who are very shy and afraid of being in front of others. 

Here we walked and pretended to be models and kind of flirted with our mates using our faces. Unfortunately, I did not have videos or pictures of it, because you would have liked too much. Well, just the following...

In the last part of the class we acted out a movie scene that another group chose for us, and so did we. It was a challenge. I had watched Shreck many times but I have never memorized dialogues from the movie. But I can say it ended very well. 

All my classmates participated in it. Also, there was another where we acted in silence. At that moment we had to improvise a scene depending on the background music we had given by our classmates. I believe ours was the best, far from reality but still nice!!. I will share one of our classmate's scenes for you to have an idea of what it was about.

And finally, I will share a Jonathan of Luck for the next class>

See you in the next ENTRY!!

Voice Projection

 This week we had an interesting topic that I did not know teachers were taught with. In order to know more just join me next so you also know what this is about.

Voice projection is the strength of speaking. Thanks to this teachers are able to speak out loud clearly. So, it all starts from the expansion in the diaphragm where we accumulate air and use that same air to produce strength in the vocal tract that generates a strong voice without hurting your throat. 

We had some fun and useful practice with the whole classroom in order to work out our voice projection. Before this, we watched a video explaining the commercial voice which are>

* Organizational 

* Sales

* Natural

It is very hard to highlight the differences between practice but theoretically is

- Organizatinal. Mostly used for formal conferences or ads on TV. It is neutral and conveys formality.

- Sales. This is a bit more interactive with the voice and you sound more catchy for you to grab the listener's attention and sound persuasive.

- Natural. For some is harder to reach this tone, but the fast way to explain is that you sound with intonation and make it the most natural possible to one's ear.

Our classmate Nidia works on the radio every morning and has experience with voice projection. Fortunately, she was giving some tips on the best use of our voice and taking advantage of it. 

Besides that, We had some practice where we made two rows one in front of the other we had a conversation, but the teacher will say "move" and we must have step back to continue the conversation, so in this way, we could have a good voice projection.

But the most fun is that we had to imitate "female", "infant", and "male" voices as part of the practice of imitation too. Even we pretended we were top models and kind of flirt using expressions. It was good for confidence exercises. 

It was pretty much it this week. In the next one, we will practice a movie scene and have a pantomime scene too. stay safe and aware of the next Entry!!