Teach English in MajiAng Zhen - Zhuzhou Shi

There are four recognized disciplines associated with the teaching of a second language. In my case, this is English, but the principle can be applied to the majority of second language learning/teaching. These are listening, speaking, reading and writing, and all of them relate to the everyday use and acquisition of language. Insofar as a second language is concerned, the terms macro or integrated skills are often interchangeable when describing this particular learning methodology which holds each as valuable and important as each other. Speaking and writing are known as productive skills and reading and listening as receptive skills. Having myself just moved to another European Country from the United Kingdom, knowing a few phrases would appear to be enough to get by, but the real challenge is to start to be able to understand what is being said back to me. There are two main methods of instruction and alongside it is a wealth of material available to use to support the teacher which will benefit the students. In content-based teaching, they will be encouraged to learn in a teacher-guided but student-led communication process where they will be learning a complicated subject such as a social science at the same time and is recognised as a highly effective method, but it will be important for the teacher to choose the appropriate material for the proficiency level of their students. Currently, there are three models related to the topic of content-based learning with the aim of bringing all four disciplines into the study of a specific topic often drawn from a broad range, but whatever is chosen, from a linguistic point of view it must be able to cover a full range of skills, looking to develop a high level of grammatical difficulty, vocabulary and complex verb construction, such as past simple or conditional tenses and modal verbs. However, the aim is always toward communication and although the two can be split and separately taught, the theme will always need to be appropriate to the student level of capability. In the teaching of business English for example, the language of communication is too central and fundamental for it not to be integrated as a given. Its sister method involves an activity, the purpose of which is to naturally draw the language from a specifically defined task, so that in the case of a problem-solving task, for example, the words, phrases, and verbs are directly linked to solving it are learned at the same time although some of the grammar may be incorrect as the principle is towards a correct meaning rather than a perfect structure. In recent years this approach has made positive inroads within the sphere of the subject of teaching across the board in general, not just in the instruction of TEFL and one of the important discoveries that have been made is the importance of group and pair work as these methods increase student interaction time, and can be a factor in their enthusiasm to take on more complex tasks, such as writing a TV advert or acting out scenes from a play. To ensure that language skills can be integrated successfully into TEFL lessons, or progressive functional skill Integration as it has become known, the teacher should consider how many ways this can be encouraged in the classroom. In order to lay the foundation for this to be successful, the teacher will need to make an evaluation of the class by testing what the current level of integration is. Then, the choice of material will need to be of nature where all four disciplines are promoted equally through their association with the required vocabulary and how to arrange them in the correct syntactic manner. As these four skills are all part of the how language is used on a daily basis, the key appears to be to find an effective way to allow them to develop at the same time, and although a lesson may only be focusing on one, bringing other tasks related to the subject. Studying history, for example, could integrate a short biography of a famous figure, and some reading and research can then be part of the main video lesson. Once a good strategy has been established it can be adapted to include even more useful elements. One successful method is called Focal Skills and is essentially a method of screening out students with a weakness in one of the four disciplines. So the learners take a listening test and those who grade below Intermediate are placed in a listening group, the rest to Reading. For example, a student should have good listening comprehension skills before working on the other three, and so forth. However, it is generally accepted that spoken English must be encouraged throughout the process, the theory is that the students work on their weaknesses from a position of strength. There is a structure to the strategy of focus skills agreed as Listening, Reading, Writing and Advanced; the placement tests are Listening, Reading and Writing. Stephen Krashen uses the term affective filter to refers to negative factors that may get in the way of their overall comprehension and understanding, and these include boredom, being anxious, or their mood at the time. So the use of this particular approach is not to put the students under pressure and they are not generally tested on the subject they're studying at the time. They are under no obligation if they decide they don't want to do it, and they can just listen to teachers interacting with the group playing or watching authentic material, and if the learner is not ready to move on then they can remain at that level until they are demonstrably ready to move on. There is an opinion that the proficiency of students learning English as a foreign language is less than desirable because of outdated methodologies and that a more natural approach to the TEFL is needed as these are not entirely working and are the reason for such apparently poor results. Modern approaches would seem to be encouraging teachers to be more facilitators than fonts of unarguable wisdom, and as a result, many linguists feel that these are no longer the best ways to acquire a language and be successful in using it.