Listening, Oral Work, Reading and Writing

To teach English to children is not easy; it requires a lot of work! There could be different challenges that we have to face when we are trying to teach listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills to children. For us, there were certainly a lot of them in our teaching practicum.

The listening skill is the first one that we put into practice when teaching a new language. Children in their native language learn how to listen and understand way before how to speak, read or write. That is why is really important to start over there, but the biggest challenge that we face as EFL teachers is the frustration of not being understood by our students. If we are asking our students to do an activity, but they don't understood a thing, we can give in to the pressure and start talking in their mother tongue in order to accomplish the activity. Then, another problem appears: How are children going to say they do not understand if they don't speak the language? In this problem we can see that the skill of speaking is also challenging. Children can see a new language as something negative, something that gets you out of their comfort zone, and they are going to limit their exposure to the language.

Reading in their mother tongue represent a big challenge for kindergartners, but even a bigger one in a foreign language. How ca we expect them to read in English when they haven't learn how to do it in Spanish? It is almost the same with writing skill, how can we expect them to write in English when they haven't learn how to do it in Spanish? Children of that age have a lot to learn yet, and in fact some of us couldn't approach these skills because of the lack of previous knowledge of them.

The ideas presented in chapters 3 through 6 of the book "Teaching English to children" can teach us how to handle some of these problems. There are several activities that we can use with our pupils to exposed them to the target language and develop the four macro skills. 

As we said before, the first skill we have to begin working on with our pupils is listening. Children get excited when they listen to their teacher speaking English. When this happens, they want to know what mean what their teacher has said; they always ask the meaning of each word they listen to. Also, they say that they would like to learn English as much as they can and, later on, speak as their teacher does. We have to take advantage of this enthusiasm making them work. We can work on two skills, listening and speaking,  at the same time if we make them repeat words, phrases or sentences. With this kind of activity, they can develop the listening skill by listening their teacher speaks, but they also can develop their speaking skill by repeating words modeled by their teacher; they also develop their pronunciation repeating and repeating, and learn vocabulary. Also, it is important that when we work with listening activities, we have to use visual aids in order to our students can associate the content studied with the real world. 

Talking about the writing skill, we worked on it just a little bit because, as we explained before, they did not even know how to write in their L1. We tried to make them do letter strokes in worksheets specially designed for them, as our tutors suggested us. In the case of first grade students, work on the writing skills was a little bit easier because they knew how to write.

We consider that individual activities worked best during our teaching practicum; we all used this kind of activities. Children like to work alone, doing things by their own; that's why we took advantage of this factor made them work in this way, using their own ideas. They were concentrated in what they were doing, and they asked for help only when it was needed.  We used different materials for every single class, such as flashcards, books, worksheets, audios, puppets, etc. Those ones helped us to make our classes interesting and to get our students attention almost all the time.

Some activities that we did not use in class are:

1. Writing activities

2. Reading activities

3. Matching activities

4. Dramatizations

5. Discussions

6. Pairwork grammar activities

7. Dictations

8. Delayed copying

All the activities may work in our context, but they will depend on the level of the students. Why? They will depend on that because each one requires some vocabulary, grammar structures, pronunciation, etc. Also, some of them will depend on the amount of students we have, eg.  for pairwork activities. 

As a conclusion, we can say that we need to adapt your personality to our context and the level we teach to work on developing the macro skills of our students. We can follow several methods, approaches, techniques to make a really fruitful learning process for our students. It is up to us what we are going to do to get our goals, but what is important is do it with enthusiasm, effort, and attitude.