Teaching Skills Lessons: Why Every Lesson is Not About Grammar or Vocabulary
Show Notes
In this week's episode, we're doing an in-depth review of teaching skills lessons, starting with how they differ from systems (grammar and vocabulary) lessons. It's tempting to think that every lesson should involve teaching students new words and grammatical structures, but it's equally important to focus on developing students' skills: reading and listening comprehension and speaking and writing fluency. So we're discussing exactly what makes skills lessons different from systems lessons, and giving you practical strategies for how to plan and deliver different types of skills lessons for your classroom.
In This Episode
How skills are different from systems: how to distinguish them
Receptive Skills vs. Productive Skills
The receptive skills: reading and listening, which involve comprehending a written or audio text
A reference to our previous episodes on teaching a reading or a listening lesson for more information
Why the texts students read or listen to should be similar to texts they’d encounter in their daily lives
Why it’s important to give students a task before they read or listen
An example of a reading text and a task you could assign students to help them focus their reading
The structure of reading and listening lessons (they follow the same stages)
Starting with a more general reading or listening task before moving on to a task that requires a closer read/ listen
The productive skills: speaking and writing, which involve producing a written text or practicing speaking fluency
A reference to our previous episodes on teaching a speaking or a writing lesson for more information
Skills that Work Together
Putting a productive task at the end of a receptive skills (reading or listening) lesson
How to choose an appropriate productive task for a reading or listening lesson (it depends on the text students read/ listened to)
How receptive skills work comes into play in a productive (speaking or writing) lesson
An example of a receptive (reading) task in a writing lesson: having students read an example of a travel blog for gist before writing one
An example of a receptive (listening) task in a speaking lesson: having students listen to a demo of the speaking task before they do the task
Why combining different skills work is authentic: we don’t usually practice individual skills in isolation in real life
Why the focus and main aim of the lesson determines how much time should be spent on which skill
Bringing Systems into Skills Lessons
Why systems lessons are often referred to as “language” lessons
Why systems should never become the main focus in a skills lesson
Integrating vocabulary work in a receptive skills lesson: a vocabulary pre-teach
The difference between a vocab pre-teach in a receptive skills lesson and a whole vocabulary lesson
How to determine whether vocabulary is “blocking” in a receptive skills lesson
Why you shouldn’t try to pre-teach every word in the text
Doing a “useful language input” in a speaking or writing lesson
An example of what useful language would look like in a writing lesson about a travel blog
Dealing with Errors in Skills Lessons
Monitoring and noting errors for a delayed correction stage
Determining when to correct on the spot and when to wait until later
How a fluency focus differs from an accuracy focus in a lesson
Dealing with errors you don’t know how to explain
Giving students suggestions for higher-level language as opposed to only correcting errors