Productive and Receptive Skills in the ESL Classroom - Receptive Skills - Patchwork ESA
So, let's have a look at a typical receptive skills lesson. The main focus of this lesson is going to be reading, although there will be some listening involved as well and it?s going to be a patchwork ESA lesson. As a patchwork lesson, it will start off with an engage and this engage what we're going to do is to play an extract about Elvis Presley and it's going to be an Elvis Presley song and we can ask the students if they know who it is and if they know anything about him can help generate the interest in this. We can also ask them what they'd like to know about it. What we can then do is just to introduce them to the text but they're going to read the detail later on but just at this stage we'll do a quick skimming or scanning exercise to find some information from that particular text. Here it's important that that skimming or scanning exercise is at the most a couple of minutes so that we don't give them an opportunity to read every single word within the text. From that point we can then move on to our first study activity and in this particular phase of the lesson it would be useful to pre-teach some language and this will include names of things like Graceland and so on and so forth as it relates to Elvis Presley. So, do some pre-teaching of vocabulary and then do a check on understanding. Once we're sure from that study phase that they have an understanding of the vocabulary required, we're going to move on to our engage and the engage activity is going to ask them to read the first text that they have during the engage base at this time read it for comprehension. Again, before we start this activity it's very important that we do a demonstration and elicit a correct answer before giving out the material. Once they've completed the reading for comprehension then we can go on to our study which is to ask a series of comprehension questions typically by using a worksheet and again before we actually start this activity we need to demonstrate the purpose of the activity, elicit correct answers and then give out the material. Once they've completed the second study activity and we've gone through our feedback and correction, we can then go on to our first activate and what we're going to do in the first activate activity is ask them to write a short biography for Elvis. On completion of the writing phase, they can then feed that back and we can have a look at any common errors that?s created from this particular activity and study those errors. Once we've done that we can go on to the final phase of the lesson, which will be our second activate activity and that final activity we're going to put the students into pairs and we're going to ask them to write an autobiography, which doesn't contain the name of the person they're writing about. What we can then do is to get them to read out their biographies and we can ask the class to guess who.
Below you can read feedback from an ITTT graduate regarding one section of their online TEFL certification course. Each of our online courses is broken down into concise units that focus on specific areas of English language teaching. This convenient, highly structured design means that you can quickly get to grips with each section before moving onto the next.
