1.

In a listening activity how many times do students need to hear the same recorded material
and why?
There are several listening activities for students in class. However it is good for students to
listen to other voices. This can be done with audio recording into the classroom. Some examples
are:
 Recordings taped from the radio and played on the tape recorder;
 Songs played on a tape recorder or CD player;
 Songs played on an MP3/4 player or mobile phone;
 Audio recordings made by teachers, students or other people by a mobile phone;
 Audio books played on a CD player or downloaded to a laptop or MP3 player.
Students should be allowed to listen to the same recorded material more than once if
they struggle. A good listening activity consists of three stages: pre-listening, while-
listening and post-listening (Wilson, 2008). In pre-listening, the teacher prepares the
students for what they will hear (Hurd & Lewis, 2008). According to Houston (2016), the
pre-listening stage should not be too long; about 10 to 15 minutes at the most. The next
stage, while–listening, is the stage where the students listen to the recording and
complete a task. Karimi and Dowlatabadi (2014) suggest that the teacher play the
recording a few times and assign a different task each time. The last stage, post-listening,
is a stage where students are given feed-back from the teacher. According to Alonso
(2012), post-listening benefits the teacher because he or she can analyze specific
difficulties faced by the students. Whichever activity the teacher chooses to practice
receptive skills with the students, he/she has to be sure to give them multiple
opportunities to read or listen, so they can practice without anxiety.

2. Discuss the roles of the teacher in intensive listening activities.

Intensive listening – in class, requires focus and work on tasks to find answers or do follow-up work.
Listening is an active process requiring participation on the part of the listener. Poor understanding
results when listeners do not pay attention. We need to build up students' confidence by helping them
listen better, rather than by testing their listening abilities. We also need to acknowledge the students'
difficulties and suggest ways out of them. Some of the roles of the teacher in intensive listening activities
are:

 Organiser: we need to tell students exactly what their listening purpose is and give them clear
instructions about how to achieve it. One of our chief responsibilities will be to build their
confidence through offering tasks that are achievable and texts that are comprehensible.
 Machine operator: when we use audio material, we need to be as efficient as possible in the way
we use the audio player. Testing the recording out before taking it into class so that we do not
waste time trying to make the right decisions or trying to make things work when we get there.
We should take decisions about where we can stop the recording for particular questions and
exercises, but, once in class, we should be prepared to respond to the students' needs in the way
we stop and start the machine.
  Feedback organiser: when our students have completed the task, we should lead a feedback
session to check that they have completed it successfully. We may start by having them compare
their answers in pairs and then ask for answers from the class in general or from pairs in
particular. It is important to be supportive when organising feedback after a listening if we are to
counter any negative expectations students might have, and if we wish to sustain their
motivation.
 Prompter: when students have listened to a recording for comprehension purposes, we can
prompt them to listen to it again in order to notice a variety of language and spoken features.

3. What pro-active listening strategies do you as a language learner use

I try to use as much as I can several strategies as a language learner:
 Predicting content- I try to predict the kind of words and style of language the speaker will use.
Knowledge of the world helps me anticipate the kind of information I am likely to hear.
Moreover, when I predict the topic of a talk or a conversation, all the related vocabulary stored
in my brain is 'activated' to help me better understand what I am listening to.
 Listening for gist- content words (the nouns, adjectives and verbs) help me a lot.
 Detecting signposts -Those words, which link ideas, help me to understand what the speaker is
talking about. They're particularly important in presentations and lectures.
 Listening for details -When I am listening for details, I am interested in a specific kind of
information – perhaps a number, name or object. I am trying to ignore anything that does not
sound relevant. In this way, I can narrow down my search and get the detail I need.
 Inferring meaning –using clues and prior knowledge about a situation to work out the meaning
of what I hear.
Active listening is a cognitive process involving an array of intellectual behaviors. While
listening to teachers, students have to use cognitive strategies such as paying attention,
taking notes, making associations and analogies, asking questions, integrating
information and making inferences seeking the main idea, and setting objectives for
listening.

4. Choose a listening activity from a coursebook and explain how you are going to use it in
class.
Here are the steps that I will follow for the listening lesson plan in the class:

 Set the context This introduces the theme of my listening topic, which is travel, I can ask
students what are 5 things that people do while they’re spending time waiting at an airport. It’s
best to have students discuss the question for a couple of minutes with their partner and then
elicit some answers from the class.

 Pre-listening task – I will need to assign students a pre-reading task.This could be prediction
tasks which lead to the next step. The topic can be “problems while travelling”. I will have
students think of 5 common travel problems with a partner. I will elicit some answers and will
write them on the board.
  Listening -The students listen for the overall picture the first time. I can have them see if their
prediction were true. Students can compare answers with a partner and then I will go over them
together with the class. I can give students some more difficult comprehension questions, they’ll
listen again, and check answers with a partner and then with the class.

 Pronunciation- If there are some words that are difficult to pronounce, or students particularly
struggle with this, I may want to focus a little bit on pronunciation.

 Application- Students will have to apply the concepts from listening to their own lives in order to
make it more memorable.

 Follow up- I will ask students to do a presentation related to the listening passage.

5. What are some reading strategies that are useful to teach to pre-intermediate to advanced (even
fluent) readers of English?
To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies
of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting,
summarizing, and visualizing-organizing.

6. What are some possible ways to sequence the activities in a reading lesson
Sequencing is an essential reading skill that students must develop if they are to fully understand all
reading material. Identifying sequence in a text involves identifying the beginning, the middle, and the
end. One of the easiest ways to recognize the order of events is to look out for the sequencing words or
transitions that are used to connect the various parts of the text. Some of these words and phrases also
act as signals to provide an indication of whether the event will be located in the beginning, in the
middle, or toward the end of the text’s chronology. Graphic organizer can be used for sequencing-
graphic organizers are a great way to help students arrange their thoughts more efficiently in a range of
areas. There are a number of different graphic organizers. A few more activities can be helpful for
students in their reading:
 Order out of Chaos- In this activity the teacher divides the class up into small groups of three
or four. Then gives each a copy of a short story. The short stories should be cut up into
paragraphs. In their groups children reassemble the story according to how the think
chronology should be. If all groups use the same story, the class can then compare their
choices at the end. If each group has a different story, they can read their story to the other
groups at the end and explain reasons for their decisions;
 Spot the sequence- the teacher needs to encourage students to ask themselves: What
happened first, second, third? What happened before or after a specific event or step? What
happened in the end?

7. What is extensive reading is and what are its benefits?

Extensive reading is a language teaching procedure where learners are supposed to read large quantities
of material or long texts for global understanding, the principal goal being obtaining pleasure from the
text (Bamford). The reading is individualized, what means that students choose books they want to read,
they read it independently of the teacher and they are not required to do any tasks after reading.
Bamford states that students who read more will not only become better and more confident readers,
but they will also improve their reading, writing, listening and speaking abilities and their vocabularies
will get richer (Bamford, Extensive Reading Activities 1). Bamford praises the motivation aspect of
Extensive reading, seeing its primal benefit in developing positive attitudes toward the foreign language
and increased motivation to study this language.
Other benefits are: Students read a lot and read often.; There is a wide variety of text types and topics to
choose from.; The texts are not just interesting: they are engaging/ compelling.; Students choose what to
read.; Reading purposes focus on: pleasure, information and general understanding.; Reading is its own
reward.; There are no tests, no exercises, no questions and no dictionaries.; Materials are within the
language competence of the students.; Reading is individual, and silent.; Speed is faster, not deliberate
and slow.; The teacher explains the goals and procedures clearly, then monitors and guides the
students.; The teacher is a role model…a reader, who participates along with the students.

8.Explain some of the problems with reading texts aloud in class.

Some of the problems with reading texts aloud in class are:
 Reading aloud is not natural.
 There is a very low student participation in this activity. Commonly one student reads and the
others listen. When one student reads the others simply don’t listen.
 Some students read badly and slowly but thus they set a bad example for others.
 Students need to understand the text. The comprehension is much more important than the
ability to read the text aloud.
 Repetition. To be able to read a text fluently and understand it well students need to re- read the
same text several times. And if the text is interesting they are bored as soon as they start to read
the text the second time. If they are bored they do not pay attention and if they do not pay
attention they don’t learn.
 Reading aloud is time-consuming. A short text takes about one minute to read for each student
and moreover the teacher need to correct and thus each students spends two minutes reading.
It is a lot of time that could have been used better.
 Noticing the language. Many textbooks use short texts to introduce some grammar. Students are
expected to notice these grammar, points and deduce the correct grammar rules from them. But
it hardly even happens. Students need to read the same text again and again to notice the
grammar.
 Confusing spelling: Words in English are not necessarily pronounced like they are spelled.
(Though, thought, through; etc.)
 Risk of saying it wrong
 Not engaged with the content: The sound and the content go together. If you don’t know what
you’re saying, it won’t sound good. That’s why it’s impossible to pick up a text and start reading
it if you want to sound natural. You have to know what you’re saying before the words start
coming out of your mouth.