640923-03-5048/Wan Zubaidah A.

Rahman/HBET3503

Question 1

1.1 Introduction

It may seem rather odd to consider teaching listening separately from speaking
as these two skills are “two sides of the same coin’; they are typically utilised together
in oral interaction. However, there are occasions, such as listening to the radio, the
lectures, or to announcements at the airport, when no speaking is required.
I have selected a sample of teaching listening and speaking in a website. Refer
the web site in Appendix 1. The target group is the intermediate level of students in
Year 1 of primary school. The process of teaching is the top-down processing. It
refers to the use of background knowledge understanding the meaning of a message.
The background knowledge for top-down processing may be previous knowledge
about the topic of discourse, situational or contextual knowledge, knowledge in the
form of schemata or scripts, plans about the overall structure of events and the
relationships between them.

2.1.1 The Evaluation of The Selected Lessons

Telling stories is an everyday affair. Pupils come to school with stories to tell
their friends – what they did yesterday, what their parents told them and what they
saw on television. Teachers should exploit this in helping students to acquire
language. Vocabulary can be expanded if the lesson is properly plan. Thinking skills
can be practised and oral fluency enhanced when a consistent effort is made to
enhance pupils’ story telling skills. In order to teach listening and speaking skills, we
have to plan the lessons. An effective teacher is a teacher who knows what s/he wants
or is supposed to teach and how best to go about it. The selected lesson has the
curriculum specifications and the instructional objectives. The skills taught in the
lesson is listening, speaking and writing as well. The instructional objective is for the
pupils to listen and to understand the story, Both objectives are suitable for the
lessons.
The lesson spent about one hour. The duration is enough for activities
listening and speaking. The students seemed to be ready during the pre-listening. The
activity was quite interesting. The teacher asked the way she told the story and asked
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the students to comment. The pupils are quite fluent in English compared to our
students. The book the teacher used to tell was not really a big book. She should used
more larger book, with a big picture and big letters because the students are in Year
One. The main purpose of the pre-listening stage is to focus the listener’s attention on
what s/he is going to hear. The activity did by the teacher was attracted by the
students because of the way she told the story in a very fast speech. One of the factors
affecting the choice of pre-listening activities is students are required to give short
answers or produce complete sentences. There were two students commenting the
way of telling the story better. The other factor that was fulfilled was the students’
attention was kept focused. During the pre listening, the teacher told the students what
they would learn.It showed what information was needed by the students in order to
achieve the objective and how that information would be presented. One of the key
functions of planning for a teacher is organisation. The lesson was not really well
organised in terms of materials and the involvement of students in the class. This was
because of the teacher had to call out their names in order to answer the questions.
Besides, the teacher had a confidence to teach on the lesson that day because she is
may be an experience teacher. This made the students respect the teacher and
anticipated that her lesson was valuable. Planning can also help teacher to know how
and when to condense content, how to motivate students, and how to assess student
performance.
The while listening stage is when the actual listening takes place. And so, the
while listening activities should be interesting to make students feel they want to
listen and carry out the activities. This could be done by choosing suitable topics and
content (something current and of interest to the students), material with local
‘flavour’ or activities that are enjoyable and satisfying to do in themselves) such as
games). During this stage the teacher told the story with interesting intonation but
only the story book should be improved. The main purpose of the while-listening
stage is listening comprehension that is to help learners develop the skill of getting
meaning from spoken language. However, in order to be able to do so, learners must
first be able to discriminate the sounds (segmental) and the stress, rhythm and
intonation patterns (supra segmental) of the language. So exposing learners to
segmental and supra segmental features of the language, especially during the earlier
part of lesson, would also be a vital aim.
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The post-listening stage can be defined as consisting of activities related to a

listening text that is carried out after the listening is completed. Some of these
activities are continuation of those done at the pre- and while-listening stages, while
others are only loosely connected to the listening text. One of the simplest purposes of
the post-learning stage is checking whether students have understood and completed
the while listening activity successfully; in other words, checking for answers. In my
selected lesson, the teacher did the writing exercises. The teacher took a lot of time on
doing exercises on writing, as for the objective on the more on speaking skills. The
teacher should add more activities on speaking. After the story telling, the students
may do the role play to paraphrase what the characters just said in the story. These are
the social interaction activities, on the other hand, involve exploiting simulation and
role-play to create a wider variety of social situations and relationships. The main aim
of this type of activities is not only the functional effectiveness of the language, but
also the social acceptability of the forms that are used. Students listen to how native
speakers speak in a situation. Focusing on the forms and functions used by the
speakers before getting students to role play would give them the opportunity to try
out new language. According to Byrne (1986), oral in the classroom is seen as a
sequence of presentation- practice- production. At the presentation stage, new
language material is selected by the teacher and presented in such a way that the
meaning of the new language is as clear and as memorable as possible. The students
will listen and try to understand but they will probably say very little. At the practise
stage, the teacher will provide the maximum amount of practice, which is both
meaningful and memorable. The last stage is the production stage, which is
unfortunately not often done by the teachers who stop short at practice.
The writing did by the teacher should be done after the role play activity. The
teacher asked the children rewrite a few sentences with word given. The written work,
which could take many forms - listing specific points, summaries and essays. When
using the listening text as input for extensive writing activities, some in-class
discussion about the topic is perhaps advisable. This will ensure that students know
what they are to write about.
When the teacher gives writing exercise, they do have to think of the level of
the listening text and the proficiency of the students which are intermediate students.
The activity should depend on how the teacher’s timetable is organised. If the
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listening lesson is right before recess, it may not be a good idea to do “heavy stuff” at
the post listening stage. The teacher needs to consider which language skills to
include in the post-learning activity and relocate the time. The post learning activities
that are motivating or can be made more motivating so that students will not get bored
and stop listening or doing altogether. I observed that a student was asked to talk
about her written story on the card. We do not want activities at the while listening
stage to be so interesting that they make the post-listening work an anti-climax.
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3.1 Lesson Plan of Listening and Speaking

Date : 3 July 2009

Time : 9.15 to 10.15 am

Duration : 60 minutes

Class : Year 1 Ibnu Sina

Subject : English Language

Topic : Hansel and The Animals in The Jungle

Teaching Materials: Big Book, Tape of Sounds, Strips of names of animals

Curriculum : 1.7 Listen to and enjoy stories, tables and other tales of imagination and
fantasy and predict outcomes and draw conclusions at a level suited to their ability.

Prior Knowledge : Students are familiar with variety of stories.

General Knowledge : To develop students’ awareness of types of animals in the

jungle.

Specific Objective : By the end of the lesson, students should be able to:

1. Listen and understand the story

2. Say a few dialogues from the given names of animals in a role play.
3. Write a few sentences based on the stories.

Moral Value : To appreciate the environment and the animals and loving
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Procedures:

Pre-Listening Stage

The teacher tells a story very fast. Teacher asks the students to comment how to tell a
story in better way. (The material used: Big Story Book)

While-Listening Stage

The teacher tells the story with suitable intonation while pointing to the sentences in
the Big Book. The sound of music and animals is played while the teacher is telling
the story.

The teacher can interact with the story while telling the story.

Post-Listening Stage

The teacher tells the students that they are in a garden full of flowers. They are very
happy. They take a basket and start plucking flowers.

The teacher gives them instructions on what to do and where to move, thus allowing
for listening practice. The teacher will say, for example, “Suddenly you spot a
beautiful butterfly.” They will move like the butterfly – swinging their arms from side
to side stretching and bending as they move.

The students do the role play by continuing the story .

For example:

They will imagine that they come across other animals that may be found in the
garden, such as a bird and say what the bird says in the story to Hansel.

The students are also to relate what they do with these animals, like stroking the bird,
trying to catch a rabbit or trying to avoid a snake.

The teacher will continue playing the tape while the students do the role play.

The students may work in pairs to write a short story according to the name of the
animal given on a card while the other works on the illustrations.
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Closure

Students to relate to teacher what are other animals that they know that are not in the
story.

Self-Evaluation : The lesson has been successful conducted. The objective with the
new materials selected has achieved. Teacher managed to conduct the lesson on time.

4.1 Discussion of the Improvement on the Observed Lesson

Teachers can use these activities and explore possibilities of even more tasks. There
are many ways to extend these activities by adding to the lists of objectives and using
appropriate materials. Evaluation shows our concern, as professionals and specifically
as teachers, who have their students at heart, look for the highest quality of the
materials that have been selected. Evaluation of materials is a multi-faceted activity
that can be used for different purposes. It includes qualitative as well as quantitative
methods, can focus on an entire course or single lesson and can be undertaken by a
variety of different people.

With different materials used in the above lesson, the students can learn new facts,
new skills and new attitudes of new behaviours. The learning materials used able to
achieve its instructional objectives. It must be able to do what it intended to do and it
must be effective. The big book able to attract students and sustain their interest in the
lesson. To achieve this, the material must be presentable and learner-friendly based on
their ability as the intermediate students. The material must be reliable and error –
free. The materials are provided in schools, cheap and reasonable.

Students may also create all kinds of stories by experimenting with other movements
based on the elements provided to them. The teachers are to guide students in
exploring, experimenting and discovering ways of expressing themselves. Through
sharing stories with others, students develop positive self concepts and learn to be
more tolerant of others and appreciate their differences.

The above lesson, the teacher prepared materials which are suitable and appropriate to
teach both listening and speaking because teachers possess the first information about
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their students’ ability and background. The tasks in the above lesson are simple and
relatively undemanding and it is important to pre-teach key vocabulary so as to
prevent panic. Again, pre- teaching is important, although your students should be
able to deal with unknown vocabulary to some extent. At an intermediate level,
students should have some tactics of dealing with new vocabulary without panicking
but it is still useful to have a quick definition on hand for some words which are
difficult or bombastic words in storytelling. Whatever tasks teacher comes up with
must be tailor-made to student level and he must provide pre-listening activities to
activate background knowledge of the students. Such materials can appear in many
forms such as recordings, charts, pictures, drawings, music, songs and etc.

Music used according to Jonathan Marks (2004), are particularly suitable for
practising the kind of listening where the listener has no opportunity to interact with
the speaker, listening to the radio, listen to public announcement at airports, bus
stations, railway stations and etc. This suggests it would be helpful to give learners
more opportunity to listen to ‘live’ voices-visitors to the class, if feasible or most
obviously, the teacher. This of course, goes against recommendations to reduce
‘teacher-talking time’.

To sum up, materials used by teachers must be of high quality, practical, worthy of
use, appropriate and suitable when they are in use. There are a number of reasons that
teachers use to determine these criteria. Using more suitable materials is relatively
easy and convenient way of improving not only our students’ general skills but also
their confidence in a real situation. We need students to be more open and creative.

The students need to venture beyond their level and adopt higher order thinking.
Through sharing stories with others, students develop positive self concepts and learn
to be more tolerant of others and appreciate their differences.