1. Methods of Foreign Language Teaching as a science.

As a science foreign language teaching method has problems and ways of

investigation. Problems of FLT are:
 Why to teach? – aims of teaching a foreign language
 What to teach? – the content of teaching
 How to teach? – methods and techniques of teaching
 Whom to teach?
 When to teach?
Methods of FLT is an applied science. There are general and special methods.
General methods deal with general problems of FLT. Special methods deal with
the special ways of teaching a special subject.
Ways of investigation of FLT methodology are:
 A critical study of the ways of FLT
 Study of experience of the best teachers
 Experiments with the aim of confirming or refuting
 Testing the working hypothesis.

2. Connection of methods of FLT with other sciences.

Flt methodology is closely connected with pedagogy, psychology, physiology,
linguistics and some others.
As pedagogy and methodology deal with problems of teaching and education,
they are closely connected with each other. One branch of pedagogy is didactics.
Didactics studies general ways of teaching at schools. Methods on the other hands
studies specific ways of teaching a definite subject. In teaching different subjects
general principles of didactics are applied. In teaching foreign language the teacher
forms and develops different habits which then leads to developing skills. In order
to be able to do it one needs to know the psychology of learners.
Effective foreign language learning depends on the learners’ memory. That is
why a teacher must know how to help pupils successfully memorize the material.
Consequently, methodology is closely connected with psychology.
Methods of FLT has s definite relation to physiology of the higher nervous
system. According to physiology habits are conditional reflexes as an action
performed in response to a definite stimulus. Since language behaviour is a
response to different communication situations, these two sciences are closely
connected.
 Methods of FLT is also closely connected to linguistics, because of teaching
materials.
3. Aims and content of FLT.
Aims are very important in teaching any subject. The teachers should
exactly know what the learners are expected to achieve in learning ‘their
subject’. We distinguish ‘aims’ – long term goals and ‘objectives’ – short term
goals. Aims are the final result of teaching, but objectives are the result of a
definite lesson.
There are four aims which should be achieved in FL teaching:
1. Practical aims; the acquisition of FL as a means of
communication. Practical aims cover habits and skills which
pupils acquire in using a foreign language.
2. Educational aims: through FL study we can develop the
pupil’s intellect. Teaching a FL helps the teacher to develop
the pupil’s voluntary and involuntary memory, his/her
imaginative abilities and will power.
3. Cultural aims: learning FL makes the pupil acquainted with
the life, customs and traditions of the people whose language
he/she studies through the learning materials; with the
countries where the target language is spoken.
Developmental aim – the main idea of Developmental aim is to teach a
learner:
 to develop his/her creativity, intellectual and cognitive abilities, to develop
different types of memory and attention
 to develop the mechanisms of anticipation, prediction, etc.
 To develop the abilities to start, to go on and to finish their communication.
The content of FLT has some components to deal with:
- Psychological component – habits and skills
- Linguistic component – phonetics, grammar and vocabulary
- Methodological component – how to attain the aims

4. Principles of FLT.
Methods of FLT is based on the fundamental principles of didactics.
They are:
 Principle of accessibility – the teaching materials should meet requirements
of linguistic and psychological factors.
  Principle of durability – implies the ability of a pupil to keep in his memory
linguistic and language material he/she learns
 Principle of conscious approach – implies comprehension of a linguistic
material by comparison.
 Principle of activity – presupposes a constant accumulation of knowledge
and active participation of learners in the process.
 Principle of visuality – is realized in direct and visual explaining of
meanings by showing and naming the objects
 Principle of individualization – takes into account individual peculiarities of
the learner and focuses on the cognitive styles of the pupils.

5. Equipment used in FLT.

Teachers and students can use quite different pieces of equipment in the
classroom. Let’s have a look to some pieces:
 Boards – are the most common feature of any classroom. There are different
types of boards such as, blackboards or whiteboards, Interactive whiteboards
(IWBs) also known as smartboards, mini-boards. In some cases even
retractable walls can also be used as boards.
 Projection – a stand-alone projector which can be connected to different
devices is the most common one used nowadays. Nevertheless, overhead
projector (OHP) or overhead transparencies (OHTs) also can be seen in
some classrooms.
 Audio devices – computers, mobile devices, MP3 players, IWBs, CD
players are used to broadcast audio materials.
 Mobile devices – teachers and students use mobile phones and tablets for
listening, watching and doing various exercises in the classrooms.
 Cards, dice, rods, and puppets – teachers have always used smaller teaching
and learning aids to help students study languages. They are used to help
learners to understand and use the material appropriately.

6. Ways of using classroom resources.

Education technology can make learning more interactive and collaborative.
We can use technology for:
  Showing things – we can show things using a variety of resources, ranging
from blackboard to presentation software.
 Sharing things and collaborating – we can encourage students to work
together to make videos or plan presentations for the class, use wikis and
blogs to share information, or to use any platforms any social media to
communicate and share information and their thoughts.
 Watching and listening – using video channels or audio sites can be very
helpful in developing students’ abilities and skills.
 Practising things – together with notebooks and workbooks, digital
alternatives like electronic workbooks are used by the students to practice at
home.
 Authoring things – teachers have always encouraged students to author
things. Pupils used to create posters or wallpapers, now they use digital
versions like blogs, wikis and other sites where they can share their own
pictures, stories, audio clips, etc.
 Researching things – students use different internet resources to find
information or language materials. Online dictionaries, language corpuses,
and concordances are very useful devices.

7. Pronunciation problems in language teaching.

Having good pronunciation is very important for language learners, but it is

not always easy. Different problems may occur in pronunciation teaching and
learning. What students can hear and can say are the most common problems
related to pronunciation. Some students have great difficulty hearing and
reproducing definite pronunciation features. This may be because their mother
tongues do not use the sounds which English has, and they are not familiar with
this or that sound.
Another problem related to pronunciation is the intonation problem. Hearing
‘tunes’ or identifying different patterns of rising and falling tones can be extremely
difficult for some language learners.
The key to successful pronunciation is first to have the students listen
repeatedly so that they notice how English is spoken – either on audio or video or
by their teachers.

8. Pronunciation teaching in lesson sequences.

 Just as with any aspect of language teachers have to decide when to include
pronunciation teaching in lesson sequences. There are several ways of doing it:
 Whole lessons – sometimes teachers devote whole lesson sequences to
pronunciation, and some schools timetable pronunciation lessons at various
stages during the week. Students may work on listening skills before moving
to the pronunciation part.
 Discrete slots – some teachers insert short, separate pronunciation ‘slots’
into lesson sequences. Over a period of weeks, they work on specific
phonemes, sounds, or on stress patterns.
 Integrated phases – it is useful to get students to focus on pronunciation
issues as an integral part of a lesson. For example, when they listen to a
recording we can draw their attention to pronunciation features on that
recording. We should concentrate on the students’ correct pronunciation.
 Opportunistic teaching – teachers may stray from their original plan and
teach pronunciation opportunistically because it has ‘come up’.

9. Aspects of vocabulary knowledge.

Vocabulary can be defined as the words in the language. The aspects of
vocabulary which students need to learn are:
 Form: pronunciation and spelling – the learner has to know the
pronunciation and spelling of a word.
 Meaning: denotation – the definition given in dictionaries.
 Grammar – if an item is irregular or has some particular way of connecting
with other words it will need to be taught.
 Collocation – two or more words that often used together and sound natural.
ex. the fast train; a quick meal, etc.
 Connotation – the secondary meaning of the word associated with the
positive or negative emotions. For ex. a moist sandwich (positive); a soggy
sandwich (negative)
 Appropriateness – using an item in a certain context
 Meaning relationships – as synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, co-hyponyms,
superordinates, translation.
 Word formation – prefixes, suffixes, combining words.

10.Vocabulary assessment.
 From time to time we need to check how much of the vocabulary students
has mastered. In order to do it we use a variety of vocabulary tests:
 Tests of target vocabulary - are used to check understanding and using target
items; spoken or written knowledge of the item; connotations, collocations
ad so on. Here are some common vocabulary test formats:
- Multiple-choice; Gapfills; Focused cloze; one-to-one matching;
Dictation; Sentence completion; Say if you know it; Translate; Read
aloud; What’s in the picture?; What more do you know about this word?
etc.
 Tests of overall vocabulary knowledge – Vocabulary Levels Test and the
Lexical Frequency Profile are designed to assess the overall vocabulary
knowledge of learners.

11.Principles for presenting and explaining grammar.

There can be different reasons for explaining grammar, like indications in
the syllabus and course materials, or a learning need. In any case, we may
use these practical principles:
 Provide students with examples of the target feature in meaningful contexts
before explaining it.
 Both say and write examples of the target form.
 Teach both form and meaning.
 You may or may not use grammatical terminology.
 Explain grammar in the students’ L1, unless they are proficient enough to
cope with English explanations.
 Compare the English structure with an L1 parallel if you can.
 It is often useful to provide an explicit rule.
 You can ask students to work out rules for themselves, based on a set of
examples (inductive process), or you can give the rules yourself, and they
later work on examples (deductive process).
Practical tips:
- Use pictures
- Don’t just say ‘Do you understand?’- ask students to demonstrate their
understanding
- Get feedback.
- Teach early in the lesson
 12.Grammar assessment.
Grammar assessment is done in most classrooms primarily through written
tests. Grammar-test items require students to respond cues in order to prove that
they have understood and can apply a grammatical rule. There are different types
of grammar-test items:
 Closed-ended test items - include multiple-choice, guided gapfills,
transformation, matching, rewriting and correcting the mistake type of test.
 Open-ended test items – give a clearer idea of how well the student can
communicate using the target grammar. ‘Open-ended sentence completion’
and ‘Sentence-composition’ are forms of open-ended test items.
 Translation – is a little used testing technique. It is a good way to identify
whether students understand the difference between their L1 and English
and use grammar rules appropriately.

13.Integrating language skills.

There are four language skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening.
Skills are divided into two types: Receptive skills- reading and listening, and
productive skills- speaking and writing. In order to replicate the natural processes
of skill-mixing and to provide maximum learning opportunities for students, it is
useful to integrate different skills. Using different techniques can be helpful:
 Speaking as preparation and stimulus – in order to activate students’
schemata and engage them in a topic that they are going to read or hear
about we ask them to discuss it beforehand.
 Texts as models – especially where the students are working with genre-
focused tasks, written and spoken tasks are a vital way of providing models
for them to follow. One of the best ways of having our students produce
certain kinds of writing or speaking models, is to show them appropriate
samples.
 Texts as preparation and stimulus – much language production work grows
out of texts that students see or hear. That is why, teachers often use written
and spoken texts to stimulate students into some productive work.
 Integrated tasks – teachers frequently ask students to listen to something and
take some notes, or to prepare a spoken summary of something they have
read. In some cases students do listening, speaking, writing and reading
almost simultaneously. Indeed, task-based learning, or even just working on
 a single task, is almost predicated on the idea of skill integration, since it is
usually impossible to complete a task successfully in one skill area without
involving some other skill, too. Skill integration also happens when students
are involved in project work.

14.A procedure for teaching receptive skills.

Although there are significant differences between reading and listening the
basic classroom procedure is the same for both. A typical procedure for getting
students to read a written text or listen to a recording involves Type 1 and Type 2
tasks. Type 1 tasks are those where students read or listen for general
understanding or response. Type 2 tasks, on the other hand, are those where
students look at the text to prompt more detailed responses, gather specific
information or analyse language.
 Lead-in – the procedure for teaching receptive skills generally starts with a
lead-in. This is where we engage students with the topic and try to activate
their schema. The job of the receptive skills teacher is to prompt the students
to get in touch with that knowledge or schema. They can predict what a text
is likely to be about, and what they are going to see or hear.
 Comprehension/response task – once the students are ready to read/listen,
we set some kind of a task so that they will read or listen in a general way –
trying to extract a mostly general understanding of – or response to – what,
superficially, the audio or written text is all about.
 Reading/listening – the students then read or listen to the text in order to
complete the task that has been set, and then the teacher directs feedback.
Here students can work in pairs or small groups.
 Text-related task – is any kind of follow-up activity, and might be either a
more detailed response to the content or a focus on aspects of language in
the text. Sometimes it can be set immediately after the Type 1 task has been
completed. Once Task 1 has been completed successfully, we will often get
the students to do a Type 2 task.

15. A procedure for teaching productive skills.

Although the productive skills of writing and speaking are different in many
ways, we can still provide a basic model for teaching and organising them. A key
factor in the success of productive-skill tasks is the way teachers organise them and
how they respond to the students’ work.
 Lead-in – in this stage we engage students with the topic. Perhaps we ask
them what they know about a certain subject or topic.
 Task – when we set the task, we explain exactly what the students are going
to do. We may get the students to repeat the task instructions back to us. We
will also make sure that the students are given all the information they need
to complete the tasks.
 Monitoring – once the students have started, we will monitor the task. This
may mean going round the class, listening to the students working and
helping them where they are having difficulties.
 Feedback and follow-up – when the activity has finished, we give task
feedback. Here we may help the students to see how well they have done.
We will show positive aspects of what they have achieved and not
concentrate solely on their failings. Finally, we may move on from the task
with a task-related follow-up.

16.Strategies for dealing with difficulties in teaching

productive skills.

When people don’t know a word or just can’t remember it, they may employ
different strategies to resolve the difficulty:
 Improvising – speakers sometimes try any word or phrase that they can
come up with in the hope that it is about right.
 Discarding – when speakers simply can’t find words for what they want to
say, they may abandon the thought that they can’t put into words.
 Foreignising – when operating in a foreign language, speakers sometimes
choose a word in a language they know well and ‘foreignise’ it in the hope
that it will be equivalent to the meaning they wish to express in the foreign
language.
 Paraphrasing – speakers sometimes paraphrase, though it can make
communication longer and more complicated.
Paraphrasing and improvising are more useful techniques than discarding
thoughts or foreignising blindly.

17.Sequences of managing projects

 Projects generally follow the same sequence:
 Topic choice and briefing – projects star when the teacher or the students
decide on a topic. Once the choice has been made, a briefing takes place
where they define the aims of the project and discuss how they can gather
data, what the timescale of the project is, what stages it will go through and
what support the students will get as the work progresses.
 İdea and language generation – if the students have come with their own
topics, they need to make a plan about what they have to find out, and think
about where they can find that information.
If the teacher is directing the project the students may be told what they are looking
for and where they are going to find it.
 Data gathering – students can gather data from different resources. They can
use internet search engines, consult books, watch different programmes,
design questionnaries and interview people and so on.
 Planning – when the students have got their ideas, generated some topic-
specific language and gathered the data they require, they can start to make a
plan of how the final project will be set out.
 Drafting and editing – if the project has a final written product, a first draft
will be produced. This draft will be self-edited by the project writers.
 The result – finally, the goal at which the whole project has been aiming has
been reached. This can be: a wriiten report; a blog; a role-play, a short piece
of film, a drama production or a recording.
 Consultation/tutorial – throughout a project, teachers will need to be
available as tutors, advising, helping and prompting the students to
faciliatate progress.

18. Features of top-down listening

According to Michael Rost and JJ Wilson top-down is one of the

listening ‘frames’. We use ‘top-down’ to describe an approach where the
students attempt to understand the overall, general meaning of what they are
listening. How can we approach this task?
 Using prediction – sometimes we may pre-teach vocabulary that the
students will encounter when they listen. This will help them to predict the
content of what they will hear.
 Getting the general idea – one of the ways of increasing our students’
listening confidence is to ask them just to try to identify the general idea of
what is being said. They should be able to do this without having to
understand every single word.
 Maintaining attention – students need to maintain their focus as they listen.
One way of doing this is to give them interesting tasks to focus on while
they are listening.
 Multiple listening – students should have the opportunity to listen to the
same thing as often as feasible. Each time they hear an audio extract again
they will almost certainly undersatnd more.
 Working together – it is important to allow students to work together to
discuss what they have just listened to. When they discuss their
interpretations of what they have heard, they end up understanding it better.

19. Features of bottom-up listening.

Bottom-up processing happens when listeners concentrate on

understanding individual words as a way of understanding the whole. We
need to help our studentsdifferent sounds, words and features of connected
speech, separate the words out. We can do this in a number of ways:
 Dictation – we can dictate sentences which have features that we want our
students to get used to. We can also use dictogloss – a procedure where we
read a short text and the students write down as many words as they can.
Later they can try to recreate the text we have read to them.
 Micro listening – it is useful for students to listen to small phrases and
elements that cause them problems. The more they do this, the easier they
will find it when they encounter these elements in longer listening texts.
 Audio ‘concordances’ and other helpful recordings – we can use different
programmes to record short sentences and then have them repeated again
and again on the audio track. The students will experience a kind of listening
drill. We can also record audio ‘concordances’ where we say a number of
sentences, all of which contain the same word or phrase.
 Narrow listening – we can have our students listen to a number of short
listening texts on the same theme or topic or in the same genre to get
repetition.
  Transcripts – another effective way of helping students is to allow them to
read transcripts of what they will listen to or have listened to.

20. Forms of live listening.

A popular way of ensuring genuine communication is live listening. This allows th

students to practise listening in face-to-face interactions and allows them to
practise listening ‘repair’ strategies, such as using formulaicexpressions, repeating
up the main point, using rising tone, rephrasing etc.
Live listening can take different forms:
 Reading aloud – an effective activity id for the teacher to read aloud to the
class. This allows the students to hear a clear spoken version of a written
text.
 Storytelling – provides excellent listening material. Students can be asked to
predict what is coming next, to describe the people, or to retell the story as it
is powerful way of increasing language competence.
 Interviews and conversations – are very motivating listening activities,
especially where the students themselves think up the questions.

21. Advantages and disadvantages of pre-recorded audio

There are a number of advantages and disadvantages of using pre-recorded audio.

Advantages:
 Different voices – pre-recorded materials allow students to hear different
accents, listen to men and women, children, adults and old people, and to
different English language varieties.
 Availability – pre-recorded material is readily available everywhere.
 Repetition – the great advantage of pre-recorded material is that you can
play it again and again.
 Specially produced material – there is a wide variety of audio material which
has been designed especially for students of English.
 Transcripts – studying transcripts in conjunction with listening to the audio
itself can be very useful.
Disadvantages:
 Acoustics – in big classrooms with poor acoustics not all the students can
hear equally well.
  All together – in classrooms where only one audio track is being played,
everyone has to listen at the same speed, sapped dictated by the recording,
not by the listeners.
 Interaction – students can’t interact with the speakers on an audio track in
the way that they can in face-to-face conversations.
 It’s unnatural – having a group of people sitting around, all listening to audio
material does not reflect typical listening behaviour.

22. Viewing and listening techniques

All the viewing and listening techniques ae designed to awaken students’
curiosity through prediction and will be eager to see if their expectations are
fulfilled.
 Silent viewing (for language) – the teacher plays the film extract at normal
speed but without sound and the students try to guess what the characters are
saying.
 Silent viewing (for music) – the teacher shows a sequence without sound
and asks the students to say what kind of music they would put behind it and
why.
 Freeze frame – we can ‘freeze’ the picture, stopping the participants dead in
their tracks and ask students to predict what will happen next.
 Partial viewing – is a good way of arousing students’ curiosity. Trying to
work out exactly what is going on with such partial viewing encourages the
students to contextualise the language they are hearing and to listen very
carefully.
 Fast forward – the teacher fast-forwards the video so that the sequence
shoots past silently and at great speed. When it is over, the teacher asks the
students what the extract was about and what the characters were saying.
 Pictureless listening – the teacher covers the screen, the students listen to the
material and guess what is going on there.
 Pictureless listening (music) – the students listen to music and say what kind
of scene it accompanies and where it is taking place.
 Pictureless listening (sound effects) – the students listen to the sound effects
and guess what is happening.
 Picture or speech – half of the students face the screen and half face away.
The students have to describe what is happening and others have to try to
understand what is going on.
  Subtitles – if the subtitles are in English, the students will benefit from
seeing and hearing the same thing.
 Videotelling – we can ask students to predict what they are going to see,
based on clues we give them.
23. Characteristics of intensive reading
Intensive reading involves learners reading in detail with specific learning aims
and tasks. There are various ways that we can ask our students to interact with
reading texts:
 Encouraging student responses – One of the most important ways of
encouraging student engagement with a text is to ask them whether they like
it and why – why not. We can also ask them which characters in a reading
material they most like or dislike and why. Students can also use some
symbols as ✔(check mark), ✘(cross), ?(question mark), ! (Exclamation
mark) to express their personal response to what they are reading. We can
ask them to use reading ‘knowledge’ chart also.
 Transferring information – one way of having the students demonstrate their
understanding of the text is by asking them to transfer the information they
see to other media.
 ‘Interrogating’ the text – texts can be used to promote critical thinking by
encouraging students to ask questions about truthfulness, cultural settings,
genre and so on.
 Using reading as springboard – we can use text as springboard for different
follow-up activities and text-related tasks such as, role-playing, letter
writing, information transferring and others.

24. Characteristics of extensive reading

Extensive reading involves learners reading texts for enjoyment and to

develop general reading skills. 
 Extensive reading materials – Students can read whatever they want to read
for extensive reading. At higher levels they can read books written for a
competent English-speaking audience, but at lower levels they can read
graded readers.
 Extensive reading tasks – we can use some tasks to encourage our students
to read. We can ask them to fill in a simple report form for every book they
read; to share their thought on a site; to keep a reading ‘diary’.
 Talking about books – some teachers motivate their students by organising
‘literature circles’ where they talk about what they have read.
 Extensive and intensive – some educationalists offer to combine intensive
and extensive reading by ‘forcing’ students to read books and discuss the
assigned material.

25. Characteristics of fluent reading

Once our students have mastered basic reading comprehension, we need to
help them deal with more sophisticated texts and tasks quickly,
appropriately and skilfully. The aim is for or students to become fluent
readers. Characteristics of fluent reading are:
1. Language level – the text should be of a level that is easily
comprehensible to the students.
2. Content – the text should be based on information or world knowledge
that the students are familiar with.
3. Speed – learners should read meaningful unit by meaningful unit, rather
than word by word.
4. Selective attention – learners concentrate on the significant bits and skim
the rest.
5. Unknown vocabulary – learners guess meaning of unknown word from
the surrounding text, or ignore it. They use a dictionary only when these
strategies are insufficient.
6. Prediction – learners think ahead, hypothesize and predict.
7. Motivation – texts and tasks should be selected with reader interest in
mind.
8. Purpose – learners are aware of a clear purpose in reading, for ex. to find
out something, or to enjoy reading.
9. Different strategies – learners use different strategies for different kinds
of reading.

26. Speaking activity types

There are a number of widely-used categories of speaking activity.

  Acting from scripts – we can ask our students to act out scenes from plays or
their coursebooks, sometimes filming the results. We often ask students to
act out dialogues they have written themselves. Playscripts and dialogues are
good language producing activities.
 Communication games – aim to get the students talking as fluently as
possible. Information-gap games and Television and radio games are two
particular categories.
 Discussion –discussions range from highly formal, whole-class staged
events to informal small-group interactions. Buzz groups (brainstorming),
formal debates, unplanned discussions and reaching a consensus type of
activities are very effective ways of encouraging students to take part in
different types of discussions.
Other useful speaking activity types are: prepared talks and presentations,
questionnaires, simulation and role-play, and storytelling.

27.Ways of helping reluctant students in teaching speaking

Sometimes getting students to speak in class is not easy. Itheren order to

help them to cope with this problem we can use different ways:
 Making students feel relaxed – because students feel anxious about
speaking, we will do our best to create a relaxing environment. We want to
lower their affective filter; this is the barrier which results from anxiety.
 Matching level and task – it is very important to set speaking tasks at a level
that students are comfortable with.
 Using pairwork and groupwork – using pairwork or groupwork is important
not only because it gives every one a chance to speak, but also it is less
pressurised for many people.
 Preparation – students will perform much better if they have the chance to
think about what they are going to say and how to say. Giving them quiet
time to think in their heads about the words they will use is very helpful.
 İncluding fluency activities – a different way of making our students feel
more relaxed about speaking is to include quick ‘instant’ fluency activities in
every lesson. İf we do this, the students soon get used to start to feel more
confident about speaking.
 Adopting appropriate teacher roles – prompter, participant or feedback
provider.
 Mandatory participation – activities like ‘numbered heads’, fluency circles,
jigsaw reading, story-circle writing and other similar activities make all the
students speak.

28. Characteristics of writing

Writing is fundamentally different from the other four skills.
 It is permanent – the written material can be used either very soon after it
was written or later.
 It is dense –the content of a written passage is, unlike speech, presented
relatively densely, with little or no ‘redundancy’.
 It is asynchronous, or time-independent – there is a time-lapse between
production and reception of written material.
 The person or people being addressed are not physically present.
 It is produced slowly.
 It is learnt and high-prestige form.
 It uses more standard forms.

29. The roles of the teacher in teaching writing

There are three very important roles of the teacher in teaching writing.
 Motivator – one of our principal roles in writing tasks will be to motivate the
students, creating the right conditions for the generation of ideas, persuading
them of the usefulness of the activity, and encouraging them to make as
much effort as possible for maximum benefit.
 Resource – we should be ready to supply information and language where
necessary during extended writing tasks.
 Feedback provider – giving feedback on writing tasks demands special care.
Teachers should respond positively and encouragingly. When offering
corrective feedback, teachers will choose what and how much to focus on,
based on what the students need at this stage.

30. Aspects of literacy in teaching writing

Literacy is now understood as a means of identification, understanding,
interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-
mediated, information-rich and fast-changing world. In foreign language
 teaching we need to decide what kind of writing we expect from our
students, and, therefore, what kind of literacies we are asking from them.
This is especially important when students are studying English for
academic purposes; the actual discipline and the level they are studying for
will determine how ‘literate’ they should be. Handwriting, spelling, layout
and punctuation, and text construction are aspects of literacy.
 Handwriting is a personal issue. Students should not all be expected to use
exactly the same style.
 Spelling is difficult for some students because in English a single sound may
have many different spellings, and the same spelling may have many
different sounds; not all varieties of English spell the same words in the
same way.
 Different writing communities obey different punctuation and layout
conventions in communications such as letters, emails, reports and publicity
materials.
 In order to write successfully students need to know about coherence and
cohesion and use different cohesive devices.