Motivation ‘As a rough generalisation, we can say that: people listen and read for two basic reasons: for enjoyment and for information. These are two sources of motivation which we have to work on. * ‘The more students use their language skills for enjoyment, the more language ability they are likely to acquire. Listening and reading for enjoyment What kinds of listening and reading are enjoyable? You have to find this out from your students. What you then have to do is to give them real encouragement to do this kind of listening and reading in English, without building in so many checks and tests that you kill the fun. Here are some ideas which focus on encouraging out-of-class listening and reading, often referred to as extensive reading. e Is there any English language television, radio or cinema in your teaching situation? Agree on a programme or film that you will all see or listen to. Make some class time available to talk about it. e Is there a continuing serial on radio or télevision? Go through part of a recorded episode in class and then have a regular spot for Keeping up to date with developments. . e If there are subtitled programmes on television, encourage students to experiment with them: sometimes looking at the subtitles, sometimes not, sometimes covering them up. @ Choose a story which you think will appeal to the students and divide it into short (five-minute) episodes. At the end of each class, or as a break in a lesson, read an episode; no questions, no tests. ¢ Ask friends to record stories in episodes to give the class a change of voice. Collect recordings of interesting personal experiences which foreigners have had in the country where you teach. I would advise restricting these to positive experiences. from: Edge, J. 1993. Essentials of English Language Teaching. Longman.107 e Can you provide suitable (= interesting and not too difficult) books? @ Are books available somewhere in the place you teach? Why not? Will the institution buy some? Does it just need some time and a talk with the librarian? e All the major ELT publishers produce graded readers. Will their local agents help in some way? e If there is a local British Council Centre or other cultural centre, will they make a special arrangement for your students? What do they do with their old books? Will the students (or their families) pay for one book each if you take the trouble to organise the buying of them? If so, talk toa colleague about whether you want to buy a class set (so you can all work together), or a few copies each of a smaller number of boaks (for groupwork), or as many different books as there are students (to provide maximum variety). © If you decide for this last option, one way of encouraging participation without overt checking is to ask each reader to mark a card in the book saying how they rate the book on a scale of 1-5. Now and again, you can bring together students who have read a particular title and ask them to talk about their reactions. It is difficult to overestimate the potential effect of having students enjoy English language books or programmes on the radio and television. Unfortunately (or fortunately), however, enjoyment is not something that can be timetabled. What can be timetabled is time for teachers to spend on encouraging the kind of listening and reading that we have talked about here. When students see that the teacher finds something important enough to spend class time on it, they are also likely to take it seriously. If your schedule doesn’t allow for this, explain to your director what you would like to do and ask politely if it can be timetabled. The extra effort required to make language learning a meaningful and enjoyable experience can make all the difference between relative * success and relative failure for learners and teacher. It is also one of the factors which make teaching a tiring way to earn a living. Listening and reading for information Listening and reading for information is what the usual type of listening and reading class focuses on. Here, we use short texts of spoken or written English in intensive listening and reading. As usual, there is a danger to look out for. Many students have learnt to listen to and read English by working intensively on such passages. The idea of reading which they have formed is one of starting at the first word and battling through till108 the last, with all elements of comprehension, grammar and vocabulary being tested before the text has been ‘done’. If their reading instruction has also featured a lot of reading aloud, this will also have encouraged a word-by-word approach to reading which will, in fact, hold back their progress. What we want to do is to teach different aspects of reading and listening, sometimes called microskills and strategies. We have to show that we listen and read in different ways, according to our purpose. I read a recipe for a new dish I want to cook very carefully from beginning to end; when I receive my teaching institution’s in- house journal, I skim through it very quickly indeed to see if there is anything that I want to spend time on. One strategy is not better than another, they are both appropriate for their puxpose. So, the important question is not: Did the students learn all the new words in this reading text and answer all the comprehension questions correctly? ‘The important question is: Did the students learn skills which will make them better readers of English, or get more practice in the skills of purposeful reading? We do not use reading and listening to teach texts, we use texts to teach reading and listening. ‘As we look at listening and reading in this light, it becomes clear that we need a closer view of the skills and strategies which we wish to teach. . Skills and strategies ‘The transferable skills we wish to teach will enable students to: skim (get a general understanding of what a piece is about); extract main points (such as when taking notes on a talk or an article); scan for specific information (such as what time the news is on TV); comprehend in detail (such as instructions on how to find a house); make inferences (about opinions, implications and attitudes); evaluate (e.g.: So what? What have I learnt? What shall I do now?) Associated with these skills are many others (recognising the shapes of letters would be one) which I am not going to go into. What we must take account of is the fact that we are dealing with language109 learners, who may always find themselves in a situation of understanding less than they wish they did. So, we have to encourage an attitude of being confident enough to carry on, even though things remain uncertain. And we need to encourage a strategic approach to dealing with incoming information. ‘The three major strategies to encourage in students when they are listening and reading for information are: Think about your purpose in listening/reading and use appropriate skills. © Think about what you already know, and keep predicting what the speaker/writer will say next. Keep thinking ahead. ‘ © Focus on what you do understand, and use that to help you work out what you don’t understand if it seems important to your purposes. We have looked so far at possible sources for listening and reading materials, likely purposes for listening and reading, and necessary skills, attitude and strategies. We are now going to look at the shape of a typical lesson in this area, where we bring these various points together in teaching. The shape of a lesson The shape of a typical lesson comes from what we know about listening and reading: © We understand new information in terms of what we already know, think or feel about the subject in question. © We usually listen and read with some purpose or interest in mind. @ Having new information should involve a change of some kind: we should know more, or think or feel differently from before. These thoughts suggest the shape of a lesson in three parts: © Before text ~ We work on the general topic in order to get students thinking about what they already know, and in order to establish a reason for listening/reading. © With text ~ We use questions and tasks to practise appropriate skills, and to make students aware of those skills. © After text - We ask, ‘So what?’ In other words, we show some connection between the new information and the students’ lives. Before text If you have a say in choosing a text, you need to balance topic, difficulty, and task