Advanced Teaching Method

Three last sessions of the course Advanced Teaching Methodology mainly deal with techniques and methods of language teaching. The first part of this essay summarizes major points about those teaching techniques, and the second part focuses on how to develop both students’ active and passive vocabulary as to me, this is a field in teaching which I have not paid enough attention to.

Firstly, a detail review of introductory activities, including warmers and lead-ins, was presented. According to Spratt, Pulverness, and Williams (2011), introductory activities, which are carried out in the first stage of the learning of a lesson, help learners feel at ease and focus on the lesson. Warmers are activities used to help students know each other, raise their energy, or make them settle before the lesson starts. Therefore, warmers are not always related to the topic of the lesson. They can be games or quizzes. On the other hand, lead-ins are connected to the topic of the lesson since they need to raise students’ interest into the main theme of the lesson and trigger background knowledge. To do this, lead-ins can involve discussing topic-related questions or pre-teaching key vocabulary. Secondly, stages of a lesson for each skill were discussed, including teaching receptive skills, teaching productive skills, teaching vocabulary, and teaching grammar. In teaching receptive skills, there is a need for teachers to identify three stages: pre- (pre-reading, pre-listening), while- (while-reading, while-listening), and post- (post-reading, post-listening). In the pre- stage, teachers usually need to activate students’ interest and background knowledge of the topic and present key vocabulary. During the while- stage, in order to provide students mo...

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...s, word family, roots, or by topics.

Theories about teaching methodology and techniques are just ideas written in books if teachers do not try hard to apply them into their real teaching situation. Furthermore, in my opinion, teaching does not merely involve teaching the knowledge and skills, but it also involves giving students guidelines for effective learning strategies suitable with them and encouraging students to invest their effort and intention in their own learning.

Works Cited

1. Gu, Y. (2002). Learning Strategies for Vocabulary Development. New Zealand: Victoria University of Wellington.

2. Spratt, M. & Pulverness, A. & William, M. (2011). The teaching Knowledge Test Course (2nd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

3. British Council. Retrieved from http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/knowledge-database/passive-vocabulary on January 29th.