Teaching and Assessing Macro Skills

• This summarizes the key points regarding teaching and assessing macro skills.

Listening

• Listening is a macroskill, and understanding sounds, syllables, and phrases is a key component.
• Listening is the foundation for language acquisition.
• Students devote 50% of their time to listening in a foreign language.
• Intensive listening focuses on the form of the language.
• Responsive listening shows understanding and creates appropriate responses.
• Selective listening picks out important information.
• Extensive listening understands longer texts and connects ideas.

Stages of Listening

• Receiving involves hearing and attending.
• Understanding determines the context and assigns meaning to words and utterances.
• Remembering all details is important for moving forward in conversation.
• Evaluating assesses the information and determines its veracity.
• Responding involves giving feedback.
  • Formative feedback provides ongoing assessment and guidance.
  • Summative feedback provides a summary of performance or learning.
• Bottom-up processing decodes the text.
• Top-down processing comprehends it using one's schema.

Pre-listening activities:

• Identify vocabulary needs.
• Activate interest and motivation.
• Put it in context.
• Set the listening purpose.

While-listening activities

• Provide opportunities to re-listen.
• Promote guided listening.
• Give students 'thinking space'.

Post-listening activities

• Respond to the text.
• Analyze linguistic features of the text.
• Integrate speaking and writing.

Speaking

• Talk as performance is public speaking and oral presentations.
• Talk as transaction focuses on information and meaning, not technicalities.
• Talk as interaction refers to conversations.

Speaking Drills

• Repetition involves repeating phrases.
• Substitution involves replacing words or phrases.
• Q&A involves answering questions.
• Transformation involves changing the form of a sentence (+/-).
• Replacement involves using pronouns or other words to replace phrases.
• Expansion involves adding more details to a sentence.
• Fixed routines are groups of words used together to express a particular idea or concept that is more specific than the individual words.

Speaking Situations

• Interactive situations involve alternatively listening and responding.
• Non-interactive situations involve recorded speech.
• Partially interactive situations involve a speaker with a live audience.

Speech Act Theory (Austin and Searle)

• Locutionary act is the expressive/literal meaning of an utterance.
• Illocutionary act is the meaning one wishes to convey, such as stating an opinion, making a prediction, or giving advice
• Perlocutionary act is the effect of our words.

Felicity Conditions

• Conditions that must be satisfied for the speech act to achieve its purpose.
  • General: Language is understood, no playacting or nonsense.
  • Preparatory: Authority of the speaker and circumstances of the speech act are appropriate.
  • Sincerity: Speech act is performed seriously and sincerely.
  • Propositional: The circumstances in which the speaker speaks the utterance.
  • Essential: Attempt.

Reading

• Comprehension is the heart of reading.

Elements of Fluency

• Rate is the speed at which a person reads.
• Prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech.
• Accuracy is the ability to read words correctly.
• Phonics approach considers individual sounds.
• Whole language approach teaches several macroskills at once, focusing on meaning.

Chall's Stages of Reading Development

• 0-6 years: Pre-reading (letter recognition).
• 6-7 years: Initial reading (phonological awareness & decoding).
• 7-8 years: Confirmation fluency.
• 9-13 years: Reading to learn new information.
• 14-18 years: Multiple viewpoints.
• 18 and above: Construction and reconstruction.

Eye Movements

• Fixation is when the eyes stop or get fixated on a word or words.
• Inter-fixation is when the eyes move from one stopping point to another.
• Return sweeps are when the eyes swing back from the end of the line to the beginning of the next line.
• Saccades are short, quick hop and jump movements.
• Regressions are backward right-to-left movements.
• Span of recognition is the eyes' recognition of a group of words.

Types of Reading Comprehension

• Lexical Comprehension previews vocabulary before reading the story or text, reviewing new vocabulary during or after.
• Literal Comprehension understands the explicitly stated information, recalling details mentioned by the author with "Who, what, when, where" questions.
• Interpretative Comprehension understands facts that are not explicitly stated, where illustrations may help to infer meaning.
• Applied Comprehension is not a simple question that can be marked right or wrong, it challenges children to support their answer with logic or reason.
• Affective Comprehension previews social scripts to ensure understanding of plot development, connecting motive to plot and character development.

Writing

Teaching Writing Approaches

• Controlled writing focuses on grammar patterns, sentence structure, and proper punctuation.
• Free writing is quick and spontaneous, with no worries about style, form, grammar, or punctuation.
• Guided writing is formal, where a small group of children with similar abilities write together, while informal writing involves the teacher scaffolding individual writing tasks.
• Communicative writing learns language by communicating real meaning.
• Author's chair is for students to use during sharing period.

Pedagogy and Assessment

• Beneficial backwash is if what is assessed becomes what is valued and what is valued becomes what is taught.

Types of Questions (according to expected response)

• Referential questions do not assume a known answer
• Display questions indicate the answer is known
• Audiolingualism supports the view that language is primarily speech and is best learned through habit formation
  • consistently associated with Skinner, Bloomfield, and Charles Fries
• Humanistic approach notes that the whole being, emotional and social, needs to be engaged in learning- not just the mind.
• Oral language development is a critical foundation for reading, writing, and spelling and is the engine of learning and thinking.
• Cognitivist view says that errors are welcome because they indicate what you know and what you need to know.

Types of Language Assessment Tasks

• Imitative tasks involve "parroting".
• Intensive tasks are cued tasks (ex: picture, oral cues) to elicit oral language.
• Responsive tasks are brief interactions to help the student's ability to participate.
• Extensive tasks are complex, lengthy discourse (ex: reports & proposals).
• Interactive tasks are long, interactive discourse (ex: role play, games etc.).
• Grammatical-consciousness raising is a top-down approach that involves explicit grammar instruction to contribute to the learner's literacy awareness.
• The Inductive approach starts with sample sentences before explaining the sentence patterns.