REFLECTION

Muhammad Fuad Bin Ishak

The listening component aims at developing learners ability to listen to and
understand the spoken language better. The sub-skills of listening range from the
basic level of sound, word and phrase recognition to an understanding of the whole
text. While speaking is linked closely to listening, learners are taught to listen
carefully to what is spoken and give an appropriate response. In the development of
oral skills, learners are taught how to ask questions politely when seeking
information or clarification and to reply giving relevant information.
These are the elements that I as a teacher have to lay emphasis on, in the
lesson when planning for listening and speaking skills lessons. Before the study of
these skills, I always thought that both of the skills are not as important as writing
and reading skills, but alas they were all important in teaching the language. That
was the point that I have to bear in mind when planning my lessons.
` This assignment and the process of it really opened up my horizon of teaching
the skills. There were lot I have learnt and theres so many more for me to explore in
becoming a better teacher, one shouldnt stop learning and one will never had
enough of knowledge.
During the process of completing task 1, where we have to read various
sources about listening and speaking skills, I discovered many teaching models,
approaches and techniques to be used in teaching these skills. I was a one
dimensional teaching method before and the task had had me to variety of
approaches to be used when teaching these techniques. I was very delighted upon
the discovery of these new and interesting method and approaches.
I was also more open, in the sense of planning my lesson for task 2, where we have
to lesson a listening and speaking activity. Based on the materials we collected and
read through various resources, we came up with many interesting and attention-
grabbing activity to include in our lesson. And as for me, the teaching of listening and
speaking skills used before was always a direct listen and repeat after the teacher.
But after we realize there was so much we can do, so we chosen one that is more
appealing and fun to carried out role playing. In this stage, we mock a restaurant
dining experience as our theme and we found that, this role play really integrates
many skills as well, such as vocabulary lesson, greetings and social expressions.
Although we have to endure many obstacles, such as distance between group
members, time constraint especially when these few weeks before, I was
concentrating on the UPSR pupils, and also to cope with family matters and such,
but that doesnt make me to surrender or regard this assignments as a burden. Its
actually a win-win situation where all the hard work is not only applied to my
assignments but indirectly it makes me, as a better teacher when it comes to plan a
better listening and speaking skills lessons. I was glad and ecstatic when first we
thought this crippling assignments turn out to be a blessed in disguised.