“TASKS BASED ON TEXT- READING AND LISTENING STRATEGIES”

The article “Reading and listening strategies”, written by Jane Willis, describes different strategies to
improve reading and listening in English as a foreign language. These strategies are based on the way
people normally read in daily situations, so they pretend to help students understand oral or written
texts in English outside the classroom.

As for reading, the author reports on the fact that it is more important to understand the general
meaning of a text than concentrate on what each word might mean. For this reason, it is necessary to
give children the opportunity to read alone and let them work at their own pace to catch up the main
idea of the text. Therefore, effective writers are people who try to comprehend what they read
regardless of ambiguous sentences. They are used to selecting and reading just the most important
parts of the text and taking advantage of pictures or other resources to fully understand it.

As for listening, the article highlights the impossibility of stopping a recording. Listening activities have
to be done at real time and it might suppose a serious difficulty for some students. For this reason, the
author proposes to select adequate texts and encourage children to explain the main idea of what
they have listened to in spite of not being sure about it. Teachers are not supposed to punish wrong
interpretations. They are supposed to encourage students to listen to the lectures again in order to
improve their interpretations if it is necessary.

Another useful strategy to help students understand an oral text is to make them concentrate on “keys
words”, which are the most important words to fully understand what we are reading or listening to.
“Key words” are enough to catch up the main idea of a text and they give us the possibility to work
with more difficult and fast speeches.

Finally, the article proposes to make students recognize some patterns, which are general structures of
oral or written texts. Patterns might help people understand what they read or listen to because if we
recognize the pattern it might be easier to follow the text. Teachers should take patterns into account
in order to prepare some helpful activities for their students. In spite of the fact that we usually can
identify more than one pattern at the same text, the author describes six common patterns. The first
one is called “situation – problem – solution – evaluation” and it is used in news and reports. It consists
of describing a general situation and a specific problem and trying to propose a solution which can be
effective or not. The second pattern is called “sequential” and it consists of explaining a story or a
situation taking into account the sequence of time. The third pattern that is described is called
“general - specific” and it is used when the author focus on a general aspect at the beginning of the
text and, after that, they introduce a specific item, such as an example or a description of an element
that is include in the general one. Another pattern is the “topic - elaboration” and it consists of
presenting the topic before starting to talk about it deeply. The fifth pattern is called “main facts –
supporting details” and it is used in news. These texts begin with a paragraph which is a summary of
the main ideas of the story. After that, the author focuses on detail that might seem irrelevant. The
last pattern is called “hypothesis – evidence – conclusion” and it is normally used in researches. Once
the author has described ah hypothesis, they have to focus on the reasons that are useful to prove
that idea. Thanks to these evidences, the author can present a final conclusion.
“THE TBL FRAMEWORK: LANGUAGE FOCUS”

The article “The TBL framework: language focus”, written by Jane Willis, focus on the last phase of the
TBL framework, which is called “Language Focus”. This last phase, in which children are supposed to
learn some specific forms of the language, is divided in two parts: language analysis activities and
language practice activities. Thanks to these activities, children increase their range of vocabulary and
useful expressions and they learn some grammatical aspects.

Language analysis activities are activities related to the language structures which have appeared
during the task cycle. Children select, identify and classify words and phrases from the texts or
recordings used previously. For this reason, these activities are contextualized and children are already
familiar with the words or expressions they have to analyse. They observe the words or phrases and
try to classify them correctly. For example, they may be asked to find all the expressions of time which
appear on the text and try to classify them in three groups. Children are allowed to work individually or
in pairs and do the activities proposed by the teacher at their own pace. It means that the teacher help
students just when it is absolutely necessary, but they encourage them to investigate and try to use
their own resources to solve the activities autonomously.

These activities can have different starting points. It means that, depending on the purpose, the
teacher prepares activities related to a specific language topic. There are three starting points:
semantic concepts, words of parts of words and categories of meaning or use. If the starting point is a
semantic concept, the activity will focus on the meaning of some expressions or words and children
will be encouraged to answer some questions about it. If the starting point is a word or a part of a
word, the main goal of the activity will be to make children discover grammatical aspects. For example,
they might be asked to find all the word that words ending with “–ing” and classify them according to
what they think. Finally, if the starting point is related to categories of meaning or use, children will be
supposed to classify some phrases or word in different categories. Activities with this starting point are
closely related to the other ones because they can include semantic and grammatical aspects.
However, activities related to categories are exclusively focused on classifications according to some
categories proposed by the teacher. Apart from these tree types of starting points, activities might be
related to phonology.

Either way, once children finish their activities, the teacher reviews them. They ask students what they
have answered and encourage them to justify their own answers. The teacher can write the correct
answers in the blackboard and use them to introduce new language aspects. Moreover, during the
review stage the teacher should teach children the correct pronunciation of some phrases.
As for language practice activities, children will have the opportunity to consolidate and revise
grammatical or meaning aspects that they have learned during the previous stages. The author
describes eleven practice activities that might be useful. The first one is called repetition and it consists
of repeating a word or an expression to learn how to pronounce them fluently. The second one is
called listen and complete. In this activity, children are supposed to complete a sentence just by
hearing or reading the first part of it. Another activity that might be helpful is the gapped examples
and it consists of finding the word or expression missed in a sentence. The fourth activity is called
progressive deletion. The teacher number the expressions and each student have to read the
expression that corresponds to a number. The complexity of this activity increases when the teacher
starts deleting words and the students are supposed to remember them. Another activity could be the
unpacking sentence, in which students have to turn a long sentence into a short one. The repacking
sentence consists of turning the short sentence back into a long sentence. The seventh activity is called
memory challenge and it is based on memorizing the sentence that contains a specific word. The next
activity is called concordance for common words and it consists of looking for a specific common word
and observing the words written before and after that one. Other activities could be dictionary
activities, tasks related to personal recordings or even computer games.

The teacher can create a pedagogic corpus if they keep all the texts, recordings and activities all
together. It will be a useful tool in the future and a good reflexion of the methodology used in the TBL
framework: a methodology based on analysis. This methodology encourages children to work at their
own pace with familiar texts or recording. For this reason, it is good to increase children’s motivation.