Interviews
Dictation
Brainstorming
Interviews are good because you can
introduce as much control as necessary into the process. For example, you can provide the students with the questions
and even provide sample answers, which would make this more of a reading exercise than anything else. You could do
ordering of the questions and answers and a matching between questions and answers. Interviews are also good because they provide a great context for the students to role
play.
The basic idea here is that you read a
good model of a text, but at a speed where the students can not possibly get all the words. The students then, have to reconstruct the text focussing not only on the vocabulary and
grammar, but also the meaning as a central component.
It is an important part of writing and cannot be overestimated as an important part of writing , but it is often believed to be hard to do with younger or lower level learners. The teacher is going to have to give a lot of clues and topics will have to be more limited and familiar.
Just giving your students a topic and having them talk about it sounds great for students who are fluent and high risk takers, but it could be a complete dud in the wrong class.
One good thing about interviews is that they can be
used a bridge between speaking and writing.
Guided Discussion
Dictation is a holistic kind of exercise in that the students have
to do everything. They need to know the grammar and vocabulary as well as listen well to what is being read out by the teacher.
The main difference between this and the brainstorming is that this can be focussed on any part of the writing, not just the gathering and exclusion of ideas.
It´s great usefulness as a way of
making writing practice more interesting.
A guided discussion task can be
integrated into any step in the writing process and at virtually any level of difficulty.
The basic idea is that we can
use these types of integrated
activities using a variety of language skills as a means of
scaffolding writing.
Story-Telling
These are certainly useful as a way of solidifying vocabulary and structures and even speaking
functions.
This is great if your students are interested enough to do predicting. If they are not, this will probably be too difficult for them, at least as a way of trying to get the students to
compose. Story-telling is good because it integrates reading, speaking and writing.
If you have not considered your goals carefully and
realistically then you really cannot come up with a suitable answer from learners.
These are different techniques to teach using all language skills
Techniques in using all languge skills