Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener

1. Chapter 9
Productive skills: speaking
and writing
(ways to approach them in the
classroom)

2. Approaches to speaking
• Students need to be motivated in the subject
of discussion
• It is necessary to put the students in “safe”
situation in class where they are inspired and
encouraged to try using language from their
“store”.
• Create activities in which learners feel less
worried about speaking

3. Communicative Activities
• The aim of a communicative activity in class is
to get learners to use the language they are
learning to interact in realistic and meaningful
ways, usually involving exchanges of
information or opinion.

4. Some activities can be Role play and
real play
• Role card can be designed to offer students
opportunities to practice specific pieces of
language (grammatical points, functional
areas, lexical groups, etc)
• The real play technique allows learners to
practice language they need in their own life.

5. Fluency and accuracy
• The danger of correcting students in the
middle of a mainly fluency task is that you
interrupt their flow and take focus off their
message.
• Be clear about what is involved in accuracy-
focused work as compared with fluency-
focused work.

6. Different kinds of speaking
Genre
• A genre is a variety of speech (or writing) that
you would expect to find in a particular place,
with particular people in a particular context,
to achieve a particular result, using a
particular channel (face to face, by phone)

7. Approaches to writing
• When selecting work for students you need to
be clear about whether it is useful practice,
“copying” and “doing exercises” are making
use of writing in order to help students learn
something else (e.g. grammar) but do not
significantly help students become better
“writers”.

8. Teaching the skill of writing
• A student can learn to become a better writer
by being actively encouraged and helped to
follow through a series of preparoty steps
before the final text is produced and
becoming more aware of that preparation
process, so that it can be done more
independently and transparently in future.

9. Writing in class
Classroom activities:
• Brainstorming
• text- starts
• fast writing

10. Marking/ Feedback
• Getting back a piece of work with a teacher’s
comment and correction on it can be helpful.
It can also be discouraging, especially if there
is too much information, if the information is
inappropriate or hard to interpret, or if the
general tone is negative rather than positive.
The red pen particularly has associations for
many people with insensitive and discouraging
correction and judgment.