WEEK 12

REMEDIAL AND ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES

INTEGRATED SKILLS (Shorter integrated learning activities) Elementary Level 1. Making a weather chart. Pupils talk about the weather, draw pictures and write a sentence or two to describe the weather. 2. Writing class news. A pupil gives an item of news. The teacher may write it on the chalkboard. Pupils read the news item aloud and copy it into their exercise books. 3. Talking and writing about a flowering plant

TYPES OF REMEDIAL AND ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES

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TYPES OF REMEDIAL AND ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES

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Intermediate Level Reading on a topic, making notes and talking about what is read. This may be followed by a written report or account. Listening to a story, making notes, writing out the story, and reading it aloud to the class. Listening to a short play or a scene from a play, making notes, talking about the characters and writing about them.

.....TYPES OF REMEDIAL AND ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES

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Advanced level Watching a film or television programme, making notes, talking about the programme and writing a report or account after the discussion. Making up a story orally, writing out the story and illustrating it. Finding out information orally on a specific topic, making notes, writing a report and presenting the report orally to the class. Interviewing a celebrity or visitor, making a tape recording and writing out the interview for a magazine or newsletter

...TYPES OF REMEDIAL AND ENRICHMENT ACTIVITIES

INTEGRATED SKILLS (Introduce project work into the learning activities) Project work helps to make language usage meaningful and relevant. Projects can be made very simple for the elementary stages, and more complex for the intermediate or advanced stages of language learning. Below are some examples of classroom projects which can help integrate the use of language skills. They will require more than one lesson and often a series of lessons.

......INTEGRATED SKILLS (Introduce project work into the learning activities)

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Elementary Level Setting up a shop in the classroom Pupils use oral skills and relevant language content for buying and selling, weighing and measuring, asking for and providing information. Pupils also write down orders for supplies and provide written information about the items sold in the shop. Making a model house or village Pupils work in groups to read instructions, talk about the materials required, plan their individual activities, write instructions, directions, labels, etc. Making a collage or a frieze the teacher decides on a topic or theme or a story. Groups are allocated parts of the collage or frieze to work on which they will construct with pictures cutfrom magazines, newspapers, etc.

......INTEGRATED SKILLS (Introduce project work into the learning activities)

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Intermediate Level Making a postcard or stamp collections- Pupils work in groups and plan what they will collect. They list the methods they will use for collecting, storing, mounting and filling the stamps, coins, postcards, matchboxes, etc. They also list the activities that are useful, such as finding out about countries of origin, displaying collections with information written out, presenting their collections to the class, and distribution of duties. Reading and writing projects Pupils work in groups on certain topics. Each group later presents its project orally, with other materials such as reports and pictures. Questions and discussion may follow as further oral work.

.....INTEGRATED SKILLS (Introduce project work into the learning activities) Advanced Level 1. Study projects pupils conduct studies in the form of mini surveys. This could involve the formulation of questionnaires, the conducting of oral interviews and the writing of reports. 2. Class outings and related activities the class organizes visits to places of interest.. Pupils make notes on what they have seen, do further reading and write an account of their visit. 3. Inter-class competition a supplementary reader or story is selected. Pupils work in groups to plan inter-class question and answer competitions, dramatization , etc. based on the reader.

MATERIALS SELECTION, ADAPTATION AND SIMPLIFICATION

INTRODUCTION

The better the material is, the more effective the teaching is. The most important is how well the materials are used. A good piece of material used badly loses its effectiveness. If used well, even poor material is effective. Effective teaching and learning depends largely on the appropriate adaptation and use of materials

ADAPTATION, SELECTION AND USE OF MATERIALS

Adapting already existing materials rather than writing original new materials. Adapting of existing materials is less timeconsuming and more effective than writing materials from scratch. Sometimes adaptation amounts to nothing more than a slight adjustment to an already existing exercise, such as adding a pre-reading activity to a textbook passage, therefore making the passage easier to comprehend.

ADAPTATION, SELECTION AND USE OF MATERIALS

It may consist of supplying a more meaningful context for a drill in a textbook, making the drill less mechanical and less dull. At times, adaptation means exploiting an exercise fully. For example, a listening comprehension exercise could be developed into a reading activity. A writing exercise could also be developed from the same material. The same material can be used for three purposes.

ADAPTATION,SELECTION AND USE OF MATERIALS

Adaptation may also mean developing a full set of lessons from materials which are not originally produced for language teaching and learning. For instance, travel brochures and advertisements could be used for teaching the four skills, that is, listening, speaking, reading and writing. Once the technique of adaptation is practised and understood, there is no limit to the amount of adaptation that can be done.

ADAPTATION, SELECTION AND USE OF MATERIALS

Finally, what is helpful to one teacher may not be helpful to another. What is useful to the experienced teacher may not be useful to the beginner and what is suitable for one teaching style may not be suitable for another.

ADAPTATION OF MATERIALS

Although writers of textbooks usually have greater experience, they do not have any personal knowledge of each particular teachers classes. Therefore, there is always room for adaptation which will make a lesson more relevant to the special needs of a particular group of learners. Not even the best written textbook will suit a class perfectly, because every class has its own special strengths and weaknesses.

.......ADAPTATION OF MATERIALS

There are varying levels of proficiency and different strengths and weaknesses among students, therefore teachers are constantly adapting materials and textbooks. Students with weak oral skill- the textbook may provide too little oral work, so some additional materials are needed. Students with strong oral skill the textbook may provide too much oral work, so some of the exercises are best skipped. All teachers adapt textbooks in small ways. Teachers adapt a textbook when they add an example not found in the book or when they state that the students are only to attempt the oddnumbered items of a given exercise.

........ADAPTATION OF MATERIALS

All textbooks need some adaptation because of the unique needs of every class. Materials are often need to be adapted in at least one of three ways: - the materials have to be simplified - the setting may have to be adjusted - short-term motivation and goals may have to be provided

Adjusting the level of difficulty

If the material is too difficult for the students, it is necessary to adjust the difficulty by making the language easier or by simplifying the material in some other way.

Adjusting the setting

Students who are still in the process of learning a language depend heavily on nonlinguistic cues in order to understand the material. These learners need help both from the use of pictures, charts, and diagrams and from the use of familiar social settings and contexts. By making the settings and contexts variables which the students easily recognize, the illustrations and examples become more vivid, interesting and real to the students.

...... Adjusting the setting

The students background knowledge helps them learn the language. In contrast, when both the language and the setting pose difficulties, the learners task has been made more difficult. The setting can have a positive or negative effect on the learning task. For example, learners in a residential part of Kuala Lumpur might have trouble with a text involving rice planting not because of the language but because they understand almost nothing about the planting of rice

...... Adjusting the setting

Learners reading a familiar folk tale might manage fairly difficult language because their prior knowledge of the story supports their reading efforts.

Providing motivation and short-term goals

Long-term goals such as learning the language, doing well in school, and preparing for a future career are important. For the short-term, day-to-day motivation is needed to help students focus on the immediate task. Giving the students well devised short-term goals provides them with useful focus on the subject and a motivation for doing well the work required for that class period.

........ Providing motivation and short-term goals

For example, the teacher who makes it clear at the beginning of the lesson that the students will write a letter at the end of the class does two things for the students: (i) Providing the students with a clear and understandable immediate goal, the students have been given a short-term but real motivation for paying attention because the information included in the preparatory exercises will be needed at the end of the class to write the letter.

....... Providing motivation and short-term goals

(ii) With such a clearly defined goal in advance, the students can focus on precisely that part of the lesson needed to sucessfully complete the task set for them.

EFFECTIVE MATERIALS
For materials to be most effective, they should be integrated, communicative and adapted. INTEGRATED APPROACH Integrated approach to teaching various skills. An example of this integration, within the same lesson, a reading passage will be used not just for reading but will be adapted for a listening comprehension exercise.

....Integrated Approach

Similarly, a listening comprehension exercise may produce a text, which in turn becomes part of a reading exercise, and so on. This approach recycles the materials. Materials are adapted for many other activities. Both the students and teacher benefit from this sort of recycling. The students benefit from the particular combination of the new and the old found in this approach.

....Integrated Approach

The activity changes while a significant part of the linguistic material remains rel;atively constant. Thus, the student gets needed stimulation from the change to a new activity and needed reinforcement through reexamination of familiar material but from a different perspective. Another benefit is the fact that students are not equally proficient in all four skill areas: listening, speaking, reading and writing.

....Integrated Approach

Inevitably, reading is more advanced than writing and listening is more advanced than speaking. For teachers, it is much easier to take a piece a piece of material and then adapt it for one kind of activity and then another. This practice tends to overwhelm the students and overwork the teacher. Materials take time and energy to adapt and exploit successfully Because our time and energy are limited, it is important that once a piece of material has been written, that it should be fully utilized.

....Integrated Approach

Once a teacher has gone to the effort and trouble to prepare some material, it is foolish and a waste of effort not to utilize it fully. In fact, materials preparation takes so much time that we, as teachers, have little choice but to use our materials in several related ways.

COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

Materials are also more likely to be effective if they are communicative in nature. The communicative approach emphasizes three features: an information gap, a choice and some feedback. Information gap one person in the exchange knows something that the other person does not know. Thus, the teacher-to-student question : What colour is your coat? usually does not involve an information gap as both the teacher and student know the same information

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COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

On the other hand, the friend-to-friend question: What are you doing tomorrow? does involve an information gap because the person asking presumably does not know the answer, while the person asked probably does. By choice is meant that the student has some choice in what to say and how to say it. Reading a dialogue does not involve choice in this sense.

..... COMMUNICATIVE APPROACH

By feedback is meant the speaker gets meaningful response which indicates that the communication was understood. Thus, if a boy tells a girl that she has pretty eyes, and she blushes and bats her eyelids, this constitutes feedback there is at least reason to believe his message was understood. The widely known game Who Am I! uses all three features of the communicative approach we have discussed.

Examples of Adaptation of Reading Materials

As a teacher, we need to give learners clear, useful goals that will help them determine how to go about the reading task. Before they read, they should know whether their goal in reading is to answer some questions, to summarize the material, to fill in a chart, etc. Our textbooks are full of reading passages followed by comprehension questions. If reading the passage is to answer comprehension questions, let the students look at the questions before they read.

If the objective of reading is to get an overall understanding, tell the students before they read the passage that they have to produce a one sentence summary once they are done. The students are evidently been given a clear, useful goal that helps determine how they go about the reading task. Of course, it is not only possible but useful to read a passage more than once, with different goal for each of the readings.

Multiple Readings

A passage good enough to read is good enough to be read more than once. Each time it is read, however, it is read in a different way and with a different goal. For the first few readings, the students focus and learn something new, while deepening their learning of the earlier material. Each reading usually has its own purpose. - First reading: The students are directed towards getting a general understanding. This is done before the stds begin the reading through assigning a task that requires a general understanding of the passage.

Next/ Second Reading - Have another reading passage with a different focus, for instance concentrating on certain details of text structure, understanding vocabulary words in context, overall text organization, or other unlimited number of possibilities. However, this reading order is not fixed. For a weaker class, the order might be reversed: - If the reading is quite difficult for a particular group of students, it might be effective to have them read it the first time in order to answer some fairly specific comprehension questions and put off reading for the general idea until the second reading.

Conclusion

Finally, what is helpful to one teacher may not be helpful to another. What is useful to the experienced teacher may not be useful to the beginner. What is suitable for one teaching style may not be suitable for another.