Optimizing Coursebooks and Teaching Listening Skills

Coursebook Utility and Enhancement

Benefits, Selection, and Modification of Coursebooks

This section addresses the advantages of using a coursebook, methods for teachers to enhance them, pedagogical considerations for selection, and factors to consider when choosing one.

Benefits of Using a Coursebook

• Good coursebooks offer a carefully prepared, coherent syllabus, satisfactory language control, and motivating texts.
• They are often attractively presented.
• They provide teachers with material they can have confidence in.
• They come with detailed teacher’s guides offering suggestions and alternatives.
• Students generally like coursebooks.
• Coursebooks also provide material students can look back at for revision.

How Teachers Can Enhance the Coursebook

Teachers can adapt materials to better suit their students' needs:

1. Conduct a role-play after a reading text.
2. Rewrite an exercise that is disliked.
3. Replace one activity or text with something else.
4. Re-order the activities within a lesson.
5. Reduce a lesson by cutting out an exercise or an activity.

Restrictions of Using a Coursebook

• They impose learning styles and content on both classes and teachers.
• Units and lessons often follow an unrelenting format.
• Coursebooks can sometimes be bland or culturally inappropriate.

Implications for Teaching

This implies the necessity of arousing students’ interest in a topic and ensuring they know exactly what they are expected to do.

Early Language Learning: Listening and Speaking

Developing Listening and Speaking Skills in Children

This section examines the process of children learning to listen, the non-linguistic cues they use, methods for guiding comprehension, and the division of speaking drills.

Children Learning to Listen

When learning to listen in English, children are actively engaged in constructing meaning and making sense of what they hear.

Non-Linguistic Cues for Understanding

Children use several elements besides language to understand:

1. Their expectations about the speaker's intentions.
2. Predictions about what they will listen to.
3. The speaker’s use of voice, mime, and gesture.
4. The reason and purpose for listening.
5. Other features in the immediate environment.

Guiding Comprehension

Understanding can be guided and supported through means such as mime, illustrations, instructions, rhymes, stories, songs, dialogues, conversations, and descriptions.

Areas of Speaking Skills Division

Speaking skills are divided into two main areas:

Spoken Interaction

Refers to the ability to ask and answer questions and handle exchanges with others.

Spoken Production

Refers to the ability to produce language, for example, in a rhyme.