Let's start with a traditional lecture, which should not, of course, model a college professor's discourse. In this chapter we will use
"lecture" to refer to teacher explanations, on a grammatical point or writing process, for example. However, your lectures should not be lengthy or without some student interaction.
Lectures can promote student language development, especially in listening and speaking skillsprovided the teacher intersperses the talk with questions to the audience and allows sufficient wait time for responses. They also provide the opportunity to introduce stu-dents to content-based activities, linking a subject like biology with English language development. Depending on what task is required of the students, lectures can also be used to develop higher order
thinking skills and study skills. Further, while lecturing you are providing students with rich input, native pronunciation, models of English grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, and so forth.
ORGANIZATION First, as in all lessons, know your objective and relate it to your students in advance. Write a few summary points or even an outline on the board and read the points aloud. Put up some key terms and phrases you will be using. You can even point to
them as you talk. This preparation will give the students clues to your talk and will help focus their attention.
VISUAL AIDS Second, ask yourself what you can do to aid the students' under-standing of your words. Visuals are one solution. Pictures, photos, drawings, and even stick figures can help your lecture come alive.
Use your students to help demonstrate a point. Do pantomime or role play. Sprinkle a lecture with familiar examples, perhaps from
the community or from the curriculum of another subject. Better yet, where possible, select a topic from your list ofstudent inter-ests. By using multiple media in the classroom, you can reduce the reliance on language and place the information in a context that is more comprehensible to the students.
1A'
ljbTETAKING
Third, teach the students notetaking, a skill which facilitates their comprehension. You might, for example, plan a presenta-tion on "How to Take Notes." As you describe helpful strategies to the students, pause to write notesyourself on a separate sheet of paper. Occasionally stop and check to see what the students write. Have students compare notes with each other. For the second half of the lesson en subsequent days, present a few morelectures on topics of student interest and have students rake notes and compare their notes with yours and each others . If you list the main ideas of the lecture on the board beforehand, you will pro-vide the students with a framework to which they can add details.
DICTATION
DISCUSSIONS
ALL TASKS NEED SUPERVISION.
ZAIRIAN PROVERB
One traditional language learning activity that your students will expect is dictation. This activityprimarily occurs in a lecture -like setting. Dictations are useful to practice listening comprehension and writing. A slight modification that you may want to use in large, multilevel classes is a listenhg doze dictation. In this instance, you would prepare several versionsof the passage. The first version, for beginning students, would have a few blanks. The next version would have those blanks plus a few more; the third, the same blanks
as the second plus additional ones,and so forth. You then read the passage aloud to the whole class as youwould read a dictation, slowly, with repetitions. But your students would have different amounts of words or phrases to fill inaccording to their ability levels.
Whole class discussion is another way to get everyone involved.When you have 50 or 60 students, it isextremely difficult to get all of them to participate in a discussion. But, it ispossibleif students have been prepared for the discussion, if the topic is meaningful and relevant
(geared to their concerns when appropriate), and if the discussion is structured to encourage their input (see, for instance, explanation of think-pair-share in Chapter Eight). As we suggested for lectures, you are encouraged to use multiple media toenhance a class discussion.
In earlier chapters, we noted that your students are most likely accus-tomed to teacher control of lesson activities. You may find that you
have to lead several discussions as question/answer sessions until your students feel comfortable initiating questions and making comments without your prompting. You may want to consider selecting one or two students (your dynamic students,perhaps) as discussion leaders to model the participation you wouldlike from all your students.
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PEACE CORPS MANUALConsider inviting a guest speaker to your class as one way to make the transition from the lecture format to a discussion format. In advance, scout out potential speakers from your community. Let the students choose a speaker from your prepared list and help write or dictate an invitation that requests the topic for the talk. They might want to create a list of issues for the speaker to address and include it with their invitation. (You need to monitor this list and make sure it is appropriate for the speaker both in terms of its content and the speaker's English proficiency.) This process gives students a stake in the upcoming talk as well as background knowledge and concepts to listen for during the presentation.
Before the speaker arrives, have the class draw up a series of ques-tions to ask the guest after he or she has spoken. Besides factual questions ( What is a ?, When did ?), encourage more interactive varieties ( We have been studying
. What do you think about that? When we read
, welearned . Can you share your ideas? I didn't understand . Could you explain again please?). These questions will provide the basis for a class dis-cussion with the speaker. You should prepare your guest so he or she can ask the students some questions too.This preparation time is also ideal for slotting in some of the gram-matical points you need to cover from the national curriculum. Your students can work on question formation, verb tenses, punctuation, and more. You will be covering those items in context, and they should therefore be more meaningful and memorable to your class.
When your guest speaker arrives, inform the students that you expect them to take some notes to use later in a class discussion.
At that later time ask students to review their notes and summarize aloud what they learned. Or, set up a "hot seat" and ask a student to sit and discuss the topic, using his or her notes. To involve the whole class, encourage classmates to extend the information they hear from the hot seat, question and/or correct utterances, compare the information to their notes, and ask for repetition or clarifica-tion. Be careful, though, not to force students to join in, especially if they are particularly shy. You may want to have a lottery to estab-lish all order for the "hot seat." Clearly, not all students will get to speak, but if this activity is repeated every few weeks, more and
more students will have a chance. Moreover, as the students become familiar with the task, they may feel more comfortable speaking up.