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Reflection Paper VIII

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Reflection Paper VIII

Uploaded by

peteparabatai8480
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Universidade Eduardo Mondlane

Faculdade de Letras e Ciências Sociais


Curso de Licenciatura em Ensino da Língua Inglesa

Subject: Didactics II
Student’s name: Pedro Alberto Raposo

PAPER VIII
Reflection VIII
1. An advanced student approached you to help improve their listening skills because
they can’t understand a single work when they watch movies in English. How can you
help this student? Support your approach with relevant literature.

Considering the fact of being an advanced student, what lacks on the student may not be
much related to grammar aspects but vocabulary. What this student needs is to expand his
vocabulary as much as possible so that he can cope with different variants of English.

I would suggest him a suitable way of enhancing his listening skills by telling him to practice
more extensive listening accompanied by an extensive reading as well. This means read and
listen to whatever is relevant and makes you feel comfortable and motivated. At this stage a
bunch of things can be helpful. Read books, novels, documents and academic articles, as
long as it is a source of reliable information, because listening is nothing without reading. Is
through the reading where the student gets to know the words spelling which can later help
him to relationate with sounds he listens to out there.

According to Waring (2010), listening and reading are the best ways to learn a language. He
noted that if learners understand what they listen to, they can increase their word recognition
speed, they can recognize uses of grammar structures and collocations more easily and this
will make their brain work effectively.

Vo (2013) also argues the benefits of extensive listening by saying: Extensive listening
empowers language learners since they can choose listening materials appropriate to their
proficiency. They can listen in a relaxing manner and direct their attention to comprehending
speech as well as have opportunities to acquire vocabulary and learn about other features of
the language such as stress, pronunciation, and intonation through listening. (p. 30-31)

Bot extensive listening and reading exposes the students to a plenty new vocabulary so I
would suggest the student the following tips:

Listen to as many different variants of English as he possible

Reading for pleasure benefits include: text comprehension and grammar, positive reading
attitudes, pleasure in reading in later life, increased general knowledge (Clark and
Rumbold, 2006).

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This can be done easily by listening to the different sources of information such as TV,
Radio, films and reports. At this stage the student shall avoid being so strict when selecting
the material because sometimes you may learn new things from somewhere you didn’t
expect.

He also needs to be able to listen for specific information (such as times, platform numbers,
etc), and sometimes for more general understanding (when he is listening to a story or
interacting in a social conversation). A lot will depend on the particular genres he is working
with.

This skill can be easily developed by starting asking the student the type of stories he likes
most. This information may help me when selecting the appropriate material for him. Short
recorded stories may be suitable, where I elicit the language by asking skimming and
scanning question.

Jot down and look up words he doesn’t know

Whenever reading, watching a movie or talking to a teacher, get in the habit of jotting down
any word he doesn’t’ know. Since words are used in context (situational and linguistic) and
not in isolation, I would suggest the student to make notes of how a word is used in a
sentence so that he can better master the use of it in a natural way.

Use new words in writing and speech

Sometime it’s trick for the brain to remember things we don’t constantly use or practice, so
the best way to deal with that is to implement the new words on our daily vocabulary.

Focus on sentences rather than definitions

Studying definitions is trying to force your brain to remember a lot of small separate pieces of
information that sometimes aren’t associated with anything else in your life. However, if you
write a sentence, you can much more effectively use the new words in many different
contexts.

During the process I may also give assistance to the student to clarify some possible doubts
and practice with him having conversation about his future plans once he finishes the course.

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