Topic 8

Question 1

Written English

Answer 1

Writing is the connection of words and utterances linked together to form a text.

In primary education, we’ll not demand very extended or elaborated texts, but texts based on the student’s interests, close to their experiences and related to the contents and topics worked in class and established by **Royal Decree 157/2022, 1st of March.
AÑADIR CURRICULUM DE LA RIOJA

• Daily routines
• Description of places and objects
• House, jobs,hobbies…

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE WRITTEN LANGUAGE

• It’s space-bound, static, permanent
• Writing allows repeated reading and close analysis and promotes the development of careful organisation and compact expression
• Lack of visual contact between writer and reader
• No immediate feedback
• Unique features of writing include pages, lines, capitalisation, spatial organization, and several aspects of punctuation
• Writing is very well suited to the recording of facts and the communication of ideas and to tasks of memory and learning
• Errors in writing can be eliminated without reader ever knowing they were there

Question 2

Approaches to reading and writing

Answer 2

Young learners need to be good listeners and speakers before they can become proficient readers and writers of any language. Learning to read and then to write means young learners have to link what they’ve heard or spoken to what they can see (read) and produce (write)

LITERACY STRATEGIES

• Phonemic awareness Young learners of English need explicit instruction on the link between the symbols (letters) in English and the sound they represent. Young learners have to learn blending: Consonant Vowel Consonant, then how to segment the sounds in words.This’ll help them with decoding and spelling.
• Semantic Young learners need to be taught how to encode the symbols and visual in order to find out the shared message
• Syntax as Krashen said, it’s best acquired rather than learnt explicitly. It’ll occur through multiple exposure to language usage in different contexts

DEVELOPING LITERACY

• Labels Desks, coat, furniture and objects around the class
• Posters Reading time, don’t forget to wash your hands…
• Messages we like…
• Reading aloud in the corridors or in the playground

Other activities to promote reading for pleasure

• Running dictation
• Make their own story books, comic, booklets…
• Creating and representing stories
• Favourite reading
• Make it purposeful: collect information for something idea of Ellis and Brewster
• Extensive reandig: A lot of easy material in the FL idea of Krashen

STAGES IN READING DEVELOPMENT BY MARYANNE WOLF

• Stage 1: the emergent pre-reader 6 months to 6 years
• Stage 2: The novice reader 6-7 years
• Stage 3: The decoding reader 7-9 years
  -Stage 4: The fluent,comprehending reader 9-15years
• Stage 5: The expert reader since 16 years

Question 3

Reading comprehension: techniques to develop global and specific reading comprehension

Answer 3

READING SUB SKILLS

At the early stages, should remain at word level, playing games with typical letter combinations and to practice word recognition: labelling pictures

They don’t understand all the vocabulary and structures in the text, it’s our job to teach them how to use the context to understand the words they don’t know

READING SUSKILLS

Krashen identify the four main sub skills of reading:

• Scanning: reading to extract specific information. True or false
• skimming: Reading for general understanding. Match the paragraphs with the pictures
• extensive reading: enjoyment of discovering and learning from the text. The reading corner, school library…
• intensive reading: Spratt. Opposite of the las one.
  Examining and studying the language, reading for detail. Putting the events in chronological order.

STAGE CLASSIFICATION AND READING ACTIVITIES

• Pre reading : In this phase children predict about what they think is happening next before they/teacher read it. Increase the reader’s knowledge of what they’re about to read to help them to understand. Look some pictures, tell what you know about the topic…
• While reading : In this stage children can develop the strategies to help them understand the text. Can be collaborative
  running reading, use website or jigsaw reading.
• Post reading : Students summarise, reflect or question what they’ve just read through activities. Telling someone about what we have read is a natural reaction. Discussion, debate, reviews…

SYNTHETIC PHONICS AND ANALYTIC PHONICS

Analytic phonics children are taught to recognize whole words by sight, and later to break down the word into the smaller units of sound. It isn’t clear how much time will it take to learn it.
Synthetic phonics is a method of teaching where words are broken up into the smallest units of sound (phonemes). Children leant how to make connections between graphemes and phonemes.
Jolly Phonics as a Synthetic method
It uses a multi sensory approach where each letter sound is introduced with actions, stories and songs. It teaches the letter sounds in 7 groups of 6 letters. Pupils are able to read a range of easily decodable words sooner.
/t//a//i//n/ all in the first group they can read the words pin, sat, tin
Pupils are encouraged to use their arm while they pronounce the sound to make the blending process easier.
The use of synthetic phonics doesn’t exclude the use of analytic phonics

Question 4

Written expression: from the interpretation to the production of texts

Answer 4

The emphasis was shifted to oral comprehension and expression.The audio lingual and audiovisual approaches emphasized the basic patterns of spoken language.But the teaching of writing remained the same as before, writing was to be used to reinforce the knowledge of orthography, morphology and sentence patterns.
Any imperfection in language were attributed to a lack of knowledge of syntax and vocabulary and so the mistakes were forced to be studied or repeated.
Our pupils, specially the youngest ones, are still coping with the problems of learning to write in Spanish, such as handwriting, punctuation and layout. Therefore, we must be especially sensitive to the different writing demands we are making on our pupils in the FL class and be aware of variety of ways of supporting their writing.
WRITTEN SKILLS BY MATHEWS

• Graphical skill include writing graphemes, spelling, punctuation, capitalisation and format The most difficult or important are spelling and format.
• Grammatical skill refer to out pupils’ ability to successfully use a variety of sentence patterns and constructions.
• Stylistic or expressive skills refer to our pupils’ ability to express precise meanings in a variety of styles or registers. These skills may not be very important to our pupils but the lack of awareness in this respect may hinder further learning.
• Rethorical skills refer to the pupils’ ability to use cohesion devices in order to link parts of a text into logically related sequences
• Organisational skills involve the sequencing of ideas as well as the ability to reject irrelevant information and summarise relevant points. This is a skill that some of our pupils will find difficult in Spanish, so we’ll have to practise it once we reach the sentence level.

STAGE CLASSIFICATION AND WRITTEN ACTIVITIES

• Presentation The teacher presents the new language in a meaningful context. Through stories on the board, showing flashcards, predicting and matching for the first time the written word and the image
• Practice The purpose is to practise handwriting and spelling apart from learning new vocabulary Make lists of known words, picture dictionaries, match and trace the words, do word searches, label the picture, word dictation At sentence level, children can: Do running dictation, write speech bubbles for comics, sequence or number sentences and copy, answer questions, dictogloss Fluency in writing is important for children to draft whole paragraphs and texts by the end of Primary Education.
• Production having something to communicate is always the best motivation. Harmer in his book How to teach writing studied the importance of the teacher’s role at every stage. Teacher should act as: assistant, resource, evaluator and editor Some activities are: Projects, first line last line, e mails, booklets, application letters

CORRECTING WRITTEN WORK
If we are correcting their written work, we must always remember to react to the content of the work, showing the pupil where the work was effective and where it wasn’t. We may use symbols, some examples:

• WO Word order: I go to school always at 9
• S Spelling error: There is a buterfly there
• G Grammar mistake: She has ten year old

Peer correction, where children correct their peers using a highlighter pen or simply giving them clues to do the checking using stamps or stickers drawing happy or unhappy faces