1.

You want to improve your students speaking as an essential part of his language, but when and how do you consider a speaking activity should be introduced? Describe and justify your strategies.
Speaking is one of the four linguistic skills. Together with writing, it is what we call a productive skill and can be defined as the process through which speakers articulate phonological features of the language comprehensibly. Besides it contributes to achieve communicative competence, which is the main goal of foreign language learning according to our education system. Regarding learning to speak in a foreign language, most people think it will be relatively easy, because in both L1 and L2 they have to go through the same stages, but the time devoted to every process will differ quite a lot. In this sense, as for the L1, it takes around a year for children start producing their first words. However, in L2 or foreign language learning, the amount of time devoted to each speaking period is notably shorter and, although at the early stages of learning, students can produce words and sentences very quickly, they become fossilized at the last stage. However, the sooner children start to produce even words in a second language, the better for their language development. The speaking activities must always start from sounds to words and then to sentences. At the initial stages of L2 learning, it is important that children learn some vocabulary or simple structures, as greetings or introductions, which will help them feel more confident about how much English they know, for example, classroom language. This type of language is repeated regularly and our students will learn it very quickly. Progressively, teachers will provide them with more complex speaking activities, including games, oral drills, songs, dialogues, interviews and so on. These activities range from offering controlled practice to those which offer communication practice in a less-controlled environment, more similar to real life communication. The most important aspect to take into account is that the speaking session must be motivating for children and always put into context. Besides, it must follow a three stage structure that we will describe now. First, a presentation stage where we will prepare our students for the task and introduce the topic of the speaking activity. The main objective is that they can understand the meaning and the function, as well as the spelling, of the new words. The activities at this stage are aimed to create interest, build confidence and facilitate comprehension. Some examples would be produce a model sentence or check understanding, by asking for examples. With very young learners, the use of flashcards or realia would help them to understand the words more easily. Then, there would be a practice stage, which is normally done under controlled settings, where students basically imitate the teacher. The teacher will begin by showing the pronunciation of the word to the students. Then, choral and individual repetition can be used to test the students ability to produce the sound. Activities to be included at this stage are: - Drills, which can be choral or individual. We can also use transformation, substitution or functional drills. - Short dialogues, which must use relevant and appropriate language, realistic situations and be motivating.

Finally, there is a Production stage, where students will use the language in free more creative ways and check how much they have learnt. The students must be able to use the language freely, accurately and appropriately, with the correct pronunciation The following activities are designed to provoke spoken communication between students or between the teacher and the students. We can find seven different categories: - Reaching a consensus, where students have to agree with each other after a certain amount of discussion. - Group discussions, where students work together in a group in order to reach a joint conclusion on a given topic. - Relaying instruction, where students give each other instructions, such as in describe and draw. - Communication games, such as role-plays, guessing, puzzles, card games, etc. This are designed to make learning fun. - Problem solving, where students are encouraged to talk together to find a solution to a set of problems or tasks. - Talking about yourself, which is often useful at the beginning of classes to warm thing up or to create a good and positive atmosphere. - Simulation and role play, which are teachers favourite tool. All these activities must have a desire to communicate, a communicative purpose, different varieties of language and limited teacher intervention. Whether the students speak throughout the lesson or at the end as a practice is up to the teacher. Either way, it is the most important part of any classroom session. The teacher plays a very important role in each of the skills. During the first stage, he will control the situation so that students can understand the activity. Then, we will act as a monitor or corrector, as students will start to manipulate language. Finally, teacher will guide and facilitate the students learning process so that they are able to produce the language and communicate effectively.

2. How can we motivate children to write in English?

Writing is one of the four linguistic skills. Together with listening, it is what we call a productive skill and can be defined the ability to transform speech into symbols or graphemes. Besides it contributes to achieve communicative competence, which is the main goal of foreign language learning according to our education system. Before starting to design activities that motivate students to write, we must first take into account different aspects: First, we need to bear in mind that student must have developed some sub skills which are necessary for the development of their writing. Those skills are: First, graphic skills, which include graphemes, spelling and punctuation. Then we have grammatical skills, which refer to the students ability to successfully use a variety of sentence patterns and constructions. The third ones are stylistic skills, which refer to the students ability to express meanings in a variety of styles and registers. The following ones are rhetorical skills, which refer to the students ability to use cohesion devices in order to link parts of a text in a logical way.

Finally, we have organisational skills, which refer to the students ability to express their ideas in a clear way, rejecting irrelevant information. The second aspect to consider is the age and level of children. In the early stages, students will generally write very little. It is usual to use pictures and to ask them to copy words and short sentences which must be connected with their schoolwork or daily lives. Copying can be meaningful if thinking is involved in the copying process. Examples of meaningful copying activities: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Listing words, for example objects that can be found in a house. Putting lists of words in alphabetical order. Classifying words into categories: food, clothes, animals... Spelling activities, like crosswords. Games such as Bingo.

Then, as children progress in their learning, we can include more complex texts. That would be more creative, and would include choosing the right vocabulary, grammar, sentence patterns, spelling and layout; having ideas and joining them. These activities have a communicative purpose and a target audience. Keeping in mind the students age and interests, we could make the following classification: Personal writing: diaries, shopping lists, recipes, notes Social writing: e-mails, postcards, letters, invitations... Study writing: summaries, exams Creative writing: poetry, riddles, stories, songs

The main goal at this stage will be to motivate children to write. To do this we can follow these steps: 1. 2. 3. Explain them what is the purpose of the writing task. Help them with planning their ideas before writing. Encourage them to think about the message they want to convey.

4. Make them aware of the fact that someone will read their text so things must be explained as clearly as possible. Besides, there are other tools that we can use to motivate our children to write. The first one would be to use literature to inspire writing. We can very nice stories that can inspire children to write. Besides, by using children's literature, educators will provide students with a model of what good writing looks like. Another effective tool would be to go outside and try to find an item. Touch it, smell it, listen to it, look closely at it, and if it's safe, taste it. The best way to write about something is to experience it in a full way and then express your feelings and impressions about it. Poems can also be a motivating and creative way of writing. We can do activities with acrostics, with lantern poems (following a given structure) or using opposite words.

Another way to motivate children to write would be tell them that their work will be posted in the classroom. The will work much harder on those assignments. They will put extra effort into what they have to do, because they know others would read it.

3. How would you plan a listening and speaking activity in 1 st Cycle? Design a lesson and the types of activities you will carry out in your lesson. What considerations should be taken into account?

Listening and speaking are two of the four linguistic skills. They are said to be expressed through the oral medium. However, speaking is a productive skill, whereas listening is a receptive skill. They contribute to achieve communicative competence, which is the main goal of foreign language learning according to our education system. In this case, we are speaking about students in the first cycle. At this age, they are full of vitality and learn while they play, they move and do activities they love, as their motivation to learn a foreign language comes from the interest of the task and not the future usefulness of these teachings. Students are only 6 years old and are in the Pre-conceptual stage of their development, so they are quite much centred on themselves. Then, it is useful to choose topics that are related to childrens closest world. The best way to work on those two skills is by integrating them in the activities. It is impossible to speak in a conversation if you do not listen as well. If we imagine a language lesson as a chain, we can visualize how one activity can lead into other activities, each encompassing a different skill. TPR is an excellent resource to be used with young learners. This method, designed by James Asher believes in the importance of letting our students enjoy the process of learning and it also helps the more kinaesthetic children. We will divide it in two phases. The first one is modelling. Here we will issue the commands to the students and perform the actions with them. In the second one, students will demonstrate that they can understand the commands by performing them alone. The lesson I have designed will be divided into three stages and it will be developed using the song Head, shoulders, knees and toes, which teaches the parts of the body. In the pre-listening stage, we would show the students a picture of a boy and a girl and start pointing different parts of the body. We would ask them to repeat after us. Then we will ask the class, as a whole, to say the names of the body parts as we point to them on our body. We will use the same order of the song to allow the natural rhythmic pattern of the song to become familiar; as well as the language. Finally, we will play the game "Simon Says" using the words of the song. In the while listening, we would play the song twice, the first time showing the flashcards when the different words appear and the following one pointing directly to the different parts of the body and encouraging our students to do it as well. In the post listening part, we would introduce the speaking skills, as we would ask the student to sing the song while pointing at the different parts of the body. Then we will divide the class into groups. Each group must work collaboratively using the song and the actions; half the group must mime the song and the other half sing the song in time to the mime. Then they will swap roles.