CURSUL DE PREGTIRE PENTRU TITULARIZARE

LIMBA ENGLEZ PARTEA I

Warm up
Express freely your opinion on the following:
1. I teach each unit of the book in the same way.
2. I talk too much in my lessons.
3. The best topic for a conversation is one that interests the teacher.
4. Mistakes are best corrected as soon as the students make them.
5. Competences are semantically identical with skills.
6.There is no difference between competences and objectives.
Questions to be considered when teaching English
1. What do we teach?
a. Language systems (5; knowing)
b. Language (macro)skills (4; doing)
Language Systems
The sounds (phonology);
The meaning of the individual words or groups of words (lexis or vocabulary);
How the words interact with each other within the sentence (grammar);
The use to which the words are put in particular situations (function). Analysis of how
these sentences relate (or don't relate) to each other (known as discourse)
Questions to be considered when teaching English
2. Why do we teach? Aims:
1. to develop competences in the english language;
2. to increase the students general knowledge of the English language;
3. Why do students (or people) learn English?
Basically, to acquire new skills and to develop new competences in English (either
because they have moved to a new place or because they need English at school.
Where do we teach/ learn?
4. Where do we teach/ learn?
a. in what contexts?
b. in what class arrangements?
CEFR the 6 levels
A1 Beginner/Elementary
A2 Pre-Intermediate
B1 Intermediate
B2 Upper Intermediate/Post-Intermediate
C1 Advanced
C2 Near native-speaker level

Key concepts
Method = a way of teaching.
Procedure = an ordered sequence of techniques that describe the way in which you do
an activity (first, you open your books, then you go to page, etc.)
Technique = a type of activity (such as silent viewing, i.e. playing a video with no
sound).
Activity/Task = The basic building block of a lesson.
ELT METHODS
The grammar-translation method
The direct method
The audio-lingual method
The cognitive code approach
The notional-functional approach
The communicative approach
the total physical response
the natural approach
task-based learning
lexical approaches
Teaching the Language Systems
A general model for introducing new language - Harmer (1991):
1. lead-in;
2. elicitation;
3. explanation;
4. accurate reproduction;
5. immediate creativity.
Task Introduce second-type conditionals to Intermediate-level Students.
Teaching Pronunciation
Sample activities:
1. minimal pair drills (made of two words which differ in only one sound), based on
sound differences. To use short lists of words associated with pictures:
bad bed
reach rich
live leave
2. tongue twisters: Three thin trees and three tall trees.
3. phonetic transcriptions of texts;
4. a phonemic chart on the wall of your classroom and use it.
Teaching Vocabulary/ Lexis

Teaching words = teaching:

Single-word vocabulary items;
Collocations: traffic jam;
Multiword items: someone you can talk to.

Pre-teaching vocabulary
Match the words with the pictures.
Match the words with the definitions.
Divide these words into two groups (e.g. food words and hobby words)
Label the items in a picture with the right names.
Complete gapped sentences with words from a list.
Sample Activities
Can you guess the meaning of ?
Find words in the text that mean
Find in the text synonyms/ antonyms of
Find words that the writer uses to describe

Presentation of new words

Can be made through:
demonstration: gestures, mime, facial expressions;
visual aids: pictures, objects, drawings;
verbal explanation: by means of definition, analysis (derivatives), context,
translation, synonyms, antonyms
Teaching Grammar
Two approaches: the deductive or the inductive approach.
The deductive approach: from theory (explanations, grammar rules) to examples
(phrases or sentences). The structure is introduced overtly, the teacher stating its name,
meaning, form, usage, exceptions, etc. and then giving examples to illustrate it.
The inductive approach: the students see examples of language and then work out
the rules.
Teaching the Language Skills
FOUR BASIC SKILLS OF:
WRITING,
SPEAKING,
READING
LISTENING.
Teaching the Language Skills
Writing and speaking involve language production and are called productive skills;
Reading and listening involve receiving messages and are called receptive skills.
Teaching the Receptive Skills (Reading and Listening)
Subskills:

scanning extracting specific information;

skimming getting the general idea;
guessing meaning from context;
reading / listening for detailed comprehension.
Predictive skills = at the basis of the expectation principle. Efficient readers /
listeners predict what they are going to read / hear.

Teaching the receptive skills

Harmers model:
1. Lead-in the Ss and the T prepare themselves for the task and familiarize
themselves with the topic of the reading / listening exercise. Purpose - to create
expectations
2. The teacher directs task to follow a During this stage the teacher makes sure that
the students know what they have to do;
3. Students read / listen and perform the task;
4. The teacher directs feedback helps the students see if they performed the task
successfully;
5. The teacher organizes a follow-up task asks them to create something based on
the text; work based on reading/ listening texts can lead to discussion or written work
in related areas.
PREDICTION
The following activities may be used for prediction:
minidiscussion on the topic;
discussion of a headline / title;
discussion of the first line / paragraph;
brainstorming related to the topic;
announce the topic and ask the students to think of questions they expect to be
answered by the text;
announce the topic and the characters involved and ask the students to predict their
attitudes and opinions.
While reading/listening
Tasks to be performed while reading / listening:
gap-filling exercises;
tables, charts, diagrams to be completed with information given by the text;
true / false statements;
note-taking;
find synonyms / antonyms for certain words in the text;
asking the students to guess the title;
asking them to answer a series of questions.

Teaching Listening
We may speak about:

 intensive listening occurring in the classroom;

extensive listening occurring away from the classroom.

Teaching Listening
Principles:
Encourage students to listen as often and as much as possible.
Help students prepare to listen: have them look at pictures, discuss the topic, help
them get engaged with it.
Play the audio track or extracts of it several times, if needed.
Encourage students to respond to the content of a listening text, not just to the
language.
New language structure
Scrivener (2005) differentiates three categories within the umbrella of
presentation:
1. teacher explanation;
2. guided discovery;
3. self-directed discovery.

TASK
Classify the following grammar-clarification activities as mainly (E) explanation,
(G) guided discovery or (S) self-directed discovery?
1 You write some sentences (all using the past perfect) on the board, but with the
words mixed up, then hand the board pen to the students and leave the room. S
2 You tell a story about your weekend. Every time you use a verb in the past simple,
you repeat it and write it on the board. At the end, you write 'past simple' on the board
and explain that you used all these verbs in the past because the story happened last
Saturday. E
3 You lecture about the construction of conditional sentences. E
4 You create a board situation, clarify a specific meaning and then elicit appropriate
sentences from the students or model them yourself. G
5 You hand out a list of twenty If sentences. You ask students to work together, discuss
and find out what the 'rules' are. S

Practice grammar
The following types of pattern practice drills can be used:
1. repetition drills;
2. substitution one word in the sentence is replaced by another of the same class:
We ate at the restaurant last week.
They at home yesterday. etc.
3. replacement the substitution of one word in the sentence triggers changes, but the
basic structure is preserved:
I come to school every day.
She
. yesterday.

 4. transformation or conversion affirmative into negative or interrogative, active into

passive; singular into plural, present into past.
5. completion requires production of a sentence to make it complete:
I want a
I want to
6. question-answer: Do you learn English? Yes, I do. / No, I dont.
LISTENING
Listening may be practised for:
specific vocabulary,
specific information
or meaning and message.
The acquisition of each subskill requires the use of various activities.
Listening for specific vocabulary
In the case of listening for specific vocabulary - fill in the blanks or simply put down
certain words they hear in a text (like names of vehicles, names of plants etc.).
Listening for specific information
For listening for specific information - ask them to say if certain sentences are true
or false, or ask them to fill in a grid (with characters names, age, place and time of
certain events, etc.). It is not necessary for the students to understand the whole text.
Listening for meaning and message
In the case of listening for meaning and message, we may use multiple choice tasks,
asking them to choose the correct answer to a set of questions, for instance.
Procedure for listening
set the task;
play the recording;
check if the students performed the task;
if not, play the recording again as often as necessary.
If you suggest several tasks, set them in turns, and then play the recording and get the
students answers and offer feedback after each of them.

Teaching Reading
A distinction can be made between extensive reading, that students do away from the
classroom and intensive reading that students do in the classroom.
Other useful distinctions would be between authentic texts and adapted texts, and
between authentic texts and artificially created texts.
Different types of texts require different reading techniques: we may use - sentencelevel reading vs. global reading techniques
linear reading vs. skimming scanning,
reading aloud vs. silent reading.
Sentence-level reading and linear reading = reading each and every word and
sentence
The global reading techniques - scanning and skimming (silent reading techniques)

 Skimming = reading fast to extract the main idea. E.g.: the way in which we read a
magazine or we evaluate a book to see whether we would like to read it or not.
A typical skimming question: Is this story set in a restaurant or in a school?
Scanning
In the case of scanning we photograph the entire page to perceive certain elements
that catch our eye. In this way, we locate specific information quickly, without reading
the whole text.
Typical scanning question would be What time does the museum open?
Reading tasks
The following ideas for reading tasks can be used:
put the paragraphs/ illustrations of the text in the right order;
insert the sentences in the appropriate places;
find words in the text that mean the same as those in the list;
act out the dialogues, story, etc.;
pick out the texts with missing sentences/ paragraphs;
decide whether information is missing before or after the text;
select a sentence/ paragraph that does not belong to the text.
Teaching Speaking
In short, the 6 characteristics of communicative activities are:
desire to communicate;
communicative purpose;
attention focused on content, not form;
variety of language;
no teacher intervention;
little materials control.
Communicative activities
Condition the existence of an information gap between the students - one S knows
something that another S does not.
Communicative activities types
Oral communicative activities designed to provoke spoken communication
between the students and/ or between the teacher and the students.
Written communicative activities - designed to provoke written communication
between the students and/ or between the teacher and the students.

Teaching Writing some activities

note-taking
summarizing
instant writing: Complete the sentence: I will never forget the time I
using music and pictures ask the students to describe the scene from a film that
might accompany a certain piece of music that they have just heard; describe a picture;
guess which the picture being described is.
writing brochures and guides;

writing poetry.
Written communicative activities, like:
exchanging letters The Agony Column experts giving advice on various topics;
co-operative writing writing a story; each student writes a sentence.

PARTEA A- II- A
Testing
Testing is an intrinsic part of the learning process. It includes all the techniques and
procedures the teacher uses to promote and assess learning.
According to whether they take place before, during or after teaching, tests may be:
placement tests, given at the beginning of the learning process;
progress, diagnostic and achievement tests, given during the learning process;
proficiency tests, given after the learning process.
Placement tests
Intended to provide information which will place students at the stage or in the part of
the teaching programme most appropriate to their abilities.

Progress and diagnostic tests

Progress tests are small-scale tests meant to verify recent, short-term learning; short
duration.
Diagnostic tests are larger-scale tests, covering information taught during an entire
unit or even semester; longer duration.
Achievement (attainment) tests
Designed to establish how successful individual students, groups of students or even
courses have been in achieving objectives. They are comprehensive tests set at the end
of a school year, of a teaching cycle or of a language course.
Proficiency tests
Designed to measure students ability in a language regardless of any training they
may have had in that language.
Other topics
Subjective testing (it depends largely on the personal decision of the Marker) vs.
objective testing (there is a clear correct answer)
Discrete-point tests (testing specific individual language points; marked objectively)
vs. global-integrative tests (a number of items or skills tested in the same question;
marked subjectively)
Some common discrete-item testing techniques
Gap-fill (single sentence; cloze; multiple choice)
Sentence transformation (rephrase..)
Sentence construction/reordering - brother / much / he's / than / his / taller
True-false
Direct items vs. indirect items

 Direct items actually performing the task; usually associated with productive skills
(speaking; writing)
Direct speaking item actually speaking in the foreign language; what would that
mean in writing?
Indirect items
Indirect items try to measure student
knowledge & ability by getting at what lies beneath their receptive & productive
skills.
Thus, if we believe that grammatical knowledge contributes to writing ability, then a
grammar test may be used as an indirect test of writing.
Indirect test item types
Multiple choice questions (MCQs)
The journalist was _____ by enemy fire as he tried to send a story by radio.
a wronged b wounded c injured d damaged
Advantages easy to score; elimination of error.
Disadvantages difficult to construct; time-consuming
CLOZE - the deletion of every nth word in a text (somewhere every fifth or tenth
word, ideally 9th). Procedure random.
Example: They sat on a bench attached 1 _____ a picnic table. Below them they 2
_____ see the river gurgling between overgrown 3 _____. The sky was diamond blue,
with 4 _____ white clouds dancing in the freshening 5 _____.
CLOZE
Dis.: - some items are more difficult to supply than others
- there may be several possible answers.
Adv.: - it shows understanding of the context
- a knowledge of that word and how it functions.
Cloze is not identical to fill-in the blanks. In cloze types, the deletion is
systematically. With filling-in, it is subjective.

Indirect items
Transformation items - Finish each of the following sentences in such a way that it is
as similar as possible in meaning to the sentence printed before it.
Im sorry that I didnt get her an anniversary present.
I wish___________________________.
Reordering items
Put the words in order to make correct sentences:
called / I / Im / in / sorry / wasnt / when / you.
The correct verbal form
Derivatives
Finding errors in sentences.

Direct testing Speaking

Direct test items that meet the criteria mentioned above:
An interview questioning candidates about
themselves.

 Info gap activities where a S has to find out info

either from an interlocutor or from another S.
Decision-making activities, such as showing paired candidates photos of people and
asking them to order them from best to worst dressed.
Using pictures for candidates to compare/contrast, whether they can both see them or
whether they have found similarities and differences without being able to look at each
others material (as in many communication games).
$ Role-plays where Ss perform tasks such as introducing themselves, ringing a theater
to book tickets, etc.

Direct testing Reading

$ Matching written descriptions with pictures of what they describe.
$ Transferring written info to charts, graphs, maps, etc.
$ Choosing the best summary of a paragraph or a whole text.
$ Matching jumbled headings with paragraphs.
$ Inserting sentences provided by the examiner in the correct place in the text.
Direct testing Writing
Writing compositions and stories.
$ Transactional letters where candidates reply to a job ad, or write a complaint to a
hotel based on info given in the exam.
$ Info leaflets about their school or a place in their town.
$ A set of instructions for some common task.
$ Newspaper articles about a recent event.
Direct testing Listening
Completing charts with facts & figures from a text.
$ Identifying which of a # of objects (pictures on test) is being described.
$ Identifying which (out of 2 or 3 speakers) says what.
$ Identifying whether speakers are enthusiastic, encouraging, in disagreement, or
amused.
$ Following directions on a map & identifying the correct house, place, etc
PLANNING

PLANNING = imagining the lesson before it actually happens (cf. Scrivener)

Fundamentals:
the learners;
the aims / objectives of the lesson (the aims are general, the objectives specific);
the teaching point;
the tasks and teaching procedures;
the challenge;
the materials;
classroom management.
Types of lessons:
focusing on one skill: reading, writing, speaking, listening;
grammar lessons;

 lessons of revision;
combined / mixed lessons, which are most common.
MISCELLANEA
Aim vs. objective:
AIM= general goal; it broadly focuses on what you plan to do and achieve with your
students in a lesson.
OBJECTIVE (OR LEARNING OUTCOME) = specific goal; smaller steps that make
up the aims.
Aim vs. Objective
E.g. Aim - to express time in English
Objective - By the end of the lesson, students will identify the time from picture
prompts and clocks and accurately express various times verbally and in writing, using
phrases such as, quarter to, half past, 10 minutes till/to, and 20 past.
Formulating aims and objectives
Aims are usually written in amorphous terms using words like: learn, know,
understand, appreciate.
Objectives are usually termed with the help of the future: will be able to; they refer
to specific things. They may be classified into:
Objectives classification
Cognitive
Affective
Physical
Aims vs. Objectives example
A Lesson on American Slang
Aim: to understand and become proficient at identifying the different types of spoken
English.
Objective: By the end of the lesson, students will be able to identify American slang
terms.
Objectives:
Cognitive: Students will identify and list 5 slang terms they have heard from their
peers.
Affective: Student will choose 3 of the most offensive slang terms from a list
developed by the entire class.
Physical: Students will create expressive gestures to go with their favorite slang
terms.
Competence vs. Skill
Competence (Harmer) = what we know; the state of being well qualified
Skill: Reading
Writing
Listening
Speaking
GENERAL COMPETENCE (knowledge; attitudes and resources; know-how)

COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCES
1. Linguistic competence (deals with the structure of a language)
2. Discursive competence (capacity to build and organize an oral discourse)
3. Socio-cultural competence socio-cultural conditions, i.e. politeness rules
4. Pragmatic competence the functional use of language, how to employ language in a
particular situation (for instance, in an interview).
5. Intercultural competence - knowledge of cultural values.
Skill and Subskill
Skill Reading
Subskill: - Reading to extract specific information
- Reading for detailed understanding.
Didactic activity (Scrivener):
- familiarise yourself with the material
- lead-in show picture, invite comments
- set up the activity- give instructions
- doing the activity
- close the activity and inviting feedback.
TESTING
establish the objective of the test
establish the content to be assessed (content, objective, level, type of items
write the test
write the marking scheme
it should contain the correct answers;
it should mention the points granted for each topic;
apply the marching scheme.