Category Archives: Videos
Terminology for Reading and Listening
Reading for gist/Skimming
Reading quickly to get a general understanding of a written text, eg reading a description of a city to find out if it sounds like somewhere you’d like to visit.
Reading for specific information/Scanning
Searching for a particular piece of information in a written text, eg reading a description of a city only to find out which country it’s in.
Reading/listening for detail
Reading or listening more carefully so that you get a full understanding of the text, eg reading a description of a city to find out everything about it.
Listening for gist
Getting a general understanding of something you hear, eg listening to the weather forecast and deciding you might need to take an umbrella when you go out.
Listening for specific information
Listening for a particular piece of information, eg listening to the weather forecast to find out what the temperature will be tomorrow.
Inferring meaning
Making guesses about what is not stated explicitly in a text, eg listening or reading a conversation and deciding that the people are brother and sister without them saying so.
Coherence
Organising ideas in a logical way when speaking or writing so that the listener or reader can follow our ideas.
Cohesion
Joining sentences together using words like and, but and because so our language flows more easily.
Interactive strategies
Strategies we use when we are speaking, eg showing you are listening to other people by saying things like, mmmm or uh-uh or oh!
Turn taking
An interactive strategy which is about knowing when you can join in a conversation and signalling when you think someone else should speak.
Fluency
For speaking; this is speaking without a lot of hesitation and too many long pauses. For writing; this means you can write without stopping for a long time to think about what to write.
© UCLES 2016
Nursery Rhymes
Rhymes can be used to teach new vocabulary and to enhance early reading skills in lots of ways.
Each rhyme is really a miniature story that children can act out, sing or retell from memory.
The students gain confidence in retelling each story to friends, parentes or in class.
When the children act out these short rhymes they are speaking, listening and moving.
Because they are short stories it is easy to memorize, take turns and participate.
Here are some pictures of the characters from a variety of rhymes that could be used in many ways. As necklaces, finger puppets or stapled onto headbands or popsicle sticks.
So, let´s have fun and learn some nursery rhymes!
Children can manipulate these figures as they retell the rhyme.
Here is a summary of the stories.
Nursery Rhymes provide great practice with concepts in early reading.
Because the children sing and memorize these rhymes most of them are successful “reading” them.
Reading Activity
My students are beginning to read in English and I am very proud of them.
Em Português
Meus alunos estão começando a ler em Inglês e estou muito orgulhosa deles
Different kinds of knowledge
think about the different types of knowledge that your learners have.
| Linguistic knowledge | Knowledge of English and of other languages |
| World knowledge | ‘General’ knowledge or specialist knowledge |
| Sociocultural knowledge | Knowledge about communities and social practices, how language is used by different groups of people, in different situations, for different functions |
- What types of knowledge do your learners have?
What do we do when we listen and read?
In the previous step we talked about how reading and listening to different things affects the way we read or listen. These different ways of reading and listening require different reading and listening skills. In the world of English language teaching, there are specific terms for each of these different skills. Look at the descriptions below – do they match the ideas that you had? After you’ve read about the different skills, look at the Quizlet activity to see how much you remember.
Reading and listening skills
General understanding
You can read or listen for general understanding. This is what you do when you read through an article quickly to see what it’s about. For reading, this is called skimming. It’s also sometimes called reading or listening for gist.
Specific information
Sometimes you might read or listen to find specific information. For example, maybe you are looking through an article about teaching abroad. You have a particular country you know you would like to work in, and you want to find out exactly where to find a job and how to apply. In this case you’ll read only the information in the text about that country. You wouldn’t read everything as you would if you were reading or listening for general understanding. This is reading for specific information.
Scanning
This is a bit like looking for specific information but is used only for reading, and is about finding particular bits of a text. For example, looking at a website for jobs, you might look through for a particular word or phrase. This could be a specific word, for example a qualification, or a specific number, such as the pay or the number of posts.
How to agree with a positive or negative sentence.
Watch, learn and practice to master!
Como começou a ser celebrado o Thanksgiving
Assista ao vídeo e entenda a história
Resposta à Greta
Excelente vídeo com uma mensagem maravilhosa sobre a palestra da menina Greta
Paula Lyra ELT School 
