Herman Chiu

w505a Fall 2006

The Title - Teaching English to Non-native Speakers

I myself am a non-native English speaker. I had lived in the USA for almost ten years before I came back to Taiwan teaching English to Taiwanese high school students. I have been encountering numerous difficulites in teaching during the past twelve years. The biggest problem falls into how I can help students to communicate with native speakers. To solve the problem - how to enhance their ability in both listening and speaking - becomes crucial.

The Introduction

The activities here focus on the following two aspects:

1. To find some educational web sites providing interesting programs that will arouse students' interests and keep them learning.

2. To locate web sites that offer interactive learning programs specializing in listening and speaking according to a learner's English level.

The web sites must be reliable and easy to get on both at school and at home so that teachers can employ them into classroom teaching, and students can preview, review, and practice at home or libraries.

The Tasks

Students will have to get on the web sites to find programs, exercises and complete required homework according to assigned topics.

The Process

The following are the steps that each student has to go through at the lab, libraries, or at home:

1. Go to the web sites below, find at least three listening exercises on each site, and take the tests.

http://esl.about.com/od/listening/

http://www.esl-lab.com/index.htm

2. Go to the web sites below, find at least three listening exercises on each site, and take the tests.

http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk

http://www.english-hilfen.de

3. The teacher will have to copy down some exercises from the web sites above, and give tests to the class to see what kind of progress the students have made.

The Evaluation

There is only one way to measure each student's performance, through in-class tests. Scores will be solely based on the correct answers each student gets on each test in class.

The Conclusion

This is a four-week activity. After four weeks' intensive, repeated practices, it is hoped that each student's listening comprehension will be improved considerably. You will no longer be afraid of listening to a foreigners' talking, you will not have to guess what he/she is talking, and you will be more confident of using English learned to talk to native speakers.

The Teacher Page

Introduction: This webquest focuses on helping non-native speaking students to get more practices in listening comprehension.

Learners: It can be for either 7-9 graders or 10-12 graders, depending on their proficiency levels.

Conclusion: To the students as well as general public learning English in Taiwan, reading and writing materials are abundant on the market, and one can practice reading and writing on one's own with the help of the materials bought. What they lack is a total environment of listening and speaking. Therefore, providing more opportunities in both listening and speaking is essential in order to improve their communication ability in English. Listening comes first, of course. Without understanding what others are talking about, there will be no communicating, or even worse, lead to misunderstanding.