Teach English in Yinghong Zhen - Qingyuan Shi

This unit was concerned with the productive skills necessary for fluency and accuracy with a language. These two productive skills are speaking and writing. While both are equally important to a student's full understanding of and confidence in using the new language, strengthening these two skills require different work and possibly even a different form of educational discipline. In terms of speaking, accuracy and fluency are the equally important facets to a student's successful and confident use of language. While accuracy and fluency are fostered by different activities and a different disciplinary standard, this unit did a very good job of showing how a typical ESA speaking activity can strengthen both in a fluid and creative way that is both informative and interesting to the students. This unit's use of the example lesson is very helpful because it gives a good basic outline of how the skill can be used with different classroom designs and allows for one to also think about how a speaking activity can be extrapolated to another type of lesson plan (i.e. patchwork). The second part of this unit, which covered handwriting, made an important note of how good handwriting and being able to differentiate the spelling of different words that sound the same are two hurdles for students. The importance of noting that for some students, the Western European vocabulary may be altogether new and therefore extra challenging was a helpful point made in this chapter. Finally, the examples of games and their uses was outlined at the end of the chapter, offering some useful ideas for how to engage students in fostering and strengthening their productive skills of speaking and writing.