Reading: What students say about new words.

Many students find difficulties when dealing with reading tasks. According to Tricia Hedge´s book these are some of the strategies students use get over them:

1) "I think if there is a Spanish word like it."
2) "I start again from the beginning of the sentence."
3) "I write it in my notebook."

In my view, the first strategy can be very tricky. I mean that if the word has a literal Spanish translation and this translation fits in the context being presented it can be useful for the student. However, if the word has different meanings and the student gets the wrong one, the reading can be turned into a more difficult task for him.
The second strategy can be very useful for the student, because by re-reading the sentence he can get the meaning of the word or phrase from the context.
The third strategy is very useful as well, because students can have their notebooks with new words which can help them remember their meanings.
All in all, every student will have different strategies to learn new words taken from a reading task. In my opinion, if these strategies help our students remember and even use them, they are all useful for them.

Halloween task

I found a great task about halloween. It is a quiz about the history of this festivity. I think it would be great to use it as a competition game after dealing with some reading task about the history of halloween in class. I would include this quiz because I think that It might be very motivating for students to be involved in a competition in the net. Besides, this will give them a purpose for reading. If you are also interested try this page and find out how much you know about the history of halloween:

http://www.theholidayspot.com/halloween/quiz.htm

HAVE FUN!!!!!!

Hedge: Are there any listening tasks with which you would not use a pre-listening stage?

I do not think so. In my view, the pre-listening stage is always necessary when we deal with listening tasks. We need to prepare our students in order to carry out the listening succesfully and this can only be achieved if we help them by using the pre-listening stage. No matter if the listening task is easy or difficult, the use of this stage will allow them to get prepared to what they are going to listen about, so they will not feel at a loss when they start carrying out the task. If we get rid of this stage we can generate an unnecessary feeling of frustration in our students if they cannot understand the listening task. I think that the pre-listening stage is a must and that it is our job to help students succeed in language learning.