WRITING

Writing is a process which includes planning, drafting, revising, editing, sharing, evaluating and other strategies. Writing is one of the most important four skills.

Planning or prewriting is and activity do it in the classroom that encourage Ss to write as: group brainstorming (ideas), clustering (words), Wh-questions (How, Who, what, why, where, when), etc.

In drafting or writing, the Ss visualize important facts.

Sharing or responding can be oral or in writing. Peer responding can be meaningful by having Ss responding to each other texts in small groups or in pairs.

Revising is to motivate, examinate, review and see the feedback of the writing activity.
Editing is important because Ss can see the connection between an exercise and their own activity.

The evaluating strategy helps Ss to be more responsible for their own writing.

So, as teachers we have the responsibility of creating and engaging contexts for Ss writing, with meaningful, motivating and new experiences.

“For successful writing activities, it is important to create the need of communication if we want to bring communicative skills to our classrooms”.


LISTENING

Listening is a receptive skill that includes responding activities rather than producing, meaningful activities and real use of the contexts, because all people listen in different ways, depending on the reasons for do it as specific information, details and attitudes.

This skill helps to understand stories, songs, readings, to identify different accents and speeds of speech because some people speak more slowly and with more pauses and others speak fast.

Listening involves understanding spoken language when the speaker uses body language to support the communication through gestures and facial expressions. It helps the listener to understand what the speaker is saying.

This skill also includes hearing the difference between common sounds, identifying important words, recognizing differences in the information as commands or questions, identifying main ideas and understanding a variety of sources as teachers, classmates, visitors, cassettes, videos, etc.

Some types of listening comprehension activities are: true/false, detecting mistakes, guessing definitions, skimming general information, scanning limited information, answering questions, note-taking, paraphrasing (rewriting the listening text in different words), summarizing, solving problems, predicting and interpreting.

The activities in a listening lesson can be developing by using 3 stages:

Introductory activities (plays, songs, topics, titles, pictures).
Main activities (comprehensive activities).
Post-activities (talk about the topic and relate it with our lives and give opinions about the activity).

"For this language skill it is very important to look for interesting activities, to have a clear objective and discuss the opinions and suggestions with the Ss, because they must to play an active role in listening activities".