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experience, integrating with skills other than reading, using students’ creativity.

12.3.9.3. Teaching aim: To use text as a stimulus for speaking

The emphasis here may still be on using vocabulary from a particular lexical field, using certain functions or grammatical forms, but it is also on communication skills i.e., the ability to communicate meanings.

Teachers often complain that their students are unwilling to talk in class. There may be a number of reasons for this unwillingness:

Teacher factors:

—    over-correction - if students are corrected every time they make a

mistake, they will tend to avoid saying anything complicated or difficult,

—    the teacher talks all the time,

—    lack of feedback - if the teacher does not respond to the content of

what the students say.

Task factors:

—    wrong instructions,

—    students are not given enough time to formulate opinions,

—    students formulate superficial ideas to which they are not very committed,

—    vague, open-ended ąuestions; imprecision,

—    insufficient data - students do not know or remember enough about

the topie to have definite opinions.

—    lack of engagement, interesting approach.

Leamer factors:

—    boredom - students have discussed the topie too many times before,

—    students expect morę dominant characters to take over discussion.

These factors, particularly task and leamer factors, can be compensated for by giving texts and appropriate pre-reading activities.

12.3.9.4. Effective ‘stimulus’ tasks

Tasks need to be stimulating to work effectively. The key features of such tasks are the following:

• give ideas the students can agree or disagree with,

•    give students time to consider*

•    are learner-centred, the teacher does not control the discussion,

•    involve students writing down or making a notę of their opinions so that:

-    they can remember what they thought,^;

-    they are committed to their own ideas,

-    they are les'ś^:' likely to be influenced by morę dominant personalities,

•    involve pre-discussion in pairs.

12.3.10. Tasks / assignments for self-study

1.    Find a number of reading activities and try to describe which reading techniąues are practised through them — for reference see point 3 above: Reading techniąues (based on Tanner and Green, 1998).

2.    Find a text of considerable length and skim through to locate key vocabulary in order to get the gist.

3.    Scan through television programme and find a suitable programme for a fifteen-year-old interested in computers.

12.4. The Writing Skill 12.4.1. What is writing?

“Of the four Communications skills [...] probably the most demanding is writing” (Tighe, 1975:22). It is, a productive skill and yet, the average language leamer uses this skill least of all four (Cross, 1992). Teachers should start with short sentences and then essays that is start with very controlled type of exercise and then proceed to complex type. The teaching of this skill should proceed through the stages of controlled, guided to free writing (Doff, 1988; Harmer, 1991; Haycraft, 1978). Similarly to another productive skill - speąking, writing is a means of communicating feelings, thoughts, ideas, problems and the like. It is, however, “less spontaneous and morę

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