Teaching productive skills in efl

TEACHING PRODUCTIVE SKILLS SPEAKING AND WRITING

Teaching productive skills in an EFL or ESL class is necessarily in every lesson. Although, it is clear that speaking, before writing, is the skillthat most of students want to develop. This is the reason why writing is seen as the Cinderella of the other three skills. Besides that, writing is a tedious process that requires students togenerate, organize ideas, write drafts, review, and write a final draft. Although speaking is may be found easy by many students, there is a group of students that find speaking difficult especially if theyfeel afraid of committing mistakes. Consequently, we as teachers have to be aware of our students’ needs, fears, and learning preferences so that they can feel motivated in learning the language andengaged in lessons. To make this possible a teacher has to apply some approaches such as the product and process approach for writing, and communicative teaching approach, lexical approach,audio-lingual approach for speaking.
The product approach in which students are encouraged to imitate a model text, previously read and analyzed. The organization of ideas becomes a very important part of thisapproach and it is emphasized on a final product. In contrast to the product approach, the process approach is focused basically in the process which will lead the student to end in a final product. Inthis approach the teacher does not play the role of someone who sets students a writing topic and receives the finished product, but he turns into someone who provides help ad direction through theprocesses of pre-writing, writing itself and editing. Personally, I am more inclined towards the process approach, when teaching writing, since it provides students move from one stage to the other.Starting from the generation of ideas, teachers can provide students with three different techniques, Brainstorming, Listing, clustering and freewriting. Teachers may require from students to learn...