Reflecting on Teaching the Four Skills

Reflecting on Teaching the Four Skills: 60 Strategies for Professional Development offers novice teachers strate­gies for the teaching of reading, writing, listening, and speaking, and for assessing those skills. The final chapter offers strategies for pursuing professional development. The strategies presented in each chapter are not necessarily the most impor­tant or the only strategies; they are examples written to help in-service or new teachers discover new techniques for addressing common challenges.

Each strategy--a simple and concise statement for teachers to reflect on, fol­lowed by a discussion of the relevant theory or principle(s)—is followed by three sections:

Application: A concise description of one way the strat­egy can be used and applied by language teachers.

Precaution: One caveat intended to help teachers troubleshoot for, and possibly avoid, common problems before they occur.

Scenario: One scenario of a teacher using the strategy, followed by reflective questions. The scenarios are based on actual experi­ences of language teachers from around the world.

Each chapter closes with a set of broad-based reflection questions that can be used as the basis of classroom discussion or writing/research or for self-reflection.