Key Techniques and Strategies Needed By Both Students and Teachers to Pass a Proficiency Exam in A Foreign Language
Certain people are sometimes born with an undeniable adeptness or ability for learning language, be it foreign or native. However, it is not just what people are born with that can help them totally learn and eventually become proficient in a language. For example, there are certain techniques and strategies taught by language teachers that help one to both become proficient and therefore pass a Proficiency Exam in a specific language. These techniques are literally imperative to know, in order to learn and ultimately understand the language as a whole. Furthermore, there are not only techniques and strategies that need to be known by the students learning the language, but also by the teachers teaching it. Teachers need to have general classroom knowledge, and the ability to run and maintain a proper learning environment.
Every method and tactic used is based on four areas of concentration, all of which are important as the next: Reading Comprehension, Listening Comprehension, Speaking Comprehension, and Writing Comprehension. In order to pass the Proficiency exam in the target language, proficiency in these four areas is not only necessary, but also required.
In the foreign language classroom, many things can be done by teachers not only to better the all around comprehension of their students, but also to better the environment in which their comprehending takes place. Firstly, foreign language teachers need to assist their pupils in finding their own specific comprehension plans, and need to expand upon students' aptitude to look at their own language comprehension. Secondly, in order for students to obtain proficiency, teachers must start by building on their language backgrounds and need to provide sorts of immersion times. ("Attaining High Levels of Proficiency: Challenges for Foreign Language Education in the United States," 1)
In addition, teachers need to give logical criticism routinely to better their students understanding of mistakes. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1995 181) Teachers should have three main developmental techniques that are necessary for the success of themselves and their students: evaluating themselves, charting their own progress, and making sure to keep alive the original technique of student-teacher correspondence. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 5) Teachers can also encourage students to assess their own understanding directly after an activity, making sure that throughout the activity the target language is in use. ("Teaching Listening: Strategies for Developing Listening Skills" March 9, 2005, 1) A student's success in understanding foreign languages depends on their ability in their native language. Teachers need to note students' problems relating to reading, writing, listening, and speaking more so than other less important attributes. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS
1997, 91) Moreover, as an interest of relevance to students, teachers can find out what topics they are studying in other classes and take from those. It may also be helpful to let students pick a topic in class, so that they will feel more engaged during classroom activities. Students' attentions rise when the activities in the classroom seem to be relevant to their own interests, or mirror their future aspirations for the language. Making sure students realize that confusion and the need for explanations happens among even the very best of students with even the best of skill levels helps them know they can overcome uneasiness. ("Teaching Speaking" March 9, 2005, 2) In a classroom based solely for learners, teachers must see themselves as a learner as well; gaining students' perspectives while at the same time encouraging and even accepting ideas and responses. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2001, 63) To reach and articulate students of a shy nature, teachers need to create a warmth-filled environment where there are plenty of chances for cooperation in classroom activities. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2001, 158) Furthermore, by making the classroom more entertaining for the disinterested or shy learner, the teacher, whether knowingly or unknowingly, also increases incentive amongst all students. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2001, 160) Teachers need to focus on both usual and foreign language techniques to reach all types of learners. By doing so, teachers help students in developing skills that carry them into the real world. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS
1995, 184) In order to reduce general fear and apprehension of students, teachers need to have a somewhat empathetic attitude while conducting class. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS
1998, 71) Furthermore, respect provided to students by teachers while being empathetic, gives them support as well. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2000, 5) Depending on a student's readiness, a teacher can change the content and the process by which material is taught. (LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL Vol. LVIII NO.2, 14) By being very clear on what is important to the class, teachers can differentiate curriculum in order to meet their students' various needs. (LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL Vol. LVIII NO.2, 13) When changing curriculum, teachers need to make sure that they create extended deadlines and that they create appropriately challenging assignments but ones that are not miserably difficult. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 53) Teachers can acclimatize variety by educating both themselves and their students about different learning and teaching styles. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2000, 3) When adapting their students into the curriculum, teachers can show concern for others by teaching manners and responding to cultural diversity. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2000, 4)
Foreign Language teachers also need to have general classroom ideas and knowledge, both about teaching the target language and about the teaching as a profession in general. The most influential teacher is one who can take students from point A to B while at the same time making it fun by relating to both the real and imaginative. Considering that most language classrooms are content-based, there is a very strong need for the connection between real topics and those that are unreal. When foreign language classrooms are content based, they can sometimes be paralleled in another class taken by students. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2003, 10) The second language classroom needs multiple viewpoints and including different activities or events can help students see through the same eyes as their teacher. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 21) Furthermore, by defining boundaries in the classroom, teachers are able to talk about personal experiences, while at the same time influencing assigned tasks for their students. When defining boundaries, teachers need to both annotate and denote their own perspectives in order to better understand those of students. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 22) It is imperative for a teacher to realize that what a student already understands is one of the more important factors that affect language learning. In addition, teachers should begin class each day with some sort of review. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1998, 70) In the foreign language classroom, most students are left alone to interpret necessary components of learning the target language. Therefore, teachers need to make sure they routinely do monthly or even weekly conferences with students to make sure they are not falling behind in the lessons. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1995, 183) To help hinder confusion in the classroom, teachers can develop parts of the curriculum around interests by making materials that create an understanding while at the same time are intriguing to students. (LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION JOURNAL Vol. LVIII No. 2, 14) In order for materials to be authentic while at the same time interesting for students, they must have three key parts: they must be such that the students will want to read them, they must be read for purposes that make sense and are relevant to students, and they must be read by students in a way that matches the reading type and the way people normally read. ("Teaching Reading: Goals and Techniques for Teaching Reading" March 3, 2005) There are four well-known core requirements in the classroom for foreign language that are just as important as the next: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2003, 9) If foreign language teachers teach the target language using specific techniques, students will in effect be learning a "multisensory structured language," or an MSL. Learning an MSL helps students understand how to find and fix their own errors, which is one of the most important "metalinguistic components." It also help students realize relationships between sounds/symbols, grammar and syntax ideas, and word formation and meaning. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 92)
One of the four key components to learning language is Listening Comprehension, which is used the most in the classroom because it leads to scholastic achievement more and even better than reading and writing. To be able to verbally relate, students need to first comprehend what is being said, and this is why Listening Comprehension is the most anxiety filled. Listening Comprehension can be full of apprehension, if it is incoherent to students or misunderstood in any way. Listening Comprehension apprehension happens if students believe what is presented to them is too complex. A student thinking it is required to know every word heard may in part cause the anxiety felt by him and his peers. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1998, 67) Teachers should incorporate approach preparation training into their teaching schedule to help reduce apprehension. One of the most common ways to reduce listening apprehension during an activity is to use visuals, which helps students to personally relate to the task. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1998, 71) Activities concerning Listening Comprehension anxiety help students become more motivated to understand, and their fear of being incorrect is in turn substantially lowered. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1998, 72) Apprehension of Listening Comprehension can be lowered, if teachers break down the dialogue being heard by students into small pieces of speech that still have the same emphases and pauses. Listening Comprehension apprehension can be reduced if the right steps are taken before students have fallen too far behind. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1998, 70) To become proficient at Listening Comprehension, teachers need to center students' attentions on how the listening process works, rather than on its product. Teachers need to let students practice listening strategies with genuine listening tasks by behaving more as a listener than as a teacher by responding to students' communications. In order to develop students' attentiveness on the listening process and strategies for it, teachers can make sure that students talk about how listening is done in their native language. Teachers can work with listening in class by showing students strategies that work best for each type of text involved. Teachers need to tell how and why students should use each strategy. ("Teaching Listening: Goals and Techniques for Teaching Listening" March 9, 2005, 1) Teachers can clearly tell how a specific approach is used in multiple types of listening tasks, or with a different skill. Teachers can incorporate a 5-step plan to better help students with listening comprehension: before listening students can plan for task, during and after listening teachers can monitor comprehension, after listening teachers evaluate comprehension and strategy use, teachers use authentic materials before and after listening, and both students and teacher need to review all previous attempts and critique. (Teaching Listening; Strategies for Developing Listening Skills" March 9, 2005, 2) In order to take meaning from text, students should do the following four steps: figure out the purpose for listening and predict or anticipate content and identify appropriate strategies, only use parts of listening relevant and ignore the rest use Top-down and Bottom-up strategies to construct meaning, and check comprehension while listening and when the task is over. (NCLRC, Teaching Listening; Strategies for Developing Listening Skills, March 9, 2005, 1) Teachers can use listening strategies to help the comprehension of listening through two major techniques: "Top-down" strategies, and "Bottom-up" strategies. Top- down strategies consist of listening for the main idea by predicting, drawing inferences, and summarizing. The listener uses background knowledge of the topic to activate a set of expectations as to what will come next. "Bottom-up" strategies consist of listening for specific details, recognizing cognates, and recognizing word-order patterns. The listener uses language in the message by identifying the combination of sounds, words, and grammar.
Reading Comprehension is also important in the foreign language classroom, as most classrooms are conducted using passages written entirely in the target language. In order for students to obtain communicative competence in reading, classroom and homework reading needs to be as close to real-life as possible. ("Teaching Reading: Strategies for Developing Reading Skills" March 9, 2005 3) With genuine materials, students can do multiple things once their skill in reading develops. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2001, 51) By giving students multiple types of materials to read, teachers give the chance for students to take in vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and other things in authentic context. When reading to learn, students should follow four basic steps: find out purpose for reading and activate background knowledge on topic, only use parts of text relevant to purpose and ignore the rest, use strategies appropriate to the task, and check comprehension during and after reading task. ("Teaching Reading: Goals and Techniques for Developing Reading Skills" March 9, 2005 2) Certain strategies to smooth the process of reading are as follows: before reading students should plan for the task, before and after reading students and teachers should monitor comprehension, and after reading students should evaluate their own comprehension and strategy use. (Teaching Reading: Goals and Techniques for Teaching Reading" March 9, 2005 2) Teachers can introduce to their students a five-step strategy to ease their reading process that consists of pre-reading, scanning or skimming, translating or interpreting, grasping or understanding, and transferring or digesting. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2001, 52) Teachers can give students one full page of a chosen topic for an understanding of overall reading fluency and to check the ability to regurgitate information. ("Evaluating Listening Comprehension and Speaking Proficiency of Prospective Students in German" March 7 2005, 3) To smooth the process of reading, each lesson needs to be put into three parts consisting of pre-reading, reading phase, and a follow up stage depending on the text being read. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2001, 64) Strategies to help students read more quickly and effectively are as follows: previewing or reviewing titles and captions, predicting using knowledge of subject, skimming by taking a quick look at the text to get main idea, guessing from context using background knowledge and ideas in text, and paraphrasing by stopping at the end to restate the ideas in the text. ("Teaching Reading: Goals and Techniques for Developing Reading Skills" March 9, 2005 1) Finally, there are two ways to use "reading aloud" usefully in the language classroom. First, by teachers reading aloud to students, it helps them move from "word-by-word" reading to reading in phrases. Second, using the "read aloud" and "look up" technique is when a student reads a passage and then looks up what it means. This technique encourages ideas, and not recognition. ("Teaching Reading: Goals and Techniques for Developing Reading Skills" March 9, 2005 5)
Speaking Comprehension is one of the most imperative things to be able to do in the foreign language classroom due to the simple fact that most classrooms are conducted bilingually. Teachers can start the communication by making opportunities for students to relate to teachers as people. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2000, 5) One commonly used technique that helps to calculate speaking fluency is an "oral proficiency" exam. This exam tests a student's speaking ability on a scale familiar to them. A look at speaking skills of other similar language students can help to create a grading scale. (("Evaluating Listening Comprehension and Speaking Proficiency of Prospective Students in German" March 7 2005, 2) The personal thoughts and opinions of students can be helpful in testing proficiency. (("Evaluating Listening Comprehension and Speaking Proficiency of Prospective Students in German" March 7 2005, 3) Students who are deficient or lack courage in oral exchanges can be encouraged to do so by being taught a supply of small replies they can use in all types of exchanges. This technique is very good for both beginning and experienced students. By using hands-on activities, students can rehearse in using and eventually shaping specific language techniques that each set of spoken interactions inhibits. ("Teaching Speaking; Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills" March 9 2005 2) To help engage students in language learning, teachers can discuss daily out of class language learning experiences. They can also insist that students evaluate their own progress and even ask that they use the language to communicate ideas, feelings, and opinions. ("Motivating Learners: Promoting Engagement in Language Learning" March 13 2005, 1) The main thing that students need to know about speaking is that it contains three real areas of learning: using the right words in correct order with the right pronunciation, exchange information with clarity of speech, and understanding who is speaking to whom and in what situation. ("Teaching Speaking" March 9, 2005, 1) Teachers are able to assist students in developing talking capability, by showing them the predicted set of spoken interactions for different circumstances in order for them to know what will be heard and know what can be said in return. ("Teaching Speaking Strategies for Developing Speaking Skills" March 9 2005, 2) Teachers can give students genuinely authentic practice situations to help them develop the skill of creating grammatically correct and logically spoken sentences. ("Teaching Speaking" March 9, 2005, 1)
The fourth and final key component that is necessary to become proficient in the foreign language classroom is Writing Comprehension. It is imperative to teach students each part of an essay, vocabulary, ideas, and structural techniques. Some talent in a student's native language can be transmitted to the target language in writing. Therefore, it is a good idea for the teacher to meet with their English teacher as a means of preprocessing their students. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS
1995, 3) Teachers can help students become good writers by teaching them error correction, by pointing out the difference between right and wrong, and by actively participating, all of which help create a risk-free environment. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997 40) The more appealing writing environment given to the students, the better they will write. Therefore, in order to create a more satisfying writing environment, students and teachers can follow five simple steps. First, there is prewriting or organizing. Then, there is drafting ideas through a rough draft, also revising or reworking and finalizing or finishing, and finally presenting to an actual audience. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS
2001, 69)
When becoming proficient in a foreign language, it is vital that students receive multiple types of feedback in order for them to distinguish between both their errors and their successes. All types of feedback are helpful, but some more than others and most students expect feedback from teachers. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS
2003, 20) All teachers know that there is no way for students to make no errors or no success along the way of learning, which is why it is so imperative to give feedback. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2003, 16) Students give signs of understanding when they are able to use ideas obtained in different settings to decode and understand both written and oral messages. Some students see their own difficulties, provide oral feedback, and sometimes attempt to correct them. Oral feedback is helpful to language students when finding and interpreting their own errors. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1996, 181) In addition, to check on the comprehension on students, teachers can give a "metacognitive briefwrite," or a small writing process that discusses what and how was done in an in-class discussion or an activity. The writing process is not graded, but if used correctly by teachers, can be very helpful in determining strengths and weaknesses. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 21) Overt feedback and exemplar feedback are the most effective types of feedback. With overt feedback, teachers are intentionally obvious in their feedback, whereas with exemplar feedback, teachers give students a model to understand both their mistakes and achievement. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 2003, 19) Lastly, teachers can use "requisite pedagogical tools," or hands on learning experiences to help stop unseen problematically common mistakes from occurring amongst students. (NEW YORK STATE ASSOCIATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHERS 1997, 13)
It is literally impossible to become proficient in a foreign language unless both teachers and students learn proper strategies and techniques about language learning in general. Students not only need to master the four key areas of Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing, but also need to learn the techniques talked about previously to become truly proficient. Teachers need to have a firm grasp on the techniques needed for both in and out of class activities that help students better understand the target language. Teachers and students need to know the same basic information, although teachers need to have an understanding of students as individuals. Furthermore, it is impossible to become proficient in a foreign language by just learning the strategies and technique. Similarly, it too is impossible to become proficient in a foreign language by only mastering Listening, Reading, Speaking, and Writing. Therefore, in order to become truly proficient and pass a Proficiency Exam in a foreign language, it is necessary to have mastered both the strategies and techniques, and the four key components of a foreign language.