Section 2 PWP Process

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I.Thinking

【Case Reflection】

Mr M is presenting a demo reading class. The topic is The Olympic Games . He wants to integrate some innovative ideas into his reading class, so before the actual reading of the text, he asks his students to have a discussion first on the Beijing Olympic Games. In the discussion, the students come across many language problems. What is the problem with Mr M's approach? Why?

II.Pre-learning, While-learning, Post-learning

We can divide student learning into the three stages of the PWP process: Pre-learning, While-learning and Post-learning. Pre-learning is the planning stage: teachers plan for teaching and students plan for learning. At this stage, teachers activate the students' existing knowledge and prepare them to learn new knowledge and reconstruct the old and the new to be able to use language. This stage includes all the preparations before a lesson such as lead-in, elicitation, review and activation activities.

While-learning is the stage of learning new language. It can happen both inside and outside of class. At this stage, the teacher presents, explains and leads students to learn and practise, and enables them to use the newly learned language.

Post-learning is the evaluation stage which focuses on language use. Class time is mainly used as the learning stage, while the post-learning stage is mostly done outside of class with activities such as tasks, projects, etc.

PWP could be used in any part of the teaching. In teaching skills, there could be pre-listening, while-listening and post-listening; pre-speaking, while-speaking and post-speaking; pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading; pre-writing, while-writing and post-writing.

III.Pre-listening, While-listening and Post-listening

Listening comprehension and reading comprehension are usually misunderstood as passive processes. As a matter of fact, learners play an important and active role in processing what they listen to and read. Take listening as an example. Learners cannot understand what they hear unless they pay close attention to what the speaker says and connect both language and information with their own prior knowledge. Learners cannot understand the information they receive unless they have enough prior knowledge that is relevant to the information. In reading comprehension, learners interpret or reconstruct what they read in order to understand the author's intention. This process is not only about the comprehension of the words but also the understanding of the language, the socio-cultural background and the discourse. Advanced readers can discriminate words and phrases, understand the discourse structure and related knowledge and common sense in the discourse. These types of knowledge interact and complement each other. Therefore, listening and reading are not simple processes of passive reception.

In order to improve the effectiveness of teaching, we suggest the following three stages of PWP when teaching listening:

1.Pre-listening. The activities at this stage include prediction, brainstorming, problem-posing, etc. to help learners set up goals, activate prior knowledge, arouse their interest and practise relevant language forms and functions. For example, in order to provide learners with the context of the listening activity, the teacher can introduce background knowledge to stimulate learners' schema to make the listening easier.

2.While-listening. This is the key stage in teaching listening. At this stage learners concentrate on processing information on their own, so it is difficult for the teacher to control or monitor what they are doing. As the intention is to improve listening comprehension and practice skills, it is important for the teacher to design a variety of activities such as listen and take notes, listen and sequence, listen and perform, listen and draw, listen and fill in the gaps . The difficulty level of the listening task depends largely on the teacher's requirements of the task.

3.Post-listening. In this stage, learners apply the skills and knowledge that they have learned to practise. They can do multiple choice questions, question-and-answer exercises, note-taking, information-gap tasks, and dictation to consolidate what they have learned. All kinds of practice at this stage are to assess learners' listening comprehension, not their memory. If the materials are too long, learners might forget what they have listened to earlier. In such situations, the teacher can either use open questions to lead group discussions to bridge the information gap, or use inference questions to lead learners to make judgments according to what they have heard.

Some frequently used PWP listening activities are shown in Table 7-3.

Table 7-3 PWP listening activities

IV.Pre-speaking, While-speaking and Post-speaking

Speaking is language use. It is different from listening in that learners can express themselves orally according to their own language proficiency level. Pre-speaking and post-speaking are relatively more important than the while-speaking stage in teaching speaking. Let's take a closer look at the three stages.

(1) Pre-speaking.At this stage, we prepare ourselves before we speak. Preparation activities at this stage focus on language structure and language use. The teacher can use brainstorming, mind maps, reading materials to activate related vocabulary, structures and cultural knowledge, which is especially important when it is a speaking task involving culture.

(2) While-speaking.When learners express themselves orally or when they do not understand others, they need certain strategies such as self-correction, clarification or confirmation. The teacher can introduce strategies to help during the communication.

(3) Post-speaking.The main activities at the post-speaking stage are evaluation. When people speak, there is always a purpose, so to achieve the purpose is the focus at the post-speaking stage. Success or failure can be decided/evaluated by the audience (the teacher and classmates) . There is also assessment of the language. Evaluation could be self-reflection.

Some frequently used PWP speaking activities are shown in Table 7-4.

Table 7-4 PWP speaking activities

Similar to PWP listening, there are three stages in the teaching of PWP reading: pre-, while-, and post-reading.

(1) Pre-reading.This stage is led in by the teacher using activities such as prediction, introducing background knowledge, eliciting vocabulary or structures, or activating learners' prior knowledge. It is also a stage to arouse learners' interest in the target reading. Prediction is an important reading strategy, entailing reading the title to predict what follows or what might happen. This helps learners better understand the theme of the reading material.

(2) While-reading.This is the central step in teaching reading. The teacher organizes all kinds of activities to raise learners' awareness of reading strategies and skills to help them understand the styles, structures, main ideas, themes and details of the target reading material. Learners need to understand not only the literal meaning of words but also the meaning behind them. In general, because it is more difficult to remember information in written discourse form, it will be easier, and more efficient, if we use visual support such as pictures, graphs, maps, bar charts, and flow charts.

(3) Post-reading.At this stage, the teacher leads learners to evaluate what they have read. Activities include discussions, role-play, gap-filling, retelling, false summary and writing. Take false summary as an example. The teacher provides learners with an abstract of some reading material. However, there is some false information in the abstract and the learners must correct the information by reading the given text. Role-play is another kind of activity that we often use at the post-reading stage. Learners enjoy this kind of activity which not only motivates them to read and learn, but also provides them with opportunities to use the language.

Some frequently used PWP reading activities are shown in Table 7-5.

Table 7-5 PWP reading activities

VI. Pre-writing, While-writing and Post-writing

Writing and speaking are both productive skills, and there are some similarities between them. The teaching process for writing is very similar to teaching speaking; nevertheless, there are some differences.

(1) Pre-writing. Before writing, it is essential to motivate students to write. Thus, it is vital to have discussions related to students' life, hot social issues and popular topics which lead to the target writing topic. Having done that, we can let students brainstorm about the topic and talk about anything they know about the topic such as background knowledge, vocabulary, sentence structures and writing structure.

(2) While-writing. In this stage, there are some commonly used steps such as viewing writing samples, sample analysis, deciding on the main idea, outlining, writing and editing. The writing here is not authentic writing but learning to write. Thus, every step here is to learn how to write.

At this stage, learners study the sample, analyse its structure and method, the expressions, pictures, charts and graphs it uses. This step is basically a reading task which is related to how to write. There are many ways to start to write. But the very first thing is still to determine the theme and the main idea. In elementary schools and middle schools, most writing is considered “written expression” (书面表达) , which means to write down what you want to say. It might seem there is no need to have a main idea in such writing, but every piece of writing must have a theme and main idea. Even when we explain a picture and describe what is in the picture, we need to decide what the main thing is which we want to describe and what the focus of our explanation is. For example, if a picture is about students planting trees, before we write, the questions we need ask ourselves are: Shall we use the first person or the third person to describe it and why? What is the purpose of such a description? Shall we focus on the trees or on the students? These kinds of questions help us decide on the main idea of our writing.

When we draft, should we brainstorm some related vocabulary first or write some sentences related to the topic first? Either way is fine as the former equips us with more words and the latter might benefit the writing as a whole.

After the first draft, a very important step is revising and editing, which can greatly improve our writing skills.

(3) Post-writing. In real life, when we finish writing, we put it in an envelope and send it to a publisher to publish it. These are post-writing activities. We could encourage our students to publish their writing on blogs, in school newspapers, on websites, or just on the wall at the back of the classroom. Doing this gives students a sense of achievement. In classroom teaching, what we usually do after writing is discussion and peer-editing. At the editing stage, a fundamental thing to do is to give students criteria for evaluation. For example, for a piece of writing, there must be some specified structure, or some descriptive words or clauses. Towards the end we can choose those who have written the best sentences as the class' Top 10.Such activities will motivate students not only to learn but also to write better.

Some frequently used PWP writing activities are shown in Table 7-6.

Table 7-6 PWP writing activities