LANGUAGE ACTIVITIES IN THE ESL CLASSROOM ESL c

ESL classroom activities are usually categorized into those which promote listening, speaking, reading, and writing. For children who have not mastered the Roman alphabet, such as Japanese ones, writing's initial activity is the learning of this alphabet. For these Japanese children, this is the first steep hurdle, not because the graphic symbols look "funny", but because they are used so differently from those of Japanese. The obstacle is conceptual and cultural rather than technical. Until recently, most schools taught the traditional four skills separately and in the audio-lingual sequence of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Perhaps calligraphy ought to be added as a fifth skill for people who do not use the Roman alphabet in their own language. With the current stress on holistic and communicative approaches to teaching/learning ESL/EFL, has come the teaching/learning of all skills simultaneously, in the belief that they reinforce each other and that they should be viewed holistically as the normal means of social communication. Communication is a holistic activity: the word cannot be decontextualized.

Today, the emphasis is on learning to communicate through meaningful interaction in the target language, the use of authentic material, the provision of opportunities for learners to focus on the learning process as well as on language, the enhancement of the learner's personal experience, and an attempt to link classr

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agues?". 3) During a third listening, students were to answer true/false questions. 4) A post-listening exercise involved deducing the meanings of words from the context (Harper, Soong, Pinsent, Uyeda, Wiskin, Abe, Kawamoto, Su: Exercise designers). Reading Activities "Our immediate goal as EFL/ESL teachers is to minimize reading difficulties and to maximize comprehension by providing culturally relevant information" (Carrell & Eisterhold, 1987, p. 227). For Goodman (1967), reading is a "psycholinguistic game" in which the "reader reconstructs, as best he can, a message which has been encoded by a writer as a graphic display" (Ibid, 1971, p. 135). Given the cultural and experiential differences between the Japanese student and the native speaker of English, the teacher can use texts to minimize cultural conflicts and interference and to maximize comprehension and appreciation. Another approach is that of Rigg. Rigg's Language Experience Approach (1981) aims at controlling vocabulary, structure, and content. The approach uses the students' ideas and own words in the preparation of beginning reading materials. The students decide what they want to say, and dictate to the teacher, who acts as a scribe. Thus the students neutraliz
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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