Awareness raising activities

1. Awareness raising activities

In this first stage students are encouraged to notice new knowledge or to recover previously acquired knowledge. According to Thornbury (2005, as quoted in KÜRÜM, 2016) the process of these activities is as follows:

Attention

Understanding

Noticing

KÜRÜM (2016) says that making students hear real life spoken English samples excerpted from real TV or radio shows is a beneficial awareness raising activity, and he also points out that there are conditions that must be considered by the teacher (p. 55):

If the language used in the text has some peculiarities, learners’ attention can be drawn to these language pieces. For example, expressions like you know / I know, as a matter of fact, by the way, etc.

Activating learners’ already existing background knowledge on a topic increases comprehension. For example: Brainstorming about the topic to be approached. In this way, a useful vocabulary activity and an awareness raising can be done at the same time.

After the first listening or watching, general questions such as the following should be asked:

• Who is talking with whom?
• What are they talking about?
• Where are they?
• What is the relation between the speakers? Are they friends?
• Why are they talking?

This can help the teachers to find out the general comprehension of the learners, which is a prerequisite for developing detailed activities on the topic.

If there are some sociocultural aspects, these parts should especially be made noticed. For example, thanksgiving, street musicians, employer-employee relations, etc. In the texts that such cultural aspects are the speech topic, the teacher should make explanations on cultural aspects. Comparing and contrasting the mother tongue culture and the target language culture could be a useful discussion topic.

The grammatical aspects of the spoken language can be underlined. For example, the intensity of the words in written and spoken languages is different, this means the rate of the content words in the text. In spoken language, the intensity is less than the written language.

Activities aiming for detailed comprehension should be done. Such activities can be filling out a table, answering multiple choice questions, sentence completion, matching, etc. In this stage, the text can be listened or watched a few times until the learners can answer the majority of the questions with ease.