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Teaching Language Skills

Esra RSDEMR

Teaching Language Skills

Skills are often divided into two types:

RECEPTIVE SKILLS: a term used for reading & listening, skills where
meaning is extracted from discourse.

PRODUCTIVE SKILLS: the term for speaking & writing, skills where sts actually have to
produce language themselves.

Teachers tend to talk about the way we use language in terms of four skills
reading, writing, listening, speaking.
There is some concern about seperating skills in this way, especially since
they are seldom seperated in real life.
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A. Skills Together
It makes little sense to talk about skills in isolation since in meaningful communication, people employ
incremental language skills not in isolation, but in tandem.

Therefore, if skills are multi-layered in this way, it would make no sense to teach
each skill in isolation.
We will, therefore, look at how input and output are connected in the classroom, how skills can
be integrated, and how skill and language work are connected.
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A1. Input & Output

Receptive skills (input) & productive skills (output) feed off eachother in a number of ways.
Our most important info about language comes from input.
Thus the more we see and listen to comprehensible input, the more English we acquire, notice
or learn.

Input takes many forms:

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Teachers provide language input

Audio materials
Varierty of reading texts
Extensive reading
Podcast listening
Interacting with English speakers
Students get input in relation to their output

When the sts produce a piece of lang. & see how it turns out, that info is fed
back into the acquisition process.
This kind of input comes from: ourselves- ppl wer communicating with
(teachers, students, ets.)

Figure 1: The circle of input & output

A2. Integrating Skills

It makes sense to integrate different skills in order to:

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Replicate the natural process of skill-mixing.
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Provide maximum learning opportunities for the different sts in our classes.

That iswhy so many learning sequences are more like patchwork model, rather than
following straight arrows or boomerang lesson types.

We can integrate skills in our lessons by:

Speaking as preperation
stimulus Text as models
Texts
as
preperation
stimulus Integrated tasks
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and

and

A3. Language Skills, Language Construction

Work on language skills is often a precursor to work on various aspects
of language construction.
We often ask sts to look at texts and discover facts about language for themselves.
But whether they are trying to work out construction, or whether we are explaining things that

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occur in written and spoken texts, it makes considerable sense to use anything which sts
read as data for them to work on.
There is always some aspect of language that can be drawn from text or audio.
A4. Integrating skills and language work
The ideal learning sequence will offer both skill integration & also language study based
around a topic or other thematic thread.
A5. Top-down & bottom up
A frequent distinction is made between top-down (looking at a forest) & bottom-up (studying
the individual trees) processing.

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Top-down Processing: the reader/listener gets a general view of the reading or
listening passage by, in some way, absorbing the overall picture.
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Bottom-up Processing: the reader/listener focuses on such things as individual words,
phrases or cohesive devices and achives understanding by stringing these detailed elements
together to build up a whole.
It is probably most useful to see acts of reading and listening (speaking & writing) as interaction
between top-down & bottom-up processing.
Sometimes it is the individual details that help us understand the whole; sometimes it is our
overview that allows us to process the details.
B. Receptive Skills
Although there are significant differnces brtween reading & listening, nevertheless the
basic classroom procedure we often use is the same for both.
B1. A basic methodological model for teaching receptive skills
a typical procedure for getting sts to read a written text or listen to a recording involves both
Type 1 & Type 2 tasks.

Type 1: are those where we get sts to read or listen for some general understanding,
rather than asking them to pick out details or get involved in a refined search of the text.
Type 2: are those where we get sts to look at the text in considerably more detail, maybe for
specific info or for language points.
Moving from the genral to the specific by starting with Type 1 tasks & going on to Type 2 tasks
works because it allows sts to get a feel for what they are seeing or hearing before they have to

attack the text in detail, which is the more difficult thing to do.
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B2. The language issue

What is it that makes a text difficult?
Word and sentence length
The number of unfamiliar words
Both sentence legth & the percentage of unknown words play their part in a text
comprehensibility.
When sts who are engaged in a listening encounter unknown lexis, it can be like a dropped
barrier causing them to stop and think about the meaning of a word and thus making them
miss the next part of the speech.

Unlike reading, there may be no opportunity to go back and listen to the lexis again. If,
as Krashen suggested, comprehensible input aids language acquisiton, then

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incomprehensible input will not.

If we get sts to read/listen to texts that are beyond their comprehensible level,the only effect
this will have is to demotivate them.

The more language we expose sts to, the more they will learn, so we need specific ways
of addressing the problem of language difficulty. These could include:

Pre-teaching vocabulary

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Extensive reading & listening

Authenticity
B3. Comprehension Tasks
A key feature in successful teaching of receptive skills concerns the choice of
comprehension tasks.
Sometimes such tasks appear to be testing the sts rather than helping them to understand.
But if we are trying to encourage sts to improve their receptive skills, testing them will not be
an appropiate way of accomplishing this.
Sometimes texts/the tasks which accompany them are either far too easy or far too difficult.

In order to resolve these problems we need to use comprehension tasks which

promote understanding and we need to match texts and tasks appropriately.
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Testing & Teaching: the best kind of tasks are those which raise sts expectations,
help them tease out meanings and provoke an examination out of the reading/listening
passage
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Unlike reading and listening tests, these tasks bring them to a greater
understanding of language and text construction.

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Appropiate Challenge: When asking sts to read and listen, we want to avoid texts
and tasks that are either far too easy or far too difficult.
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We want to get the level of challenge right, to make the tasks difficult but,
nevertheless, achievable.
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Getting the level right depends on the right match between text and task.
4 Thus, where a text is difficult, we may still be able to use it, but only if the task is
appropiate achievable.
C. Productive Skills
Although the productive skills of writing & speaking are different in many ways, we can still
provide a basic model for teaching & organising them.
C1. A basic methodological model for teaching productive skills
A key factor in the success of productive-skill tasks is the way teachers organise them and
how they respond to the sts work.

C2. Structuring Discourse

In order for communication to be successful, we have to structure our discourse in such a
way that it will be understood by our listeners or readers.
In order for writing to be successful, it has to be both coherent and cohesive:
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Coherent writing makes sense because you can follow the sequence of ideas and points.
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Cohesion is a more technical matter since it is here that we concentrate on the various
linguistic ways of connecting ideas across phrases and sentences.

Conversational discourse, on the other hand, often appears more chaotic. This is partly
because it is jointly constructed by however many people are taking part.
Participants need to know how to take turns, and what discourse markers, for example,
they can use to facilitate the smooth progression from one speaker to the next.
Successful communication, both in writing & speaking, depends on, to some extent, on knowing
the rules
C3. Interacting with an audience
Part of our speaking proficiency depends upon our ability to speak differentially, depending
upon our audience and upon the way we absorb their reactions and respond to them.

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Part of our writing skill depends upon our ability to change our style and structure to suit the
person or people we are writing to.
C4. Dealing with difficulty
When speakers or writers dont know a word or just cant remember it, they may employ some
or all of the following strategies to resolve the difficulty:
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Improvising: try any word/phrase that they can come up with in the hope that its right.
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Discarding: abandon the thaught that they can not put into words.
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Foreignising: choose a word from a language they know well and pronounce it in the target

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language.
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Paraphrasing: something for cleaning the teeth. Such substitution or
circumlocation gets many speakers out of trouble, though it can make communication
longer and more convoluted.
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Clearly some of these strategies are more appropiate than others.

As teachers we should encourage paraphrasing and improvising as more useful techniques
than discarding and foreignising words blindly.
However, major reason for having sts perform oral communicative tasks in class is to give them
practice in just these kinds of strategy.
C5. The language issue
Learners engaged an a productive task can become very frustrated when they just do not
have the words or the grammar they need to express themselves.
Sometimes, of course, they can research language they would like to use, but this would
make writing a very cumbersome process.

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There are a number of steps we can take which will help sts achieve success:

Supply key language: we may check their knowledge of key vocab and help them with
phrases or questions that will be useful for them.
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We should not expect that we can introduce new language and have sts use it
instantly in communicative activities. Instead we need to plan in advance.
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Plan activities in advance: because of the time-lag between our sts meeting new language
and their ability to use it fluently, we need to plan production activities that will provoke the
use of language which they have had a chance to absorb at an earlier stage.

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One of the language strategies which speakers need to develop is the art of getting
round language problems in communication; writer, too, will have to find ways of saying
things even
when a lack of language makes this difficult.
D. Projects
In order to complete projects, the children will look at books, consult websites, watch videos
and, perhaps, conduct their own mini-experiments.
The project thus becomes a perfect vehicle for skill integration and info
gathering. Projects are longer than the traditional essay or either written task.
They demand significantly more research than a buzz group preparing for a quick
communicative activity.
D1. Managing Projects
Projects can be organised in a number of different ways, but they generally share the
same sequence:
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The briefing/the choice
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Idea/language generation
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Data gathering
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Planning
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Drafting and Editing: students-teacher-self edited
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The result: written report-short film-blog-drama
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Consultation/tutorial

Although projects may not be appropiate in all circumstances (principally, perhaps, because of the
time which teachers and sts have at their disposal), still they usually involve a satisfying

integration of skills.

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At the end of the whole process, sts have work they can show proudly to their friends, or they
have the chance to be involved in really significant presentation both oral and/or with
presentation equipment, such as overhead projectors and computer-suplied data projectors.
D2. A webquest project
Webquests allow teachers to get their sts to do research from the comfort of computer

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terminal.
The webquest is a good example of multi-skill project.