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INTEGRATING THE FOUR SKILLS
ReplyDeleteEnglish teaching has four skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing) generally, In English courses the attention is focused in two or three of them, but hardly ever on the fourth skill as an integrated way. Me as teacher If I can integrate all of them, it becomes more authentic and beneficial, because in a real context when we are communicating, we usually use the four skills to express our feelings.
After, read the text “integrating the four skills “ my main objective is apply some strategies with my students trying to integrate all the skills, because sometimes I focus my attention just in one or two of them, and it could be the reason of why my students get bored.
This type of topics are very useful because helps to open our view and the perspective about how to teach. In our context, there are some reasons because of the exclusion among the skills; a) approaches are base on curriculums designs, focusing on the forms of languages. b) To facilitate programs, emphasizing in a specific skills. C) When a student is studying English and need to improve certain skill.
I will do many different activities with my children base on interactive and communicative framework.
I found two interesting web pages that helped me to understand the importance of this topic:
http://dergiler.ankara.edu.tr/dergiler/27/761/9653.pdf
http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/digest_pdfs/0105-oxford.pdf
BY : CAROL MODERA ROMERO
Every single class I have with my students I am always trying to find new approaches and techniques which help me to teach them English effectively. For that reason, when I read the article “integrating the four skills” a question arose: What could I do to design activities that integrate at least two skills?
ReplyDeleteSo far, I am trying to design activities where my students are reading and answering questions orally. However, after reading the text, I think I can do it better in terms of the integration of skills, because now, I am aware of the importance of teach English as a unit. It is not only about, for example, teaching the correct pronunciation of certain words that have any sense if I leave aside the correct way to write them down or their social usage. For the coming lessons I will implement certain strategies which allows me to integrate more than two skills: games where my kids are able to interact with their partners sharing their answers about the topic which is connected to their lives as well. (What do you do on Sundays?)
INTEGRATING SKILLS
ReplyDeleteNow a days with the technology students have an open mind and for that reason is very difficult to catch their attention also the teacher expends a lot of time planning their activities, and the students don´t enjoy and don´t learn; this happens because the teacher should implement different types of activities, taking in to account interesting topics depending on the age and also in each topic integrate the four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) to help the process of learning.
When teachers implement an interesting topic and include the four skills for a specific topic, the students have the chance to learn easily because they develop different kinds of activities and games so they can learn in a funny way and at that moment the learning is meaningful to them.
STEPHANIE ALFONSO
ReplyDeleteINTEGRATING THE FOUR SKILLS IN LANGUAGE ASSESSMENT
In some contexts, speaking ability seems to be the most important of the four skills; furthermore, students’ performance in each of the four skill areas is usually very highly related. However, if measuring only a single skill provides a less than adequate estimate of what a person can do in a real life context. Teacher should assess a person’s ability to communicate in English in a variety of contexts, an ability that is likely to involve the use of multiple language skills either singly or in combination.
The four skills are strongly correlated. Listening and reading are receptive skills and speaking and writing are productive skills. Learners need to be able to understand a written and spoken word, and to produce both orally and in written form. Teachers want to prove students’ ability to improve effective communication. It is a “two way” process that involve both a sender and a receiver of a message. The listener or reader has as much responsibility in understanding the message as the speaker or writer has in presenting it.
Finally, it can be said that, to have an effective communication, people must not only speak or write; they also must understand how others have perceived their messages if they are able to respond in different and comprehensible ways and we as teachers are the responsible to guide this process.
INTEGRATING SKILLS
ReplyDeleteThere are many situations in which we use more than one language skills. For this reason it is valuable to integrate the language skills, but there are other reasons why integration can enhance the students' competences.
The importance of building new knowledge and skills on to what students already know and can do. So, if students are able to read a short story, this skill will help them to write their own story. In the same way, if they can understand a dialogue about buying things in a shop, they can use this as a model for practicing their own speaking skills in a similar situation. Also, integrating the kills allow to build in more variety into the lesson because the range of activities will be wider. Instead of just having listening, the students can have speaking, reading and writing practice. This can raise their motivation to learn English.
For many years, English language teaching has identified four skills (listening, reading, writing and speaking), which are really relevant for effective communication and language learning. However, in the classroom, we usually teach the separately and pay more attention to the form. Nowadays, the purpose is to integrate the four skills in order to provide the students with more realistic and meaningful elements to learn and communicate.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the text "Integrating skills", my main objective is to try to integrate all the skills in my class sessions and to provide the students with opportunities to get involved in their own learning process.
This topic was so useful for my lesson planning; now, the idea is to carry out activities in which students can produce materials, choose topics of their interest, and learn the second language in real situations and joined with other subjects. In this way, the kind of interaction in the classes is not going to be just teacher-students, but also students-students and students-teacher.
Finally, I found this interesting web page which helped me to understand better the topic: http://www2.education.ualberta.ca/staff/olenka.bilash/Best%20of%20Bilash/fourskills.html
Most of the classes must be guided with two or more skills, those skills give to the teaching process a good environment where students and teacher can learn both at the same time. it means, teache discover waht skill is the best for te class and with this he or she can plan the future lessons.
ReplyDeleteHowever, the management of these skills are successful, if the teacher knows how to handle it, as an exemple, during my practicum as a pre-service teacher I have been working with two skills such as: Speaking and writing, where my students develop certain activities in orden to learn the main topic of the class. I decided to focus on those skills because I have the resources and students enjoy doing those activities, such as: worksheets, contests etc.
on the other hand, I can say that some of the classes are connected with experimental learning, because some of the topics or the classes should have a relation with the institutional projects.
And as a conclusion, there are many aspects that I want to learn about integrating skills because it will give me ideas for developing my future lessons.
Lida Leal
Integrating skills is a process that must be included in all ESL classes, because English classes cannot focus on the development of just one skill, if it happens, the result is going to be incomplete and the purposes of the class are not going to be achieved, if we are talking in terms of communicative approach, as result of this, at the moment of developing any skill, as teacher we should be aware that teaching a skill cannot be an isolated process, it means that we must understand that developing communicative skills implies using one skill as a complement of the other.
ReplyDeleteIn this way, if the teacher implements this integrating or complementing process, the environment of the class is going to be better due to students are going to feel comfortable and they will have the opportunity to develop the skill they like the most, and not the one that the teacher makes them learn .
Finally I found this article useful for mi practice and my job, because now I’m aware that a good teaching process in the one that work all the skills using them as complement of the other
francisco
Este comentario es de Oscar Ramos
ReplyDeleteFirstly I am not teacher yet, but I know it is important to combine the different skills in our classes because it helps student in different situations that they will face it in the real life. So In order to have a meaningful learning in students we have to integrate the four skills in language assessment and in all activities in our classes, but, how to do it? Maybe is not important to focus in reading, speaking, listening and writing at the same time because one skill can reinforce the others.
According to this, we can create or doing activities whereby students can develop different aspects involving the four skills like discussion, listening some information about a specific topic; in this way they can understand and having their own opinion about it , Writing and reading information about currents problems.
It´s Necessary to integrate the four skills in language assessment because in this way we can encourage students in the communicative competence and we can provide a realistic language as well
Every teacher of ESL should taking into account the importance of integrated the four skills in their clases, in order to improved students’ English in a properly and a complete way, but what teachers do frecuently is teach and focus on each one separately. Even though, it is sometimes very difficult try to integrated those skills because of the context or students proficiency, but at least, you as a teacher should start combine two of the four skills. For example, during my practicum I am trying to focus on receptive skills (reading and listening), choosing activities which are related to their context and vocabulary according to their English level, such as activities related to their daily routine and places that they visit frecuently.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, after reading the text, I could understand that it is posible to integrated the four skills no matter if my students are begginers, and it is also necessary to continue work on real situation, because they will feel comfortable with the topic and they will be more interesting in it. So, one of the links that could help me to reinforce the information and give me an idea how to integrate the four skills is http://www.slideshare.net/AnubisX0880/integrating-skills-growing-talents.
Tatiana Rodriguez O.
The four language skills have the same importance in CLT, most of the teachers of FLT try to teach the skills one by one in insolate way, but this is not the way to teach a foreign language. In the chapter “integrating for skills” shows the way to improve the language performance in to kinds or types of performance; the first performances are the productive, those are: oral and writing skills and the receptive performance skills are: listening and reading. It means to me that the developing of four skills in order to achieve the language knowledge and the same time teachers must take in to account the students level and language proficiency. Other important issue is the context or let the students get in the real life integration of language skills, in this time is important that students perceive real contexts that the teachers can provide to prove and improve the communicative language, it means that the teacher has to implement and teach four skills with the aim of students can acquit in different context that they can found in real life. The last consideration for teach productive and receptive skills is the students’ needs, wants and likes, and developed in a syllabus for specific purposes, for general purposes, business purposes, traveling purposes, academic purposes, etc. it is important that students of different levels get prepared for the specific purpose or aim they need or want to learn a foreign language.
ReplyDeleteWe as teachers have come doing the same process with our students, teaching to them a second language trough skills, but no integrating the four skills. We just limited to teach writing, in a section, reading in other, etc. Therefore to teach in this way, the students cannot learn effectively, and they will have some difficulties to express in the four skills. For that reason we as teacher have to change and, implement the teaching, “integrating skills”.
ReplyDeleteThen how can we integrate the four skills? it is a big question but is easy to solve, for example, after reading a letter, you have to understand and socialize it with their classmate, so they have to listen to you and you have to listen to them . At this moment students already use reading, speaking and listening too. So in the final part they have to answer the letter by writing. In addition you are doing and activity in order to arrive at ease in communication. And students develop the competence so easy.
In language teaching throughout time we have seen how each skill (listening, reading, speaking, and writing) was of big importance yet taught separately, though it is not wrong to teach them separately or in that random order, it has been proven that by integrating them the results are by far much better, due to the fact that one skill reinforces the other, we learnt to speak by what we hear, we learn to write by what we read, and students can interact naturally and learn in a real context where English is used effectively for communication.
ReplyDeleteSo as we can see in CLT (communicative language teaching) the main purpose is to teach the acquisition of the target language in a more natural and in a more real context, where students can feel connected and can actually relate and thereby respond, for example in my practice as an in-service teacher I often integrate two or more skills, to teach the family members topic, first I told a little bit of how my family was structured (the students listened), then I wrote on the board next to the images the corresponding equivalent in English father, mother etc. (the students read), next I asked how were there family structured (the students spoke), they made short simple sentences where they showed that they had really understood the activity (I assessed them through the making of those short sentences), and finally as homework they had to make a family tree. To them it was a fun activity and one that was meaningful to them.
This only shows us how the integration of the skills can not only work for our advantage as teachers but that it also enhances the student’s performance in class.
Jorge Luis Mejía
26072078
In terms of my classes, I have tried always to find activities to integrate all the skills in order to develop them in the same level so that students are not going to feel bored focused in just one skill.
ReplyDeleteAs result of my experience, I think that is better developing all the skills at the same time. In that way students will have more effective elements to produce something with the language, and also developing the four skills or at least three of them will allow to achieve the objectives of the communicative approach that is the one that the school where I work follows
Finally as teachers, if we implement this integrating or complementing process, the environment of the class is going to be better because students are going to feel comfortable and they will have the opportunity to develop the skill they like the most, and not the one that the teacher makes them learn.
INTEGRATING THE FOUR SKILLS
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the text it became evident for me that working with the four skills at the same tiem really speeds up the process of learning. They reinforce each other and fill information gaps that may occur. In our everyday lives we can find people are using many skills at the same time. Speaking, listening, reading and writing are the means that we use to interact with the world. Even doing this reflective log is using two skills at the same time.
Also, inside the classroom i noticed that activites gain a sense of being inside a real context, therefore they turn out to be more interactive. As a teacher I see that classes start to be more student centered because they are the ones that have to integrate the skills, I simply guide them through the process but they complete the activities using their own language construction.I feel that students become more motivated because they are not in an artificial context anymore.
Brown presentes five different models to integrate the skills but the teacher has to take into account how their students are going to respond to each of these models and also that these models are more time consuming and will probably require a lot of traning before we can see good results. I think that the curriculum should already include these models from the very beggining so that the teacher can manage time and lesson planning better.
As a conclusion, personally I have used TBL methodology in my work at the Colombo and I find that it tends to focus too much on speaking and listening while leaving reading and writing on a second level. This model also implies that all students should have a good level of interpersonal skills and I feel that this may not apply to everyone in the classroom. However, there are other models that can be used in those situations such as theme based instructions