Integrating four skills

This is the combination of four skills, reading, speaking, listening and writing into the whole language. Some people think that integration of four skills diminishes the importance of the rules of listening, speaking, reading and writing that are unique to each separate skill. They are given a chance to diversify their efforts in more meaninful tasks. So we may be wondering why courses weren't always integrated in the firs place:

 

1. In the pre-CLT days of language teaching, the focus on the forms of language almos predispose curriculum designers to segment courses into the separate language skills.
2. Administrative considerations still make it easier to program separate courses in "reading" and "speaking"
3. There are certain specific purposes for which Ss are studying English that may best be label by one of the four skills.

However the most important is that integration is the only plausible approach, this is because:

1. Production and reception are quite simply two sides of the same coin
2. Interaction means sending language and receiing messages
3. Written and spoken  often bear a relationship to each other.
4. The interrelationship of written and spoken language is an intrisically motivation reflection of language and culture and society.
5. By attending primarily to what learners can do with language, and only secondarily to the forms of language.
6. Often one skill will reinforce another, we learn to speak, and we learn to write by examining what we can read.

Theme-based curricula can serve the multiple interest of Ss in a classroom and can offer a focus on content while still adhering to institucional needs for offering a language course.

 

What is important is to put principles of affective learning into action, this principles are:

• The automaticity principle
• The meaningful learning principle
• The instrinsic motivation principle
• The communicative competence principle.

All these principles are served by theme-based instruction courses that are able to get Ss exited and interested.

 

Numerous ESL texts books at the intermediate to advanced levels, offer theme-based courses of study; such text books catch the curiosity and motivation of Ss with challenging topics of real-life issues from simple to complex, they also focus on improving their linguistics skills. One of the topic, you are sure to find immediate intisnsic motivation.

Experimental learning

Closely related to conten-based and theme-based instruction is experimental language learning. This includes activities that language both left and right brain processing, that contextualize language, integrate skills and real-world purposes. What experimental learning highlights for us is giving students concrete experiences through which they discover language principles.

Experimental learning emphais on the marriage of two substantive principles of effective learning, principles exposed by John Dewey:

1. One learns best by doing, by active experimentation
2. Inductive learning by discovery activities strategies that enable Ss o "take charge" of their own learning progress.

Experimental learning techniques tent to be learner centered by nature. Experimental learning tends to put an emphasis on the psychomotor aspects of language learning by involving learners in physical actions into which language is subsumed and reinforced.

The episode Hypothesis

Episode hypothesis the text will be easier to reproduce, understand, and recall, to the extent that it is structured episodically. By this the presentation of language is enhanced if students do not get disconnected series of sentences throw at them, but rather sentencs that are inteconnected in an interest-provoking episode.

Task-based teaching

Task-based teaching makes an important distinction between target tasks, which Ss must accomplish beyond the classroom and pedagogical tasks, which from the nucleus of the classroom activity.

Pedagogical tasks include any of a series of techniques designed ultimately to teach Ss to perform the target task. This include formal and fuctional techniques.

Task-based curricula differ from content-based, we have in task-based teaching a well integrated approach to language teaching that asks you to organize your classroom around those practical tasks that language users engage in out there in the real world.

The principal idea is that all your techniques should be identified with just one of the four but rather that most successful interactive techniques will include several skills areas.