Integrated Skills

INTRODUCTION

This module is focused on the details about teaching a combination of the four skills of language which are listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It is crucial to recognize that by attending to the four skills in four separate modules I am not advocating the teaching of skills in separate classes or even lessons. I rather quickly discovered that in most contexts of humancommunication we do not separate those skills. I also discovered that the activation of one skill (listening, for example) can be readily reinforced by the use of another skill (speaking, reading, and / or writing).

I have chosen to illustrate the concept of integration by examining a number of approaches to language teaching that model integration in the LICEO ANGLO COLOMBIANO THE SCHOOL, locatedin Armenia. This research describes as well some of those well-known approaches, all of which celebrate the integration of at least two, if not all four skills.

In the future I will examine the teaching of grammar and vocabulary, because all four skills inherently involve structure (grammar) and lexical items (vocabulary), this is a separate item devoted specifically to issues, problems, andguidelines for helping students to focus on form (the organizational components of language). Those issues and guidelines apply, of course, to whatever specific skill, or combination of skills, students are performing at a given time. Most of the materials are largely adopted from the book written by Douglas H. Brown entitled: ―Teaching by Principles published in 2008.

CHAPTER I

INTEGRATINGTHE FOUR LANGUAGE SKILLS

OBJECTIVES

After reading this research, you will be able to:

• Appreciate the importance of integrating skills for more authenticity and better reinforcement

• Analyze a lesson from the point of view of its integration of skills

• Understand the characteristics of several different approaches that illustrate the integration of skills

• Apply conceptsof skills integration to the next researches, which deal with the separate skills

For more than six decades now, research and practice in English language teaching has identified the "four skills" — listening, speaking, reading, and writing – as of paramount importance. ESL curricula and textbooks around the world tend to focus on one or two of the four skills, sometimes to the exclusion ofthe others. Books, articles, anthologies, research surveys, and conferences typically index or organize their contents according to each of the four skills.

It is perfectly appropriate to identify language performance. The human race has fashioned two forms of productive performance, oral and written, and two forms of receptive performance, aural (or auditory) and reading. There are, of course,offshoots of each mode. Lumped together under nonverbal communication are various visually perceived messages delivered through gestures, facial expressions, proximity, and so forth. Graphic art (drawings, paintings, and diagrams) is also a powerful form of communication. But attention to the four different skills does indeed pay off as learners of a second language discover the differences andinterrelationships among these four primary modes of performance.

Despite our history of treating the four skills in separate segments, of a curriculum, there is a recent trend toward skill integration. That is, rather than designing a curriculum to teach the many aspects of one skill, say, reading, curriculum designers are taking more of a whole language approach whereby reading is treated asone of two or more interrelated skills. A course that deals with reading skills, then, will more often than not also deal with related listening, speaking and writing skills. A lesson in a so-called reading class, under this new paradigm, might include

• A pre-reading discussion of the topic to activate schemata.
• Listening to a teacher's monologue or a series of informative statements...