Developing Language Skills

SUBJECT ASSIGNMENT
DEVELOPING LANGUAGE SKILL

INTRODUCCTION

English language teaching involves the development of the Four Language Skills “Reading, Listening, Speaking and Writing”. Skills relate to the way language is used (Richards, Platt and Platt, 1992), and they play a seminal role in the development of Communicative Competence. “Term coined by the linguist Dell Hymes. It is anextension of Chomsky's 'linguistic competence'. It reflects the belief that language is always used in a social context or situation”. This Competence and skills permit that learners acquire Language Learning and therefore fluency in language use.

Teaching Course Books today have sought to find ways to develop these skills trough developing strategies that permit learner to acquire them and enrichtheir learning process. Ehrman, Leaver and Oxford (2003) suggest that the term strategy implies movement towards a goal. And in this case the goal is a Second Language Learning.

Then we are going to analyze each of the skills and the way that they are working in Unit 7 of the book “Bachillerato Make Easy” created by Richmond, in which we are taking into account some of the main practical andtheoretical considerations relating to the skills, the activities and task that are proposed in this unit and the implication that they have in the language learning.

READING SKILL
At the beginning, we are going to review some concepts about What Reading Mean?
Angaluki Muaka, Elizabeth B. Bernhardt, Michel Kamil state that:
What is reading? Reading is about understanding written texts. Itis a complex activity that involves both perception and thought. Reading consists of two related processes: word recognition and comprehension. Word recognition refers to the process of perceiving how written symbols correspond to one’s spoken language. Comprehension is the process of making sense of words, sentences and connected text. Readers typically make use of background knowledge,vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, experience with text and other.

“Reading can be a great opportunity that can change your life forever. Reading can entertain you; amuse you, but most of all it will enrich you with knowledge, and experiences narrated”. (Uttara Manohar).

“Reading is a constant process of guessing, hypothesing, anticipating, confirming and predicting in which the knowledge "onebrings to the text is often more important than what one finds in it." (Grellet 1981: 7).

Page 60
This unit includes the three concepts mentioned above because it shows different activities in which are presented, use of background knowledge, reading for entertainment, word recognition, comprehension, predicting, anticipating, between other. But we are going to analyze in deep.

As can beseen in the first part of the book Unit 7 page 60, it held several times of reading, it means, “Pre”, “While” and “Post” reading stages are used. The “pre” a warm up activity or introduction to the subject to discuss and assess in groups, which is used to wake up the students' interest and to promote a cooperative learning, with an introduction of a new vocabulary activity too. Then a “WhileActivity” based on the use of background knowledge the students have of the topic, and by the analysis of sentences or short phrases (for guiding students to use of button up strategies) and the words in italics, with which learners can make predictions about the topic. These two moments are essential to introduce students to create a clearer concept of the reading address.

Page 61
On page 61of the unit 7, We find the “Post Activity” in which they use two type of questions activities “Truth Assessment” questions that focus on whether a statement is true - feasible - or not. And a “Multiple Choice” questions that allow students to choose from a number of possible answers. According to Widdowson (1978:96). Multi choice may be distracting activity because of a focus of attention on the...