Teaching language skills
Teaching language skills is often the key focus or main element in the language teaching practice.
Knowledge of the theory and practice of teaching these skills is one of the key learning objectives of many universities around the world.
Such skills can be divided into two groups
Receptive skills
Productive skills
The teaching of such language skills should be underpinned or informed by a dynamic perspective of language variation
The major dimension of teaching such language skills involves teaching students how to use English—both spoken and written— in many different ways.
To shuttle appropriately between diverse varieties, cultures, and
communities
To negotiate effectively across cultures and Englishes
To take ownership of their own use of English
To develop critical awareness of existing
assumptions and practices that promote linguistic and cultural inequality.
Teaching Speaking
The teaching of this skills was not perceived as important until the introduction of the direct method and audio-lingual method.
Over the last two decades, the importance of oral skills and therefore using authentic or real-life communication in teaching materials has been emphasized by the paradigm of communicative language teaching.
Other
The changes in the way English is spoken in different sociocultural contexts by multilingual and translingual speakers of English have generated a number of
pedagogical implications for teaching speaking skills in a classroom context.
Other
Teaching of speaking skills should be based on the following characteristics of a real speech or the nature of oral discourse
Speech is composed mainly of short phrases and clauses.
Speaking is either planned (e.g., a formal speech) or unplanned (e.g., a
discussion or a conversation).
Speech contains fillers and hesitation markers.
Speakers use fixed or chunks of phrases.
Speech contains colloquial expressions.
Meanings are negotiated and jointly constructed by the interactants.
Teaching Listening
Listening was not recognized as a skill in its own right until the
era of CLT (communicative language teaching).
Physiological and cognitive processes at different levels as well as attention to contextual and socially coded acoustic clues have constructed listening as the
most difficult skill to learn and teach.
Other
Listening specialists have observed that the approaches to the teaching of listening skills have evolved
Other
There exist two approaches to the teaching of listening: bottom-up and top-down approaches
A bottom-up approach tends to adopt a
view that comprehension happens when the incoming linguistic input is decoded, recognized, and understood.
These linguistic input could be different elements
sounds (phonemes, syllables)
words
sentences
clauses
A bottom-up pedagogical approach focuses on improving students’ knowledge of vocabulary and grammar
There are different tasks students can perform
Cloze listening
Multiple choice listening comprehension questions
Teaching Writing
In teaching writing skills, two of the most popular and compelling perspectives of L2 writing and its pedagogy are the contrastive rhetoric perspective and the cognitive process writing perspective.
These two schools of thought
have influenced and shaped how English-language teachers conceptualize writing in English and teach writing
Another approach to teaching writing skills that has been influential and that has been employed by language practitioners is the “cognitive process” writing movement.
This movement advocates the conceptualization of writing as process and meaning making.
It stresses the need to focus on the mental behaviors of writers at work
How writers write
Teaching Reading
The important role of reading skills in developing one’s communicative competence has often been underestimated.
A skill-based perspective of reading conceptualizes reading as having the ability to recognize codes and to comprehend as well as interpret meanings of those codes.
Advanced learners of English can be taught a wide range of reading strategies
skimming
scanning
making inferences
guessing meanings and
topics of a passage