Integrating Language Skills

              The four skills that are the most important in English language teaching are listening, speaking, reading, and writing.  These skills are important to integrate together instead of addressing them separately.  They are all interconnected and each reinforces the others.  Brown Ch. 17 talks about different approaches that teachers use to integrate these skills.  Experiential language learning uses both sides of the brain and offers concrete experiences for learners.  Instead of telling students how language works they are given opportunities to use language.  This approach is one that I would consider using as an Early Childhood major.  Children learn best through hands-on experiences.

                Kumar talks about contextualizing linguistic input in Chapter 9 of Beyond Methods.  He emphasizes the importance of semantics and pragmatics within specific contexts.  It’s important to know a person’s cultural background.  Every culture has different norms and different phrases that are considered appropriate or inappropriate.  If this isn’t known then it can be easy to take something that’s said out of context and become offended.  For this reason, it’s beneficial to talk about each language represented in the classroom and come up with examples of how something being said could come across the wrong way when it’s translated into a different language/culture. 

                Kumar talks about the integration of language skills in Ch. 10.  The four language skills have a history of being separated.  It was seen that children learn to listen before they learn to speak and they learn to read before they learn to write.  This progression was suggested because it is the general order in which children learn their first language.  However, this does not prove to be true with learning a second language.  All of these skills build off of each other and when integrated they have the potential to offer different opportunities for different types of learners.  Everyone brings different learning strategies and styles into the classroom and it’s important for the teacher to provide multiple opportunities for students to use their skills.  Integrating skills also helps the student’s communicative competence.  The goal is not for a student to only learn how to write or only learn how to speak.  The goal is for the student to be proficient in all four skills in order to communicate at their highest potential.

Grammar & Language Awareness

              Grammar is an extremely important part of learning a L2.  Brown chapter 22 talks about how there are three dimensions of language that are all interconnected.  These three parts of language are grammar, semantics, and pragmatics.  Not one of these dimensions is sufficient on its own.  It’s important to be careful not to overwhelm students with linguistic terminology, but to embed it in meaningful, communicative contexts.  There is debate as to whether or not grammar teaching should even be an isolated class.  There are ways to teach grammar that are more meaningful to students.  Learners need to have the opportunity to use the language in communicative tasks.  It’s important to focus on forms that are problematic for specific learners.  Explicit grammar teaching is more effective for more advanced levels.  What does appropriate grammar teaching look like for beginning levels?  Do beginners need more than recasting, incidental focus on form, and corrective feedback? 

            Kumar chapters 7 and 8 talk about language awareness and activating intuitive heuristics.  Language awareness is a crucial part of language and content education.  The English language has so many rules and exceptions that it can be difficult to use correctly.  It’s helpful to have an awareness of why the language is formed the way that it is in order to understand it and use it correctly.  A person’s intuitive judgment can also help them learn the structures of the L2.  We have a natural tendency to know when something is wrong, even if we don’t know how to fix it.  In order to help learners with their discovery of themselves and their new language, it is beneficial to show them that structures are characterized by form, meaning, and use.  

Teaching Reading and Writing

In the past reading specialists argued that the best way to teach reading was in a bottom-up methodology.  Teach symbols, grapheme-phoneme correspondences, syllables, and lexical recognition first and then comprehension would be derived from the sum of its parts.  Now, research is telling us that both top down and bottom up processing are important for a successful teaching methodology.  A reader continually shifts from one focus to the next from predicting probable meaning to checking whether that is really what the writer says.  I found it interesting that the use of teaching students strategies for how to read helps them more than just enriching their environment with materials for them to use. Linked to that, students also need to read extensively on their own.  Whenever you are teaching a reading technique, make sure students know their purpose in reading something.  The purpose in reading needs to be addressed.  The orthographic rules need to be taught and explained for language learners.  Sometimes it’s difficult to connect spoken word to written word with all of the rules in English. 

            The portion that talks about pre-reading, during-reading, and after-reading phases were helpful because this is something that can easily be forgotten about.  Before you read, there should be some time spent encouraging skimming, predicting, and activating schemata in order to ease into that chapter.  During the reading students need to know what their purpose is and what they’re looking for in the reading.  Finally, after reading is not only a great time for comprehension checks but also for discussing the author’s purpose and critically examining the article. 

            Process writing is also really interesting.  It allows students to discover their own voice and engage in meaningful writing.  Students aren’t going to get everything correct right away.  It’s all the steps and progress along the way that will help them develop into a better writer.