paper.no.12 - English Language Teaching -1

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• Name:- Zankhana .M.Matholiya
• Roll.No:-36
• Paper No.-12-A English Language Teaching -1
• Topic :- Four skills for language (LSRW)
• Class :- M.A. Sem-3
• Enrollment No:- 2069108420180036
• College:- Smt.S.B.Gardi Department of English
• Email ID :- zankhanamatholiya96@gmail.com
• Submitted:-Department of English M.K.University, Bhavnagar

v Introduction

●      In any language there are four basic skills. The four necessities in language or commonly known as the four skills- plays a vital role in any language learning quest.

1.      Listening skill.

2.      speaking skill.

3.      reading skill.

4.      writing skill.

·      

●      The four skills are the pinnacles of language which will take you to greater heights. They are separate yet bound together with an inseparable bond Purpose of language is to communicate. For communication listening and speaking skill is necessary while reading and writing skills are additional functions of language. The natural sequence of learning language is listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Any language is difficult and easy. Language serves many purposes. Absence of language is dearth of communication.

●      When learning another language the sequence changes to reading, writing, listening and speaking. When learner knows all these four skills then language is known.

●       Listening and speaking: these two skills are highly interrelated and work simultaneously in real life situations. So, the integration of the two aims at fostering effective oral communication. This integration will assure real-life and purposeful communication. Reading and writing: they form a strong relationship with each other as skills. They are tools for achieving an effective written communication.

             

Ø How are the four skills used in the language classroom ?

●      Through daily activities, teachers provide learners with opportunities to develop each skill: students listen to the teacher use the target language, to a song, to one another in a pair activity, speak pronunciation practice, greetings, dialogue creation or recitation, songs, substitution drills, oral speed reading, role play, read instructions, written grammar drills, cards for playing games, flashcards and write fill in the blank sheets, sentences that describe a feeling, sight or experience, a dialogue script, a journal entry.

Ø How can the four skills be used together effectively?

●       The four skills work in tandem when the activities that require their use are designed to support learners in the process of learning, creating and producing a specific product. Four approaches in particular are structured so that the four skills can be used simultaneously. These approaches are: the focal skill approach, content based instruction, task based  instruction and the project based approach.

Ø Why are four skills activities useful?

●      Four skills activities in the language classroom serve many valuable purposes: they give learners scaffold support, opportunities to create, contexts in which to use the language for exchanges of real information, evidence of their own ability proof of learning and, most important, confidence.

    1.-Listening Skill.

●      The skill comes at first place when learning language is listening skill. When a child comes into the world, they cannot read, write or speak they can only listen. Any native language is acquired by listening. So listening skill is most important in learning language.

●      When we listen, we use our ears to receive individual sounds letters, stress, rhythm and pauses and we use our brain to convert these into messages that mean something to us. Listening is any language requires focus and attention. It is a skill that some people need to work at harder than others.

●      In addition, teaching the learners a lot of listening activities is a good way of enlarging their vocabulary. People who have difficulty concentrating are typically poor listeners. Like babies, we learn this skill by listening to people  who already know how to speak the language.

●      Students are involved in various listening situations, but most students have little or no listening instruction. Little listening instruction may be due to the lack of preparation, time or material. In addition, teachers may be uncertain whether they are good listeners themselves and may, therefore, hesitate to teach this skill.

●      “Listening is a fundamental language skill, but it is often ignored by foreign and second language teachers “(Rebeccal, 1993).

●      the listening skill should be a major area of concern to teachers and students of a second or foreign language.It is intended to provide an overview of the key concepts and issues involved in understanding listening, it discusses the nature and types of listening.

●      How is “Hearing” different from listening?

●       The two terms “hearing and listening are often used interchangeably, but there is an important difference between them.

●      Listening and hearing are not synonymous. Hearing occurs when your ears pick up sound waves being transmitted by a speaker, listening involves making sense out of what is being transmitted (Hamilton, 1999) as he quoted:

“Hearing is with the ears, listening is with the mind”

●      Listening in second language acquisition (SLA).

●      In second language acquisition (SLA) research, it is the 'linguistic environment' that serves as the stage for SLA. This environment - the speakers of the target language and their speech to the L2 learners - provides linguistic input in the form of listening opportunities embedded in social and academic situations. In order to acquire the language, learners must come to understand the language in these situations. This accessibility is made possible in part through accommodations made by native speakers to make language comprehension possible and in part through strategies the learner enacts to make the speech comprehensible.

Ø How to improve listening skill.

●      For learning language continuous listening is required. There are many ways to practice listening. Now there are audio tapes, Television available which can be good source for listening practice.

●      Here are key recommendations that have been made by language educators concerning the teaching of listening.

●      Morley (1984) offers an array of examples of selective listening materials, using authentic information and information-focused activities.

●      Anderson and Lynch (1988) provide helpful means for grading input types and organizing tasks to maximize learner interaction.

Underwood (1989) describes listening activities in terms of three phases: pre-, while- and post- listening activities. She demonstrates the utility of using 'authentic' conversations. (Carter)

2) -Speaking skill.

●      Speaking is the main function of the language. Languages are for speaking. In natural process of language learning, speaking comes to second place. Through listening children imitates the utterance. Slowly they know the meaning of the words. Gestures also plays very important role in understanding meaning of the language.

●      “Speaking” is the delivery language through the mouth. Speaking is also known as the productive skill in the oral mode. It, like the other skills, is more complicated and it seems at first and involves more than just pronouncing words.

●      To speak, we create sounds using many parts of our body including the lungs, vocal tract, vocal chords, tongue, teeth and lips. This vocalized form of language usually requires at least one listener. When two or more people speak or talk to each other, the conversation is called a “dialogue”.

●      There are three kinds of speaking situations in which we find ourselves:

1. interactive,
2. partially interactive, and
3. Non-interactive

●      Interactive speaking situations include face-to-face conversations and telephone calls, in
which we are alternately listening and speaking, and in which we have a chance to ask for
clarification, repetition, or slower speech from our conversation partner.

●      A range of different types of interaction need practicing.

●      Speaking is often connected with listening. For example, the two way communication makes up for the defect in communicative ability in the traditional learning. Two way means the relationship of the communication between the teacher and the students at school. This relationship is connected with the communicative activities between two people. It can create a fresh environment for speaking language. The two way communication can lengthen the dialogue limitlessly. This is its advantage. At the same time, if the speakers want to give the correct response he has to think hard, the sentence is not easily forgotten which is created by themselves through thinking, sometimes with the teacher’s hint. They can talk freely and express themselves as well as they can.

●      In addition, speech can flow naturally from one person to another in the form of dialogue. It can also be planned and rehearsal as in the delivery of a speech or presentation. Of course, some people talk to themselves! In fact, some English learners practice speaking standing alone in front of a mirror.

Ø Characteristics of speech.

●      Levelt (1989) proposed that speech production involves four major processes: conceptualization, formulation, articulation and self-monitoring

●      Conceptualization is concerned with planning the message content. It draws on background knowledge, knowledge about the topic, about the speech situation and on knowledge of patterns of discourse. The conceptualize includes a 'monitor', which checks everything that occurs in the interaction to ensure that the communication goes to plan. This enables speakers to self-correct for expression, grammar and pronunciation.

●      After conceptualization, the formulator finds the words and phrases to express the meanings, sequencing them and putting in appropriate grammatical markers (such as inflections, auxiliaries, articles). It also prepares the sound patterns of the words to be used: LI errors of pronunciation very commonly involve switching sounds between words that are separated from each other; such switches suggest that the pronunciation of words must be prepared in batches prior to pronunciation.

●      The third process is articulation. This involves the motor control of the articulatory organs; in English: the lips, tongue, teeth, alveolar palate, velum, glottis, mouth cavity and breath.

Practice

• A range of different types of interaction need practicing.
• The conditions of oral tasks need to differ from those for written skills.
• Improvised speech needs practice, but around some content familiarity.
• Overt oral editing skills need to be encouraged, including the use of communication strategies.
• Oral language processing requires integration of accuracy, complexity and fluency.
• For learners' oral abilities to develop, courses need to vary the emphasis on fluency, accuracy and complexity. (Carter)

      3)- Reading skill.

●      In second language learning teaching can improve vocabulary. Like listening it can also helps learner to get natural structure of sentences.

●      In second language learning teaching can improve vocabulary. Like listening it can also helps learner to get natural structure of sentences.

●      Reading can be silent in our head or aloud so that other people can hear. Reading is a receptive skill - through it we receive information. But the complex process of reading also requires the skill of speaking, so that we can pronounce the words that we read. In this sense, reading is also a productive skill in that we are both receiving information and transmitting it even if only to ourselves.

Ø Focus on the uses of reading

●      A number of scholars have wished to locate discussion of reading within the wider framework of literacy practices, as specific to particular sociocultural environments. This emphasis is of relevance to teachers whose learners come to English language literacy with diverse experience of literacy in a first or other language.Some will be highly literate in a first literacy; others may be acquiring literacy through the medium of English.

●      In either case it is important to see reading and writing as part of language behavior beyond the learning of specific skills or strategies. Street (1984) introduces a dichotomy between an autonomous model of literacy which sees reading and writing as the learning of skills which are supposedly universally implicated in literacy instruction, and a view of literacy which is called 'ideological' and by which reading and writing practices have currency and prestige, not because of any inherent value but because of social and historical factors particular to the cultural setting.

Ø Process: focus on reader.

·       Process accounts of reading take the reader rather than the text as a point of departure. They are sometimes termed top-down, on the grounds that they give greater emphasis to the kinds of background knowledge and values which the reader brings to reading.

·       The nature of this knowledge can be characterized as a 'schema', or mental model, allowing a reader to relate new, text-based knowledge to existing world knowledge. In the 1980s and 1990s the role of the reader shifted. In early accounts of reading the reader was seen as passive: reading, along with listening, was referred to as a 'passive skill'.

●      There was then a shift in emphasis from a passive, acquiescent reader to an active one. Thus, the reader was typically described as 'extracting' meaning from a text. More recently the ground has shifted again to talk of reading as 'interactive' rather than simply 'active'. Readers are seen as negotiating meaning; meaning is partial within the text and writers' intentions may not be privileged over readers' interpretations.

●      Reading skills refer to the specific abilities that enable a person to read with independence and interact with the message. Reading is therefore a highly.

●      Valuable skill and activity, and it is recommended that English learners try to read as much as possible in English. Moreover, reading is a complex cognitive process of decoding symbols in order to construct or derive meaning. Like all language, it is a complex interaction between the text and the reader which is shaped by the reader’s prior knowledge, experiences, attitude and language community which is culturally and socially situated. To sum up, reading process requires continuous practice, development, refinement, creativity and critical analysis. (Carter)

4) -Writing skill.

●      Writing is last skill of language learning. Writing is one way of providing variety in classroom procedures. It provides a learner with physical evidence of his achievements and he can measure his improvement. It helps to consolidate their grasp of vocabulary and structure, and complements the other language skills. Sentence is the base of an article. So he should begin his writing with sentences. For example, translation, sentence pattern exchanging, and text shortening and rewriting.

●      It helps to understand the text and write compositions. It can foster the learner’s ability to summarize and to use the language freely.

●      Teaching English second language (L2) writing differs from teaching other language skills in two ways.

●      First, even as late as the 1970s, L2 writing was not viewed as a language skill to be taught to learners. Instead, it was used as a support skill in language learning to, for example, practice handwriting, write answers to grammar and reading exercises, and write dictation. In fact, while graduate programmes in TESOL regularly offered courses in other skill areas, virtually no coursework was available in teaching L2 writing.

●      Second, as the theory and practice of L2 composition teaching gradually developed, it followed the path of US native English speaker (NES) composition theory. Only recently has English L2 composition theory and pedagogy begun to offer English first language (LI) researchers and teachers insights and pedagogical practices.

●      “Writing” is the process of using symbols letters of the alphabet, punctuation and spaces to communicate thoughts and ideas in a readable form.

●      Writing is the productive skill in the written mode. It too is more complicated and often seems to be the hardest of the skills, even for native speakers of a language, since it involves not just a graphic representation of speech, but the development and presentation of thoughts in a structured way.

●      To write clearly, it is essential to understand the basic system of a language. In English, this includes knowledge of grammar, punctuation and sentence structure.

Ø Practice

·       As ESL research and practices have developed, many techniques and methods have proved successful in English L2 writing classrooms:

·        Careful needs analysis to plan curriculums (Reid 2000);

·        Co-operative and group work (including collaborative writing) that strengthen the community of the class and offer writers authentic audiences; Integration of language skills in class activities;

·        Learning style and strategy training to help students learn how to learn (Reid 1998); and The use of relevant, authentic materials and tasks. (Carter)

v Conclusion

●      All four skills together make the language. In language learning they are interdependent. One skill helps to learn other skill. So, it is necessary to having good control of all four skills for acquiring good language.

Works Cited

Carter, Nunan David and .Ronald. The Cambridge Guide to Teaching English to Speakers of other languages. n.d.