Chapter 15

Chapter 15Integrating The “Four Skills”

Aini Zulaikah 2201410002Class code: 02

Subject: LTTDay/ hour: Monday ,11.00 a.m

There is a recent trend toward skill integration. That is, rather than designing a curriculum to teach the many pects of one skill, say, reading, curriculum designers are talking more of a whole language approach whereby reading is treated as one of two or more interrelated skills.

A lesson in a so-called reading class, under this new paradigm, might include:

A pre-reading discussion of the topic to active schemata.

Listening to a lecture or a series of informative statements about the topic of a passage to be read

A focus on a certain reading strategy, say, scanning

Wriring a paraphrase of a section of the reading passage

In the pre-Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) days of language teaching, the focus on the forms of language almost predisposed curriculum designers to segment courses into the separate language skills.

Administrative considerations still make it easier t program separate courses in reading and speaking, and so on, as a glance at current intensive and university English courses reveals.

There are certain specific purposes for which students are studying English that best be labeled by one of the four skills, especially at the high intermediate to advanced levels.

There are several reasons why courses weren’t always integrated in the first place

1. the coin in two2. Interaction means sending and receiving massages3. Written and spoken language often(but not always)

bear a relationship to each other; to ignore that relationship is to ignore the richness of language

4. For literate learners, the interrelationship of written and spoken language is an intrinsically motivating reflection of language and culture and society

5. By attending primarily to what learners can do with language, and only secondarily to the forms of language, we invite any or all of the four skills that are relevant into te classroom arena.

The Following Observations Support Such Techniques

1. Often one skill will reinforce another; we learn to speak, for example, in part by modeling what we hear, and we learn to write by examining what we can read

2. Proponent of the whole whole language approach that in the real world of language use, most of our natural performance involves not only the integration of one or more skills, but connections between language and the way we think and feel and act

The are five models are in common use. They all pull the direct attention of the students away from te separateness of the skills of the language and toward the meaningful purposesnfor which we use languageProduction and reception are quite simply two sides of the same coin; one cannot split.

The first of the five models of integrated-skills approaches is content-based instrution. The overall structure of a content-based curriculum is dictated more by the nature of the subject matter than by language forms and sequences. Here are some examples of content-based curricula:

Immersion programs for elementary-school children

Sheltered English programs (elementary and secondary school levels)

Content-Based Instruction

Writing across the curriculum (where writing skills in secondary schoos and univercities are taught within subjet-matter areas like biology, history, art, etc.)

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) (e.g., for enginering, agriculture, or medicine)

Content-based teaching allows learners to acquire knowledge ad skills that transcend all the bits and pieces of language that may occupy hours and days of analyzing in a traditional language classroom

In order to distinguish theme-based teaching from content-based, it is important to distinguish between what is called “strong” and “weak” versions of content-based teaching.

Theme-Based Instruction

• The primary purpose of a course is to instruct students in a subject matter areas, and language is of secondary and subordinate interest

The strong version

• Very practical and very effective in many instructional setting Theme-based provides an alternative to what would otherwise be traditional language classes by structuring a course around themes or topicsThe weak version

The major principles under-lying both theme-based and content-based instruction are

Automaticity Meaningful learning Intrinsic motivation Communicative competenceThese principles are well served by theme-

based instruction and/or by courses that are successfully able to get students axited and interested in some topics, issues, idea and problem.

1. Use enviromental statistics and facts for classroom reading, writing, discussion, and debate.

2. Carry out research and writing projects3. Have students create their own

environmental awarness material. Ou an get a great deal of language and content material out of language experience approach in which students creat leaflets, posters, bulletin boards, etc.

Here are some possible theme-based ativities

1. Arrange field trips. Field trips can be made to recycling centers, factories that practice recycling, wildlife preserves, areas that need litter removed

2. Conduct simulation games. Some games get quite elaborate, with countries of the world and their respective resources represented by objects like egg cartons, bottle, cans, newspapers and the like and players charged to resolve problems of unequal distribution of wealth as well as environmental controls

Closely related to and overlapping content-based and theme-based instruction is the concept of experiential language learning. Experiential learning includes activities that engage both left and right-brain processing, that contextualize language that integrate skills, and that point toward authentic, real-world purposes.

Janet Eyring (1991) points out, experiential learning is a phrase describing everything in the last five chapter of this book. Experiential learning giving students concrete experiences through which they “discover” language principles by trial and error, by processing feedback, by building hypotheses about language, and by revising these assumptions in order to become fluent (Eyring 1991: 347)

Experiential Learning

Morris Keeton and Pamela Tate in experiential learning the learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied.

John Dewey espouses principles (a) one learns best by “doing”, by active experimentation (b) inductive learning by discovery activates strategies that enable students to take “charge” of their own learning progress.

Experiential learning techniques tend to be learner-centered by nature. Examples of learner-centered experiential techniques include :

Hands-on projects Computer activities Research projects Cross-cultural experiences Field trips and other “on-site” visits Role-play and simulation

Experiential learning tends to put an emphasis on the psychomotor aspects of language learning by involving learners in physical actions into which language is subsumed and reinforced.

Language Experience Approach (LEA) (Van Allen & Allen 1967) an integrated-skills approach initially used in teaching native language reading skills, but more recently adapted to second language learning contexts. The benefit of the LEA is in the intrinsic involvement of students in creating their own stories rather than being given other people’s stories.

Francois Gouin designed a method of language teaching called the Series Method. One of the keys to the success of the method lay in the presentation of language in an easily followed storyline. Gouin teaches a number of verbs, verb forms, and other vocabulary in a little story about a girl chopping wood :

The girl goes and seeks a piece of wood She takes a hatchet She draws near the block She places the wood on this block She raises the hatchet She brings down the hatchet The blade strikes against the wood. etc

The Episode Hypothesis

In some ways, Gouin was utilizing a psychological device that, a hundred years later, John Oller called the Episode Hypothesis According to Oller (1983;12), “ text will be easier to reproduce, understand, and recall, to the extent that it is structured episodically”

By this he meant that the presentation of language is enhanced if students receive interconnected sentences in an interest-provoking episode rather than in a disconnected series of sentences.

Oller notes that the interaction of cognition and language enables learners to form “expectancies” as they encounter either logically or episodically linked sentences.

How the episode hypothesis contributes or relates to integrated-skills teaching :

Stories or episodes challenges the teacher and textbook writer to present interesting, natural language, whether the language is viewed as written discourse or oral discourse

Episode can be presented in either written or spoken form, thus requiring reading and/ or writing skills on the students’ part

Episode can provide the stimulus for spoken or written questions that students respond to, in turn, by speaking or writing

Students can be encouraged to write their own episodes, or to complete an episode whose resolution or climax is not presented

Those written episodes might then be dramatized in the classroom by the students

Peter Skehan’s (1998a : 95) capsulization of a task as an activities in which

Meaning is primary There is some communication problem to

solve There is some sort of relationship to

comparable real-world activities Task completion has some priority The assessment of the task is in terms of

outcome.

Task-Based Teaching

Task-based teaching makes an important distinction between target tasks, which students must accomplish beyond the classroom, and pedagogical tasks, which form the nucleus of the classroom activity. Target task are not unlike the functions of language that are listed in National-Functional Syllabuses; however they are much more specific and more explicitly related to classroom instruction. Notice that the task specifies a context. Pedagogical tasks include any of a series of techniques designed ultimately to teach students to perform the target task; the climactic pedagogical task actually involves students in some form of simulation of the target task itself.

Pedagogical tasks are distinguished by their specific goals that point beyond the language classroom to the target language. They may, however, include both formal and functional techniques. A pedagogical task designed to teach students to give personal information in a job interview might, for example, involve

1. Exercises in comprehension of wh- question with do-insertion

2. Drills in the use of frequency adverbs3. Listening to extracts of job interviews4. Analyzing the grammar and discourse of the

interviews5. Modeling an interview: teacher and one student6. Role-playing a simulated interview: students in pairs

While you might be tempted to consider only the climactic (#6) as the one fulfilling the criterion of pointing beyond the classroom to the real world, all of the techniques build toward enabling the students to perform the final technique.

A task-based curriculum, then, specifies what a learner needs to do with the English language in terms of target tasks and organizes a series of pedagogical tasks intended to reach those goals. In fact, a distinguishing feature of task-based curricula is their insistence on pedagogical soundness in the development and sequencing of tasks. The teacher and the curriculum planner are called upon to consider carefully the following dimensions of communicative tasks:

Goal Input from the teacher Techniques The role of the teacher The role of the learner Evaluation

In task-based instruction,the priority in not the bits and pieces of language, but rather the functional purposes for which language must be used. While content-based instruction focuses on subject-matter content, task-based instruction focuses on a whole set of real-world tasks themselves.

Input for tasks can come from a variety of authentic sources :

Speeches Canversations Narratives Public announcements Cartoon strips Interviews Oral descriptions Media extracts Games and puzzles Photo Letters Poems Directions Invitations

Textbooks Diaries Songs Telephone directories Menus Labels

The pedagogical task specifies exactly what learners will do with the input and what the respective roles of the teacher and learners are.

Task-based curricula differ from content-based, theme-based, and experiential instruction in that the course objectives are somewhat more language-based.