Teaching by Principles Chapter 15: Integrating the “Four Skills”

Teaching by Principles Chapter 15: Integrating the “Four Skills”

Why integration?

-Integrated-skills courses gives students greater motivation that converts to better retention of principles of effective speaking, listening, reading and writing.

-Students are given a chance of diversifying their efforts in more meaningful tasks.

-Supporting observations

 ˙Production and reception cannot be split.

 ˙Interaction means sending and receiving messages.

 ˙Written and spoken language often bear a relationship to each other.

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

 ˙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 the classroom arena.

 ˙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.

 ˙Proponents of the whole language approach have shown us 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.

-Integrated-skills courses can pull the direct attention of the student away from the separateness of the skills of language and toward the meaningful purposes for which we use language.

Content-based Instruction

-Integrates the learning of some specific subject-matter content with the learning of a second language.

-The overall structure of the curriculum is dictated more by nature of the subject matter than by language forms and sequences.

-The second language is simply the medium to convey informational content of interest and relevance to the learner.

-Examples:

 ˙Immersion programs for elementary-school children

 ˙Sheltered English programs (mostly found at elementary- and secondary- school

　levels)

 ˙Writing across the curriculum

 ˙English for Specific Purpose (ESP)

-Content-based instruction usually pertains to academic or occupational instruction over an extended period of time at intermediate-to-advanced proficiency levels.

Theme-based Instruction

-Strong version: the primary purpose of a course is to instruct students in a subject-matter area, and language is of secondary and subordinate interest.

 ˙All four of the examples of content-based instruction

-Weak form: the teaching places an equal value on content and language objectives, putting focal attention to topic and peripheral attention to language.

 ˙Topic-based teaching

 ˙Serve the multiple interests of students in a classroom and offer a focus on content while still adhering to institutional needs for offering a language course per se.

 ˙Example: Intensive English course for immediate pre-university students; English

for Academic Purpose (EAP)

-Major principles of theme-based and content-based instruction

 ˙automaticity

 ˙meaningful learning

 ˙intrinsic motivation

 ˙communicative competence

-Possible theme-based activities (pp. 237-238)

Experiential Learning

-Activities that engage both left- and right-brain processing, that contextualize language, integrate skills and that point toward authentic, real-world purposes.

-Give 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.

-Give students opportunities to use language as they grapple with the problem-solving complexities of a variety of concrete experiences.

-Examples of learner-centered experiential techniques

 ˙hands-on projects (such as nature projects)

 ˙computer activities (especially in small groups)

 ˙research projects

 ˙cross-cultural experiences (camps, dinner groups, etc.)

 ˙field trips and other “on-site” visits (such as to a grocery store)’

 ˙role-plays and simulations

-Teacher-controlled techniques

 ˙using props, realia, visuals, show-and-tell sessions

 ˙playing games (which often involve strategy) and singing

 ˙utilizing media (television, radio and movies)

-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)

 ˙Students’ personal experiences

 ˙Teacher’s writing down the “experience”

 ˙Students’ modification and illustration, which is in turn preserved in the form of a “book”

 ˙Word study, spelling focus, semantic discussions, inference, prediction, etc.

 ˙Intrinsic involvement of students in creating their own stories rather than being given other people’s stories.

The Episode Hypothesis

-Gouin’s Seris Method

-Presentation of language is enhanced if students receive interconnected sentences in an interest-provoking episode rather than in a disconnected series of sentences.

-When the outcome is not clear, learners are motivated to continue reading and to become more involved in the content than in the language, therefore increasing its episodic flavor.  

-Interaction of cognition and language enables learners to for “expectancies” as they encounter either logically or episodically linked sentences.

-Contributions and relations of this episode hypothesis to integrated-skills teaching

 ˙Challenging

 ˙Requiring reading and/or writing skills on the students’ part

 ˙Stimulus for questions by speaking or writing

 ˙Students’ own episodes

 ˙Dramatization

Task-based Teaching

-Peter Skehan’s capsulization of a task as an activity

 ˙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.

-Target tasks

 ˙Students must accomplish the tasks beyond the classroom.

 ˙Similar to functions of language in Notional-Functional Syllabuses

 ˙More specific and more explicitly related to classroom instruction

 ˙“Giving personal information in a job interview” rather than “Giving personal information”

 ˙The task specifies a context.

-Pedagogical task

 ˙The tasks form the nucleus of the classroom activity.

 ˙Any of a series of techniques designed ultimately to teach students to perform the target task.

 ˙The climatic pedagogical tasks actually involves students in some form of simulation of the target task itself.

 ˙May include both formal and functional techniques.

 ˙Example in a job interview (p. 243)

-A task-based curriculum 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.

-The teacher and curriculum planner of the task-based curriculum need 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

-The priority is 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.

-The pedagogical tasks specify 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; while there is an ultimate focus on communication and purpose and meaning, the goals are linguistic in nature.

-Well-integrated approach to language teaching that asks you to organize your classroom around those practical tasks that language users engage in “out there” in the real world.