Integrated skills in foreign language teaching

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Integrated skills in foreign language teaching

Інтегровані навички в навчанні іноземної мови

Makukhina S.V.,

Senior Lecturer at the Department of Tourism, Hotel and Restaurant Business and Foreign Languages

Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University

The article deals with the foreign languages teaching as an interconnected formation of skills in all types of speech activities. In teaching foreign languages, there are concepts of “an integrated approach to language learning" as an interconnected formation of skills in all types of speech activities. The article is considered five different ways to approach the integration of the four skills. The principal idea here is not to assume that all the techniques should be identified with just one of the four but rather that most successful interactive techniques will include several skill areas. The importance of listening comprehension in language learning is now be quite apparent. There is the ever-present relationship among all four skills, and the necessity authentic, interactive classes to integrate these skills even as there is focus from time to time on the specifics of one skill area. It is noted, that speech processing theory distinguishes between two types of processing in both listening and reading comprehensions. Listening and speaking are two skills that are most widely used for classroom interaction. The article considers different parameters of these two skills, what they are, types of each, issues, and some idea of the kinds of techniques that help to focus on either one or both of them. The attention is drawn to the reading-writing connection. Reading ability is developed in association with writing, listening and speaking activity. It should be noted, that the goals will be best achieved by capitalizing on the interrelationship of skills, especially reading-writing connection. Special attention is paid to reading as a component of general second language proficiency, but only in the perspective of the whole picture of interactive language teaching. Learning a foreign language is an active process of self-development that is connected with creative activity of the students through formation and development of ideas in a foreign language.

Key words: foreign language, integrated skills, communication, interactive techniques, speech activity.

Інтеграція у навчанні - це сучасна інноваційна тенденція, викликана самим часом, який вимагає швидко, якісно та ефективно навчитися використовувати комунікацію для громадських та особистих цілей. У статті розглядаються інтегровані навички як засіб моделювання ефективної письмової та усної ділової комунікації. Описано п'ять різних способів підходу до інтеграції чотирьох умінь. Основною ідеєю є те, що всі методи в навчанні іноземної мови не слід ототожнювати лише з одним із чотирьох навичків, інтерактивні методи включатимуть кілька сфер навичок. Існує постійний взаємозв'язок між усіма чотирма навичками та необхідністю автентичних інтерактивних занять. Важливість розуміння аудіювання у вивченні мови зараз стає цілком очевидним. Через аудіювання відбувається засвоєння мовленнєвої сторони мови, що значно полегшує оволодіння говорінням. Навички аудіювання та говоріння тісно переплітаються. Взаємодія між цими двома способами виконання особливо сильно стосується найпопулярнішої категорії дискурсу в професії: бесіди. Навчання читання ставить за мету оволодіння такими уміннями, завдяки яким сприймається необхідна змістовна інформація, а всі супутні мовні та технічні труднощі не перешкоджають перебігу усього процесу. Здатність до читання розвивається у зв'язку з письмом, аудіюванням та усним мовленням. Особлива увага приділяється читанню як складовій загального володіння другою мовою, але лише в ракурсі цілісної картини інтерактивного навчання мови. Навчання письму сприяє формуванню вмінь говоріння і читання, тому для цього виду мовленнєвої діяльності мета навчання полягає не тільки в тому, щоб навчити учнів правопису, але й умінню письмово викладати свої думки. Вивчення іноземної мови - це активний процес саморозвитку, пов'язаний з творчою діяльністю учнів через формування та розвиток уявлень про іноземну мову.

Ключові слова: іноземна мова, інтегровані навички, комунікація, інтерактивні методи, мовленнєва діяльність.

Problem statement

In teaching foreign languages, there is the concept of “integrated approach to language learning” as an interconnected formation of skills in all types of speech activities - listening, speaking, reading and writing and “integrated skill” as the interaction of four complex skills (reading, listening, speaking and writing). It is known, that the subject “foreign language” itself is inherently also universal, since this subject is evaluated in the educational material of various foreign sciences.

Teachers are always looking for effective methods, both qualitatively and in a shorter period of time to consolidate the necessary skills for the successful mastery of communicative competence. Indeed, integration in education is a modern innovative trend caused by time itself, which requires fast, high-quality and learn how to effectively use communication for public and private goals.

Analysis of recent research and publications

Research and practice in English language teaching has identified the “four skills” - listening, speaking, reading, and writing - as of paramount importance. In textbooks and curricula in widely varying contexts, ESL classes around the world tend to focus on one or two of the four skills, sometimes to the exclusion of the others. It is perfectly appropriate to so identify language performance. The human race has fashioned two forms of productive performance, oral and written, and two forms of receptive performance, aural (auditory) and reading. I.A. Zimnyaya defines reading and listening as internal types of speech activity, and then writes: “It is generally accepted that inner speech is a phenomenon, a derivative that arises from external speech - auditory perception of other people and active possession of all forms of oral speech and writing”. Since this statement is generally accepted, then we can conclude that listening and reading arise respectively from speaking and writing, that is, listening and reading, are derived from speaking and writing. A very important opinion to consider when talking about Integrated-skill approach is the one that gives Rebecca Oxford (2001). She compares the teaching of English in ESL/EFL classrooms is that of a tapestry in which every aspect of English Language Teaching - such as the characteristics of the teacher or students' language - is a strand that contributes to form the final goal, which communication. In order to achieve this goal, Oxford proposes that the “instructor's teaching style must address the learning style of the learner, the learner must be motivated, and the setting must provide resources and values that strongly support the teaching of the language.” If these conditions are not present within the EFL classroom “the instructional loom is likely to produce something small, weak, ragged, and pale”.

The aim of our study is to identify the integration of the four skills of the English language in a nonnative speaking classroom, and the way in which these skills are developed for students of English as a foreign language.

Presentation of the main research material

The integration of the four skills is the only plausible approach to take within a communicative, interactive framework. Most of the interactive techniques involve the integration of skills [1, p. 26]. The following five models 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 teaching presents some challenges to language teachers. Allowing the subject matter to control the selection and sequencing of language items means that your teaching from an entirely different perspective. There are some team-teaching models of content-based teaching, however, that alleviate this potential drawback. Content-based instructions allow for the complete integration of language skills. As you plan a lesson around a particular sub-topic of your subject matter area, your task becomes one of how best to present that topic or concept or principle. In such lessons it would be difficult not to involve at least three or the four skills as you have students reading, discussing, solving problems, analyzing data, writing opinions and reports.

- Theme-based teaching helps learning become more relevant for students. Theme-based instruction provides an alternative to what would otherwise be traditional language classes by structuring a course around themes and topics. Theme-based curricula can serve the multiple interests of students in a classroom and can offer a focus on content while still adhering to institutional needs for offering a language course. “English for Academic Purposes” in a university is an appropriate instance of theme-based instruction.

- 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. Experiential learning techniques tend to be learner- centered by nature. Examples of student-centered experiential techniques would include hands-on projects, computer activities, research projects, cross-cultural experiences, field trips and other “on site” visits, role plays and simulations. 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. Through action, students are drawn into a utilization of multiple skills.

- The Episode Hypothesis is an approach to language teaching devised by John Oller, closely related to Francois Gouin's Series Method. The episode hypothesis is a form of language teaching where learners are motivated to continue reading and to become more involved in the content than in the language, therefore increasing its episodic flavor.

- Task-based curricula differ from content- based, theme-based and experiential instruction in that the course objectives are somewhat more unabashedly language-based. While there is an ultimate focus on communication and purpose and meaning, nevertheless goals are linguistic in nature. They are not linguistic in the traditional sense of just focusing on grammar or phonology, but by maintaining the centrality of functions like greeting people, expressing opinions, requesting information [2, p. 8].

So, we have considered five different ways to approach the integration of the four skills. The principal idea here is to assume that most successful interactive techniques will include several skill areas. Let's look at those four components to become aware of goals and problems and issues and trends that relate to each of the four modes of communication.

The importance of listening in language learning can hardly be overestimated. Through reception, we internalize linguistic information without which we could not produce language. In classrooms, students always do more listening than speaking. Listening competence is universally “larger” than speaking competence. Much of our language technology teaching energy is devoted to instruction in mastering English conversation . It is noted, that numerous other forms of spoken language are also important to incorporate into a language course. In monologues, when one speaker uses spoken language for any length of time, as in speeches, lectures, readings, news broadcasts the hearer must process long stretches of speech without interruption. The stream of speech will go on whether or not the hearer comprehends. Unplanned monologues (impromptu lectures and long “stories” in conversation) exhibit more redundancy which makes for ease in comprehension, but the presence of more performance variables and other hesitations can either help or hinder comprehension.

The dialogues involve two or more speakers and can be subdivided into those exchanges that promote social relationships and those for which the purpose is to convey propositional or factual information. In conversations between or among participants who are unfamiliar with each other, references and meanings have to be made more explicit in order for effective comprehension to take place.

It should be noted, that listening and speaking skills are closely intertwined. The interaction between these two modes of performance applies especially strongly to the most popular discourse category in the profession: conversation. The characteristics of spoken language can make oral performance easy as well as, in some cases, difficult. Let's consider what makes speaking difficult: fluent speech is phrasal, not word by word; the speaker can make meaning clearer through the redundancy of language; students who don't colloquial contractions can sometimes develop a bookish quality of speaking that in turn stigmatizes them. One of the advantages of spoken language is that the process of thinking as we speak allows us to manifest a certain number of performance hesitations, pauses, backtracking, and corrections. For example, in English our “thinking time” is not silent, but rather we insert certain “fillers”: uh, um, well, you know, I mean, etc. One of the most salient differences between native and nonnative speakers of language is in their hesitation phenomena. Another salient characteristic of fluency is rate of delivery. One of our tasks in teaching spoken English is to help students to achieve an acceptable speed along with other attributes of fluency. With the obvious connection between listening and speaking, six similar categories apply to the kinds of oral production that students are expected to carry out in the classroom.

- Imitative is focused on some particular element of language form that the purpose of meaningful interaction. In imitative categories, the speaking classroom may legitimately be spent generating “a human tape recorder” speech. Such drilling offers the students opportunity to listen and to repeat certain strings of the language orally that may pose some linguistics difficulty, either phonological or grammatical.

- Intensive speaking includes any speaking performance that is designed to practice some phonological or grammatical aspect of language.

- Responsive. The classroom activity encourages the short replies to teacher or students-initiated questions or comments. These replies are usually sufficient and do not extend into dialogues.

- Transactional language, carried out for the purpose of conveying or exchanging specific information. Such conversation may have more of negotiative nature to them than do responsive speech.

- Interpersonal carried out more for the purpose of maintaining social relationships than the transmission of facts and information.

- Extensive. Students are called on to give extended monologues in the form of oral reports, summaries, or perhaps short speeches.

The written word surrounds us daily. It confuses us and enlightens us, it depresses us and amuses us, it sickens us and heals us. Reading ability will best be developed in association with writing, listening, and speaking activity. Let's consider now oral and silent reading. At the beginning and intermediate levels, oral reading can: serve as an evaluative check on bottom-up processing skills, double as a pronunciation check, and it can serve to add some extra student participation if you want to highlight a certain short segment of a reading passage. Silent reading may be subcategorized into intensive and extensive reading. Intensive reading is usually a classroom-oriented activity in which students focus on the linguistic or semantic details of a passage. Intensive reading calls students' attention to grammatical forms, discourse markers, and other surface structure details for the purpose of understanding literal meaning, implications, rhetorical relationships. Extensive reading is carried out to achieve a general understanding of a text. All pleasure reading is extensive. The latter, especially, sometimes involves skimming and scanning as strategies for gaining the general sense of a text. At other times, after students have done some prereading activity, skimmed for the gist, and scanned for some key details, extensive reading is quite simply a relatively rapid and efficient process of reading a text for global or general meaning [3, p. 56].

Good writing skills are essential for success in the workplace. Whether it's emails, project reports, or sales proposals, content full of typos, grammatical errors, and poorly constructed sentences suggests a similar attitude towards work. Thus, along with improving communication, understanding the significance of writing skills can also influence how you are perceived at the workplace in terms of:

- Being Professional: With effective writing skills, your message can be understood by your peers in a better way. Writing clear messages makes it easier for others to understand your ideas and thoughts.

- Proving your ability at the workplace: Whether your job requires a lot of writing or not, people may remember even a few grammatical errors and spelling mistakes from your content. And these minor mistakes may make you seem less capable at the workplace.

- Boosting professional confidence: Each content piece has a motive. A well-written business proposal entices investors and probable partners. Clear and to-the-point emails can further impress possible buyers. And your well-crafted reports will fascinate your manager.

Trends in the teaching of writing have conceded with those of teaching of other skills, especially listening and speaking. It should be emphasized, that there are three issues will be highlighted for our consideration as you prepare to teach writing skills.

1. Process vs. product. The product and process approaches originally appeared in education as different strategies for approaching writing in the classroom. Let's consider what is termed the process approach. Process approaches do most of the following:

- focus on the process of writing that leads to the final written product;

- help student writers to understand their own composing process;

- help them to build repertoires of strategies for prewriting, drafting and rewriting;

- give students time to write and rewrite;

- place central importance on the process of revision;

- let students discover what they want to say as they write;

- give students feedback throughout the composing process to consider as they attempt to bring their expression closer to intension;

- encourage feedback both from the instructor and peers;

- include individual conferences between teacher and student during the process of composition.

We can personally appreciate what it means to be asked to write something - say, a letter to an editor, an article for a newsletter, a paper for a course we're talking - and to allow the very process of putting ideas down on paper to transform thought into words, to sharpen our main ideas, to give them structure and coherent organization. As our first draft goes through perhaps several steps of revision, our thesis and developing ideas more and more clearly resemble something that we would consider a final product.

Writing as a product entails the teacher setting forth standards in terms of rhetoric, vocabulary use, organization, etc. The product is the ultimate goal; it is the reason that we go through the process of prewriting, drafting, revising, and editing.

2. Contrastive rhetoric is the study of the ways in which the rhetorical structures of a person's native language may interfere with efforts to write in a second language. The basic concept of contrastive rhetoric was introduced by linguist Robert Kaplan in his article “Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education”. It should be noted, that no one can deny the effect of one's native culture, or one's predispositions that are the product of years of schooling, reading, writing, thinking, arguing, and defending. But new research studies tackle the issue of contrastive rhetorical traditions.

3. Authenticity writing is when we ask our students to write in their own voices to audiences outside of the classroom, for a real-world purpose, and on topics of significance. When our students write authentic pieces, they may write for the purposes of informing an audience, persuading readers to agree with their position, debating an issue, or presenting a solution to a problem. Whatever the purpose, authentic writing is in a real world format such as an article, letter, book, interview, or business report. When our students write for real reasons they are empowered, motivated, and inspired to communicate effectively.

It is obvious, that students learn to write in part by carefully observing what is already written. That is, they learn by observing, or reading, the written word. By reading and studying a variety of relevant types of text, students can gain important insights both about how they should write and about subject matter that may become the topic of their writing.

Conclusions

The process of learning a foreign language is accompanied by certain difficulties due to the peculiarities of the subject (psychological aspect of the transition from one language to another ("language barrier"), interlingual interference ("native language - foreign language"). On the way to overcome these difficulties and rationalize the educational process, the search for and determination of the most effective forms of work and ways to enhance speech activity in accordance with the age characteristics of students is decisive. After all, the better students master oral and written speech, reading and listening skills, the more successful their work at the university in general and a foreign language in particular will be.

References

integrated skills language learning

1. Richards, J. C. & Rodgers, T. S. Approaches and methods in language teaching. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 2001.

2. Крамаренко С. Г. Інтерактивні техніки навчання, як засіб розвитку творчого потенціалу учнів. Відкритий урок. 2002. № 56. С. 6-10.

3. Пометун О., Пироженко Л. Сучасний урок. Інтерактивні технології навчання. Київ, 2004. 192 с.

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