Developing Linguistic Skills: Oral and Written Communication in English
Unit 3: Developing Linguistic Skills
Our current educational system establishes that learning a language in Primary Education aims to enable communication in that language. Communicative Competence is, therefore, acquired by being competent in the four skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. Jeremy Harmer stated that listening and reading are receptive skills, and speaking and writing are productive skills. Listening and speaking concern the oral medium, whereas reading and writing concern the written medium. The four skills must be taught from a communicative point of view. When starting a new topic, the listening and speaking skills should be practiced before the reading and writing skills.
1. Oral Skills
Implications: Oral language is usually acquired before writing and has contextual support. The spontaneity of oral language means that errors are a positive sign of the learning process. The process of acquiring a language is, as Chomsky proved, a creative construction. The grammatical structure of oral language is simpler.
1.1. Oral Understanding: Listening Comprehension
Donn Byrne outlines that for effective communication, the learner should have a solid receptive base.
A. Listening Material (Input)
The auditory material should be varied, comprehensible, graduated in difficulty, and within a context. It can include: stories, instructions, discussions, songs, and films.
B. Listening Strategies (Micro-skills)
We should train the learner’s ear to understand messages in English by:
- Identifying the main idea (global understanding).
- Extracting specific information.
- Understanding in detail.
- Predicting what they are going to listen to.
C. Methodology
- Pre-listening: The teacher sets the topic and key words.
- While-listening: Students perform activities to develop listening strategies: Extensive listening (global understanding) and Intensive listening (specific search of words or facts within a context).
- Post-listening: Students perform tasks connecting what they have listened to with their experience.
D. Typology of Activities
Donn Byrne lists the following activities to distinguish sound stress and intonation patterns:
- Games (bingo, Simon Says)
- Filling the gaps activities
- Identifying mistakes
- Finding differences
- Problem-solving
- Extracting information
- Dictations
1.2. Oral Expression (Speaking)
The main aim of oral production is to speak fluently. At basic levels, fluency is not as important because the student lacks linguistic competence. But, at advanced levels, fluency is what matters, and discursive competence is the aim at this stage.
A. Material
The material should be varied and focused on the learners’ interests. At early stages, children need to see immediate results, so learning vocabulary like numbers, colors, the body, and simple structures as greetings, routines, or instructions from the very beginning is important. By hearing the same language repeatedly, children learn it effortlessly, and it soon becomes part of their active vocabulary.
B. Strategies (Micro-skills)
Expressing grammatical structures logically and clearly. The combination of fluency and appropriateness makes the language learner competent in that language.
C. Methodology
- Imitation of the model from the teacher.
- Practice: The objective is the correct learning of the structure.
- Free production: The students have to put into practice, in a creative way, what they have learnt without the teacher’s control.
D. Typology of Activities
The activities should raise the necessity of communicating, be interactive, and appropriate to the student’s level.
- Pre-communicative: practice stage (controlled activities which have a model to follow; such as drills, guided dialogues, questions).
- Communicative types, production stage (information-gap, role-play, problem-solving, following instructions, describing personal experiences, communicative games, and singing).
2. Written Skills
The written medium differs from the oral in several ways: writing is permanent, has unique features, the grammatical structure is more correct, and the ideas should be clear. At intermediate and advanced levels, written texts can be used to introduce new language as input.
2.1. Written Understanding: Reading Comprehension
Reading comprehension is a receptive skill. It is a complex active process in which the meaning of graphs should be decoded, so the student must develop some reading strategies.
1. Material
It should be adapted to the student’s age and English level. In Primary Education, texts can be stories, letters, written dialogues, and maps.
2. Reading Strategies (Micro-skills)
- Obtaining the general idea of the text (skimming).
- Locating specific information (scanning).
- Understanding in detail.
- Inferring what is not explicit from the text like opinions, attitudes, predicting possible information.
3. Methodology
The tasks must motivate the students, and they should also perceive a useful purpose for reading. The procedure:
- Pre-reading stage: motivating the students by relating the topic to their personal experiences.
- While-reading stage: the teacher gives the students points to search for: getting the general idea of the text, extensive reading. Or getting specific information, intensive reading.
- After-reading stage: usually reading comprehension questions, summarizing, or a discussion.
4. Typology of Activities
The reading texts should be varied and appropriate for the students’ age and level.
- Spelling and word-recognition activities: word-square, putting the letters of a word in order.
- Associating the visual form with the word. Associating meaning, looking for specific information, reading comprehension questions: recognizing key words, getting the general idea, suggesting a title, true/false questions.
2.2. Written Expression: Writing
Writing is the most difficult of the four skills, but it has an advantage over speech: we have more time for the writing process, so we can write at our own pace and rectify what we have written. Writing is important because mastering a language requires knowing how to use both the oral and the written forms. Because in real life we need to write and because it reinforces the learning of oral communication.
1. Material
The teacher should keep in mind the students’ age and interests.
Classification:
- Writing for oneself (lists, diaries).
- Writing for maintaining social relationships (greetings, letters, instructions).
- Writing for entertainment (songs, jokes, games).
2. Writing Strategies (Micro-skills)
Writing correctly requires a lot of practice and is a slow ability to acquire. In Primary Education, it should be done in a guided way.
Strategies:
- Writing words and linguistic forms correctly.
- Writing appropriately, according to the context.
- Writing with coherence.
3. Methodology
The student should be able to communicate ideas and feelings in writing. There must be a reason for writing. The topic should focus on the student’s interests. The student should be involved in the correction of his written work.
The stages we must follow to teach writings are:
- Copying: it reinforces spelling or sentence structure, it helps to retain words.
- Controlled practice: guided activities introducing connectors of sentences.
- Production: written production should be guided in the organization of the students’ ideas, the type of vocabulary and structures to use.
4. Typology of Activities
Spelling, words in order, parallel writing, dictations, reading comprehension, consolidating grammar, summarizing, guided composition, free composition.
3. Integrated Skills
The teacher should design activities that combine several skills. Donn Byrne said that it is essential to use varied groupings such as pair work and group work because they offer many opportunities for developing the four skills. Activities in which skills are integrated: project works, role-play, and dictations.
4. Communicative Competence
Communicative competence is the final goal in the English teaching process. It is what a speaker needs to know to be communicatively competent in a speech community. Canale and Swain (1980) established four subcompetences:
- Grammatical competence: it refers to the correct use of linguistic competence.
- Discursive competence: the ability to relate and combine grammatical forms to achieve coherent texts.
- Sociolinguistic competence: the appropriate use of language in different social contexts.
- Strategic competence: it refers to participants’ verbal and non-verbal strategies.
These four skills are complemented by socio-cultural competence, which implies knowledge of cultural factors.
5. Conclusion
In this unit, we have analyzed the teaching and learning of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The process of learning these skills must relate the four skills to each other. The students should develop communicative competence, which is the curricular aim of the current educational law.